Oops, used too much 3G, but it wasn’t me!

Though I have a legacy “unlimited” 3G contract with T-Mobile (EE who are EE) it would be apparent that I have reached the fair use limit of 3GB this month. Now the reason I have gone over the limit was for a range of reasons, but the main culprits are streaming podcasts, updates for Windows and a system update for my Nexus 7.

With my new commute, I have not had the time to download podcasts and have been using BeyondPod on my Nexus 7 to stream podcasts over the internet. This does work most of the time, but of course would have quite a negative impact on bandwidth.

I also have been using a new laptop, an Acer Windows 7 machine, but of course didn’t check the update settings and as a result it has been downloading updates in the background! Well got that changed pretty sharpish, but too late for reducing the impact on my 3G bandwidth limit.

What T-Mobile do when you reach your limit, is give you a “free” 250MB booster, which I thought would be fine for a few days. What I didn’t take into account was my Nexus 7 downloading the 4.3 Android update, which was 158MB. Now what I don’t get is that my Nexus is already at 4.3 and has downloaded this update a fair few times now!

As a result for the next few days I am probably going to be without 3G… well now I will need to rely on free wifi at stations. I am slightly annoyed (only slightly mind you) as my 3G coverage has been quite poor this month, I do believe that the main reason has been other people sucking up the bandwidth, was quite impressed with 3G speeds when I took a later, quieter train.

Now do I move over to 4G?

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