Costs of the downloaded GPRS data
Posted: Mon Jun 01, 2009 10:48 pm
Interestingly I have made following experience which I would like to share and of course any comment or feedback would be welcome.
I used to have an Sunrise monthly subscription (Abonnement) and the use of Foxytag was relatively cheap as I could drive for a long time (maybe 1 hour or so) by only paying about 10 ct. The cost of the Internet GPRS connection according to Sunrise is 10 ct / 20 kb of dl data without consideration of the time.
After having checked that the fees would be the same for a prepaid solution I changed to a prepaid plan with the result that I had to pay 10 ct for every 5 min!
According to Foxytag the application is requesting an update of the GPS data (tags) every 5min from the server. So it seems very clear that with the subscription plan a connection was build and maintained until the exit of Foxytag. Since Foxytag was only getting a couple of kb per request it did last a long time before the 20 kb limit was crossed, thus costing the next 10 ct more for the given session. But with the prepaid plan I guess that every 5 min a new connection must be made because somehow the connection is not maintained open. Sunrise pretends that there is no difference on their side e.g. that their servers do not disconnect the session even if no data is exchanged for about 5 min. On the other hand I see no reason to believe that the Foxytag application behaves differently according to a prepaid or subscription plan. So my assumption is that it must be the Sunrise servers which are not behaving the same way for prepaid of subscription.
Did anyone else have the same experience or something similar?
If someone knows by experience that some provider is proposing a prepaid solution which will not charge 10 ct for every 5 min of Foxytag use I would be very glad to know.
Thanks for any feedback!
I used to have an Sunrise monthly subscription (Abonnement) and the use of Foxytag was relatively cheap as I could drive for a long time (maybe 1 hour or so) by only paying about 10 ct. The cost of the Internet GPRS connection according to Sunrise is 10 ct / 20 kb of dl data without consideration of the time.
After having checked that the fees would be the same for a prepaid solution I changed to a prepaid plan with the result that I had to pay 10 ct for every 5 min!
According to Foxytag the application is requesting an update of the GPS data (tags) every 5min from the server. So it seems very clear that with the subscription plan a connection was build and maintained until the exit of Foxytag. Since Foxytag was only getting a couple of kb per request it did last a long time before the 20 kb limit was crossed, thus costing the next 10 ct more for the given session. But with the prepaid plan I guess that every 5 min a new connection must be made because somehow the connection is not maintained open. Sunrise pretends that there is no difference on their side e.g. that their servers do not disconnect the session even if no data is exchanged for about 5 min. On the other hand I see no reason to believe that the Foxytag application behaves differently according to a prepaid or subscription plan. So my assumption is that it must be the Sunrise servers which are not behaving the same way for prepaid of subscription.
Did anyone else have the same experience or something similar?
If someone knows by experience that some provider is proposing a prepaid solution which will not charge 10 ct for every 5 min of Foxytag use I would be very glad to know.
Thanks for any feedback!