Obi100/110 and FreedomPop?

[jplee3]

Hey all,

Was wondering if anyone has been using their Obi devices with FreedomPop...
I'm curious to know what the Obi's bandwidth consumption rate is when idle and overtime - does it receive any traffic (e.g. keep-alives) at all when idle? I'd be using this in conjunction with Google Voice and possibly an e911 service

I'm trying to go 'cheap' for my in-laws since they're only at home to sleep, literally (cause they're working most of the day and night). They hardly ever use internet (I think we use it more when we visit them!) and may make occasional phone calls.

The thing about FreedomPop is that they require a minimum of 5mb usage per month or else they'll charge an "inactivity fee" (ugh). They offer a 'free' 1gb per month plan though. I'm thinking if all they have hooked up is the Obi, that it would be perfect for them (assuming the Obi doesn't burn through 1gb in a month while idle most of the time haha!).

I'm also interested to know if there have been any measurements done as far as "minutes-to-bytes" (e.g. how many bytes are used for that 13 minute call?).


EDIT: actually, I found this for my last question - http://voip.about.com/od/voipbandwidth/f/How-Much-Of-My-Mobile-Data-Plan-Does-Voip-Consume.htm

On the G729 codec, they estimate that an hour-long phone call equates to roughly 45mb. I calculated that for G711 (I think that's the Obi's default, right?), almost roughly 80mb for an hour of conversation. So for 1gb of FreedomPop data, that translates to about 12.5 hours of conversation or 750 minutes on G711. Not sure if my math is off here but it doesn't seem shockingly out of the ballpark.

[giqcass]

I don't know what kind of bandwidth the OBi uses but there are things you can do to decrease it's bandwidth.  First I would turn off all OBi talk related functions if they only plan to make and receive regular phone calls.  I would have only 1 account registered on the device.  I would set up all other accounts as gateways with no registration to reduce background data.  You could set the registration time high to decrease background data further.

I don't know much about the freedom pop device but if you could throw a router with openwrt in between the OBi and the Freedom pop equipment you could schedule the internet to turn on only when they are home assuming they keep a regular schedule.

Perhaps someone in the forums would like to test how much bandwidth the OBi eats up when Idle.

On a related note I'm jealous Freedom POP is available in their area.  I have been waiting for it to be launched in my region.

[Marina]

They offer a 'free' 1gb per month plan though.

Where did you find that plan? I can only see free 500MB/mo on their site.

[flex25]

I read that Freedom Pop has privacy issues.  That free data comes with a price.  They send advertiser "offers" to users and share your information with those advertisers.  Read up on reviews before you order it.