New Website Helps You Manage Your Mobile Data

New Website Helps You Manage Your Mobile Data

A new website, What Is My Cap, created by nonprofit groups Mozilla Foundation, Public Knowledge and Open Source Democracy Foundation has just launched with the express purpose of comparing data plans of the major mobile phone carriers.

All of the major phone carriers, with the exception to date of Sprint, have placed caps on their data plans, with overage fees or throttling occurring after the cap is reached. Throttling is when the company slows down the speed of data exchange in response to the end user reaching their cap. shows you how much the data cap is for each carrier, how much streaming media that equals, as well as how much more you would potentially pay in overage fees if you went over your allotted amount.

A great example of how Data Caps can easily effect consumers is shown by Public Knowledge in their example of Verizon and the NFL teaming up to allow streaming of football games, including the Super Bowl.  In this example, if a consumer watched all available games over their phone, they would most likely hit their cap, and thus be charged for any usage over that limit, even if it was simply sending an e-mail.

Included on the website is a link to a Public Knowledge petition requesting the FCC to investigate wireless data caps to decide if they are fair to consumers.

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