According to calculations made by Mobile Squared, Apple will see the 1 billionth application downloaded from their App Store on April 23rd.
The site calculates that Apple currently average daily downloads of 5.1 million apps and needs under 10 million downloads to hit the milestone.
Earlier this month, on April 10th, Apple began a countdown web page and began a promotion to give away prizes including a $10,000 USD iTunes Gift Card, an iPod touch, a Time Capsule and a MacBook Pro. Every free or paid app download counts as an entry into the giveaway.
The site also says for the first 500 million downloads, Apple was only averaging 2.98 million downloads per day, so it is blatantly obvious that the content has grown more popular in the past six months. The most popular apps are currently, and will always be, the free ones, but data shows the average cost of paid apps is $2.20.
Result for: caps
Last January, the ISP Time Warner announced it would be starting bandwidth caps aimed at “collecting revenue from those who utilize over half of the total network bandwidth.”
In June, they began their “metered Internet trials” in Beaumont, Texas and just last week the ISP announced they would be expanding the program to four other cities.
The original caps however, were 40 GB and users would be charged $1 for every GB over the cap they went. Critics found the caps to be far too limited and pointed to Comcast, who introduced 250 GB monthly caps last year, as a good starting point if bandwidth caps must be used.
It appears today that after receiving many complaints from unhappy customers, Time Warner is backtracking a bit and will increase the 40GB limit on a certain “range of packages, with higher priced plans that have a larger data “bucket” along with lower priced options for casual users.”
Result for: caps
Just one month after Comcast began imposing a bandwidth cap of 250 GB on all of its subscribers, AT&T has begun testing a cap of their own, however with a much smaller limit, 150 GB.
The cap will have tiers as well depending on how fast your connection is, slower users will only get 20 GB limit while the fastest users will get the 150 GB cap.
The test, beginning in Reno, Nevada today, will “evaluate a usage-based model that could potentially help address today’s trend of explosive bandwidth usage, [and] may be extended to one other market by the end of the year,” said AT&T.
Anyone in Reno who uses over 150 GB per month will automatically be enrolled in the full bandwidth trial at the end of the year.
Any trial participant that exceeds the limit will be given a one-month grace period but if they do it again they will be fined $1 for every GB over they go.
Unlike Comcast however, AT&T will provide all customers with a “bandwidth measuring tool” and will also notify customers when they have hit 80 percent of their limit.
“A small group of customers are using the majority of bandwidth on our network,” added AT&T. “In fact, almost 50 percent of total bandwidth is used by just five percent of customers – customers, for example, who are uploading and downloading the equivalent of more than 40,000 YouTube videos or 40 million e-mails a month. This kind of heavy usage has an impact on all of our customers.”
