Using up your monthly 5 GB data allotment in less than a day - wow!
Verizon LTE Blows Through Monthly Data Cap in 32 Minutes:
Verizon's new 4G LTE network is so fast that you can use up your entire 5GB, $50 monthly allotment in 32 minutes.
I'm in the middle of testing Verizon's new LTE network, and the 2010-era speeds are soured by the 2005-era thinking on data plans. Verizon has priced LTE pretty much like 3G to encourage data sipping, not guzzling. As soon as you start using the latest high-bandwidth Internet services, your whole month's allotment can evaporate within a day.
My tests maxed out at an impressive 21Mbps. If you were downloading 5GB at that speed, it would only take you 32 minutes. Since the LTE network currently has almost nobody on it, I got average speeds around 15Mbps; Verizon estimates you'll be able to get around 8.5Mbps with a loaded network. But very few applications actually use those speeds consistently, so I also checked out some more common uses.
Downloading some files via BitTorrent, I registered 5.6Mbps, which could use up the cap in about two hours. Standard-definition Netflix video is kinder to your data cap; according to Netflix, they encode at 1500 kbps, so it'll take you 7.4 hours to burn through your monthly allotment. That's fewer than four movies.
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