While our Satellite service is highly portable, fast and easy to use, unlike our other services there are costs for transfering data both uploading and downloading. This cost is between $.99 and $1.45 per Megabit.

The terms used for data can be confusing especially when you are trying to budget usage and estimate costs. Therefore we will try to explain the terms and give you an estimate of how much using the modem will cost using different services and finally how you can lower your costs.

What is a Megabit (Mb)?

A Megabit is a term that is used to measure data transferred across networks. Because Megabits are based on binary numbers, there are 1024 Kilobits (Kb) in a Megabit. You may be most familiar with Kilobits when referring to the speed of dialup as 56Kbps. This means you can transfer 56 Kilobits each second you are connected

What is a Megabyte (MB)?

However when data is stored it is often denominated in terms of Megabytes (MB) notice that it is denominated with a large B in MB. This is because a Megabyte is larger than a Megabit. There are 8 Megabits in a Megabyte.

Simple conversions

1 Megabit (Mb)	1,048,576 bits (b)
1 Megabit (Mb)	131,072 bytes (B)
1 Megabit (Mb)	1024 Kilobits (Kb)
1 Megabit (Mb)	128 Kilobytes (KB)
1 Megabit (Mb)	0.125 Megabytes (MB)

So using the above chart you can determine the cost of service if you know the amount of data you are transferring even if its not denominated in Megabits. The reason why one term is used when storing data and one term is used when transferring data is almost arbitrary, but what is important is that you understand the differences.

The satellite service is an always on service. So you only pay for the actual data transferred, not the time online. This is important when you compare the cost of service versus dialup as an example. You will pay a premium for the advantage of mobility, speed and the elimination of fixed infrastructure. However if you are using an application where remaining connected is a priority, but the amount of data sent is not high (chat, VOIP, etc.) the cost can be competitive

Email

It's rather simple to determine what the cost of emailing would be. Short Text-Only emails will be in the range of 1-3KB. This means that if you simply use the satellite terminal for sending text emails, you can send and receive several 100 emails for the cost of 1MB.

Web Surfing

The cost of surfing the web really depends on the type of page you are viewing. AIf you were to view this page in over a satellite Terminal it would download about 5KBs of data and upload approximately 1KB assuming you have all of the images for the buttons cached from your inital viewing.

VOIP

Voice over IP bandwith cost depends on the VOIP provider you are using.

Check with your VOIP provider as to how much bandwidth a conversation cost in terms of data transfer. There are some VOIP providers that can allow you to maintain a conversation for 15 Kbps so if you were to talk constantly for a whole hour the cost would be about $50-$75 (6.6 MB) .

Instant Messaging

Instant messaging will use less than 15 kb per second when in use so the cost should be minimal if you calculate based only on actual usage.

Images and Video

Sending and receiving video is one of those services that depends on the server on the other end providing or receiving the content. Simply determine how big the content is and then determine the cost.

Determine and estimate your own usage

Need to measure how much bandwidth you currently are using, use Bandwidth Monitor Pro, www.bandwidthmonitorpro.com  . You can download this program that will show you how much data you send and recieve in a typical session.