[bascom]

If I switch to a 3G plan, can I use my phone as a modem to get my laptop online? I looked at some plans and didn't see any specific data charges listed. Is data usage deducted from the plan's video call minutes--or how does it work?

[KnowItAll]

The data rates are usually seperate.

E.G. http://www.pccwmobile.com/portal/ser...p?fldr_id=5999

[hk.com]

you can also get online by using GPRS or EDGE, no need to go for 3G.

Which reminds me I am looking for a GPRS/EDGE PCMCIA card... how much do these go for?

[bascom]

Any idea how to estimate the amount of data transfer I might expect to use? I basically plan to use MSN and check email occasionally. The problem is that my account is bombarded with spam that's usually filtered by my email client after downloading. Would hate to pay to receive all that junk.

[zerocred]

You can set outlook to download message headers only - then download the body of the messages you want.

A quick and dirty way to find out how much [email] data you download in a month in Outlook is to:
1. set the format in the email size column to kB, so they are all the same.
2. high-light the last few months emails
3. copy the highlight
4. paste into excel
5. select/highlight the email size colum
6. do a Edit>Replace on the 'KB' replace with nothing
7. add up the total data in a month (or several months and average)

Mine was about 10-20Meg per month, need to remember that over the air the email bloats up about 30% with TCP wrappers and then there's the email you send.... Anyway - it will be in the right order of magnitude.

There was a guy in vodafone Italy who got a bill for about 65,000Euro... he thought he was on an unlimited plan...

Theres anotehr tool called Aldo's Net Monitor... it'll keep a running total while you use it...

Z

[longbeard]

Which provider has the cheapest and reliable Data Plan?