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Simple, Accurate Data Counter App Needed

Nijiiro said:
Thanks. Are you using this? I did look at this one here: 3G Watchdog - Android app on AppBrain and there were 2 comments saying it was inaccurate. Could this be user error?

Thank you.
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I use it as well and haven't gone over my limit yet ..... To answer your question I'm sure that there are differences between the way the service provider (Vodafone, say) counts data and the way that 3G Watchdog counts it. At the end of the day though you shouldn't rely on it to the nearest 1/2MB as that would be sailing too close to the wind, but if I got to, say, 50MB away from my limit (500MB I think) I'd be very very careful until the end of the month.

Not a precise answer but HTH.

Dave
 
dvhttn said:
I use it as well and haven't gone over my limit yet ..... To answer your question I'm sure that there are differences between the way the service provider (Vodafone, say) counts data and the way that 3G Watchdog counts it. At the end of the day though you shouldn't rely on it to the nearest 1/2MB as that would be sailing too close to the wind, but if I got to, say, 50MB away from my limit (500MB I think) I'd be very very careful until the end of the month.

Not a precise answer but HTH.

Dave
Click to expand...

Thanks for that, Dave. I've now installed it myself and it's certainly very simple. I'll check it against my usage online after a couple of days to see if it looks right. If it does I'll tell him to give it a go, but to use it as a guide only.

Incidentally, I have 500MB too. He has 1GB and he still went considerably over. That seems like a hell of a lot - he doesn't stream anything - he wouldn't know how. Just facebook and twitter. That must be a LOT lot of tweeting!
 
The reason it is difficult for us to get accurate counter is because most mobile service providers count it differently (round up or down) and they count based on their back-end server logs statistics. Using the app on our smart-phones can only provide a close to estimate with Android SDK provided TrafficStats class.

E.g we use browser we check our PC time is say 12:15 PM. But when the request reach the back-end server with the server time clock it could be 12:16 PM as there maybe latency in the network.

When service providers bill us, it is of cuz based on 12:16 PM as that is logged in the logs. In general the discrepancy should be small but when we add all these discrepancies to ALL their subscribers you can go figure.
 
Another reason is that on the free 3G app you can't input the block size for data.

Once I got the pro version and used the "block" size set to 1kb, 3G became extremely accurate, nearest to the 250kb.

Hope this helps.
 
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