I've had the N810 pretty much since it was released, and use it sooooooo much when I'm at home. But now I really wanna take it out on the road with me, with it hooked up to my N95 for the 3G goodness!

My mobile operator is Orange (In the UK) and they have 3 plans I can go for (All are add-ons to my contract).

Option 1) £1 a day gets unlimited data downloads and browsing. I'd need to call orange every sodding day to tell them to turn it on for the following day!

Option 2) £5 a month gets unlimited evening and weekend data downloads, but no good as I want it for when I'm out during the day.

Option 3) £8 a month gets a DOWNLOAD limit of 30Mb a month, and unlimited browsing.

I think the first 2 options are out as they just wouldn't be practical, which leaves the 3rd option, £8 a month.

In real terms, is 30Mb download a reasonable amount over a month given that email counts as a download?

The setup would be used at most 6-8 hours a day. Remember that browsing isn't an issue as it's unlimited on this data plan, only DOWNLOADING is limited.

Looking for opinions from everyone, especcially those that have a similar setup.

Cheers guys.

oh, hellno!! I use about 50gb/mo on my mobile broadband service and use it about 6-8hrs/day on average. Even if I removed any streaming of audio & video one must remember many pages are now easily over 1mb in size. That leaves very little room for any real use beyond just email.

One porblem with most alledgedly 'unlimited' data plans is they are using marketing doublespeak. Words like unlimted 'web browsing' could be inferred to exclude any sort of streamed multimedia content.

Actually email, will be the LOWEST part of your usage. Especially if you only view text format emails. I never use HTML emails. Too many potential privacy & security probs, plus it's a lot of wasted bandwidth for what typically contains info I have zero need to even read. Whenever I have the option I request all email sent from a company be text only. On my XP box I use Outlook 2003 and set it to show all email as text only.

Anyway, be very...and I mean VERY certain what your service provider means when they determine bandwidth. A 30mb plan is fine for someone using 'mobile' versions of sites where there is almost no graphical content, Flush, errr, Flash, or whatever...

My data plan costs me US$50/mo, I guess that works out to about half that in pounds, for a service that gets me a solid 1200/600 speed most of the time and truly unlimited data use.

And like I say, a 30-min eBay session can blow your 30mb right there...

no, if email is, then no, especially if you have any vague notion of installing anything on your N810

I download podcasts every day that are 25mb each - ~2hr podcasts.

I'd blow through 30mb in a day easy.

Well, the first option doesn't sound that bad; a cron script and modem, there ya go!

But I am curious how they decide what's browsing and what's downloading. I'd be concerned that all tethered traffic might show up as downloads?

Unless fetching e-mail is all, and you get less than a MB of e-mail per day (both of which seem unlikely), that's not enough. Not anywhere near enough, IMHO.

No you're right, the 1st option does seem to be the best of the bunch. And if it wasn't for the fact that I'd have to call Orange EVERY DAY (Often takes 20-30 minutes to get to the right person, those minutes coming out of those included in my tariff) to sign up to it, I'd probably go for it.

I did ask about tetherered traffic though and that would be included in the data plan, so no extra costs there.

Interesting point about whether media streaming counts as a download though, would totally rule out YouTube, and is something I hadn't considered.

To be honest, I don't think Orange UK are that interested in providing mobile broadband in any serious way. It's annoying though, I'm starting to think that the best way to get a decent data plan is to take out a new contract with a different provider altogether! But I can't find any UK provider that will give anything like 50Gb for $50/£25 a month, best I can find is 10Gb for $85/£42.50 (Voice tariff with data plan add-on).

Sucks, sucks large.

Just noticed I said "though" quite alot, sorry.

Works though! lol

Tell me if I'm wrong but my Orange Plan (Racoon 35) gives me a maximum daily charge for browsing of £1.50.

Don't quote me but from that I would asume that I can browse as much as I like without paying more than £1.50 per day without having to phone them up to "book" my access the evening before I use it.

Ok, well it appears you're wrong, lol. Just spoken to Orange and they say that you can indeed BROWSE as much as you want and pay a maximum of £1.50 a day, but DOWNLOADING anything at all, will cost you extra! I also asked whether media streaming classed as a download, and they couldn't give me a 100% guarantee either way, but they are fairly sure it would indeed be classed as a download.

Cheers anyway, I thought you were onto something with that one!

Hence the cron job; you have your computer call and enable it every day. But I was just kidding on that; unless you can do it via a touch-tone computer system, it requires impractically good AI.