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Comment by avolcano | Hacker News Reader

I kind of wonder: do people really have the kind of data plans that can take advantage of this?

Maybe it's because I'm stuck with my AT&T two gig/month plan, and I don't personally know anyone with an unlimited plan that wasn't grandfathered into it, but I have to imagine there's a lot of people with lower-end data plans who couldn't use something like this. I wonder if the Amazon player has, say, a bitrate option to help people use less data, but I would be surprised if it did.

Everyone's talking about moving data into the cloud and assuming that everyone has a high or unlimited data plan, when, in my personal experience, very few people do.

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I experimented with listening to internet radio on the commute to work about a year ago. I used about 500Mbyte/month with that setup. The stations I listened to were 128kbyte/s IIRC, so perhaps my usage would be about 1 Gbyte/month now.

That is more than my data plan, so I wouldn't be able to use it all the time... perhaps useful as a backup for those moments you're not in the mood for anything you have stored on the device itself.

The main problem for me was that the 3G in public transport wasn't reliable enough -- if this cloud player does enough buffering I could probably use it.

edit: note that all consumer data plans in .nl are more or less identical: EUR 10/month on top of your regular phone plan gets you an "unlimited" data plan (which have a fair use policy limit of about 800Mbyte/month currently).

I have a grandfathered in unlimited data plan, but even if I had a 2 gig plan, I don't actually use nearly that much very often. Most of my data usage is on wifi (when I'm at home, at work, or usually when out at lunch it's on wifi; when I'm on my commute it uses 3G).

I don't know whether Amazon's music player streams the music or whether it syncs and caches the music, but if the latter, most of the transfer would probably be on wifi as well.

There's an option to download music only when on wifi, and you can explicitly tell it to cache specified tracks on the device. You can also tell it to automatically sync new purchases.

I pay $25 a month for unlimited data and text on Virgin Mobile. Granted, nothing "unlimited" is really unlimited, but I stream music on my Android phone on this plan all the time and have not hit any soft or hard cap.

See, I pay $20 a month for two gigs (family plan for texts, so I don't think I can really compare that).

Also, Virgin Mobile in what country? I'm kind of curious if that plan's still available; seems most providers are scaling back.

The $25 plan is US. I just picked up the Optimus V and love it.

Here's the link to the plan: http://www.virginmobileusa.com/cell-phone-plans/beyond-talk-...

Except for everyone on Verizon, TMobile or Sprint whose unlimited plans are cheaper than AT&T's slow, capped, and not unlimited plans.

I know it's not for long, but you can't blame me for being happy while I do.

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