We are researching the plans and methods of supplying our mobile workers'
phones with mobile data.
We suspect that getting them paid by "post-paid" will be easier than
worrying about top-up for each phone...
But my question is: As I research the plans that are offered by mobile
operators in Thailand... How much data will these commcare apps use per
month?
I know it will vary greatly by use. But, for a very rough guess, imagine
that a mobile worker submits 10 forms per workday. and each form has 25
questions. And that they have perhaps 20 workdays in a month. So,
20x25x10 would be 5000 questions per month. This is a upper estimate!
Sometimes it might be half that.
So when I look for my mobile data plans... what amount of megabytes per
month should I be aiming for? I know this will all be very approximate...
And also, let's imagine that in that month, we MAY ask that user to do an
"update commcare" to get the newest version of their form.
With all that estimated... Would 1GB be enough for the month?
It is difficult to answer this question, in a sense that, as users, I don't recall ever seeing the forms in their XML form. Moreover, CommCareODK sends extra forms like logs and your network operator may have "creative" may to round up your data consumption: you probably won't be charge by the byte, but per MB, or per 50kB, etc.
As a rule of thumb I consider a form to be 10kB. It is probably less but that way it gives me some overhead for the CommCareODK extra forms.
So 25 work days * 20 10kB forms = 5MB / month
So yeah, a 1GB is more than enough, your CommCare usage would be a tiny fraction of it.
Don't forget to include the data consumption of the mobile phones themselves: Facebook, Twitter, Google Play, all these services consumes data in the background by default.
Regards,
Charles
···
On Tuesday 09 June 2015 19:18:01 Eric Stephan wrote:
>
> Hello all.
>
> We are researching the plans and methods of supplying our mobile workers'
> phones with mobile data.
>
> We suspect that getting them paid by "post-paid" will be easier than
> worrying about top-up for each phone...
>
> But my question is: As I research the plans that are offered by mobile
> operators in Thailand... How much data will these commcare apps use per
> month?
>
> I know it will vary greatly by use. But, for a very rough guess, imagine
> that a mobile worker submits 10 forms per workday. and each form has 25
> questions. And that they have perhaps 20 workdays in a month. So,
> 20x25x10 would be 5000 questions per month. This is a upper estimate!
> Sometimes it might be half that.
>
> So when I look for my mobile data plans... what amount of megabytes per
> month should I be aiming for? I know this will all be very approximate...
>
> And also, let's imagine that in that month, we MAY ask that user to do an
> "update commcare" to get the newest version of their form.
>
> With all that estimated... Would 1GB be enough for the month?
>
> thanks for any rough guess!
>
> If any general guidelines emerge from this thread, someone should paste
> them
> onto https://confluence.dimagi.com/display/commcarepublic/Choosing+a+Network+Provider
>
> Eric
>
>
>
>
>
>
Many of our projects run on data plans with 100MB/month or less. We
regularly lock down phones to stop users from using YouTube, the browser,
music players, google play store and anything else that's data intensive.
We often install Whatsapp because users find it useful for work-related
tasks. However, with the recent addition of voice calling functionality to
Whatsapp and the ability to send videos, this does open up the data plans
to abuse.
App updates should also be relatively small, unless you include many images
or audio files.
···
On Wed, Jun 10, 2015 at 10:31 AM, Charles Flèche wrote:
Hi Stephan,
It is difficult to answer this question, in a sense that, as users, I
don't recall ever seeing the forms in their XML form. Moreover, CommCareODK
sends extra forms like logs and your network operator may have "creative"
may to round up your data consumption: you probably won't be charge by the
byte, but per MB, or per 50kB, etc.
As a rule of thumb I consider a form to be 10kB. It is probably less but
that way it gives me some overhead for the CommCareODK extra forms.
So 25 work days * 20 10kB forms = 5MB / month
So yeah, a 1GB is more than enough, your CommCare usage would be a tiny
fraction of it.
Don't forget to include the data consumption of the mobile phones
themselves: Facebook, Twitter, Google Play, all these services consumes
data in the background by default.
Regards,
Charles
On Tuesday 09 June 2015 19:18:01 Eric Stephan wrote:
Hello all.
We are researching the plans and methods of supplying our mobile
workers'
phones with mobile data.
We suspect that getting them paid by "post-paid" will be easier than
worrying about top-up for each phone...
But my question is: As I research the plans that are offered by mobile
operators in Thailand... How much data will these commcare apps use per
month?
I know it will vary greatly by use. But, for a very rough guess, imagine
that a mobile worker submits 10 forms per workday. and each form has 25
questions. And that they have perhaps 20 workdays in a month. So,
20x25x10 would be 5000 questions per month. This is a upper estimate!
Sometimes it might be half that.
So when I look for my mobile data plans... what amount of megabytes per
month should I be aiming for? I know this will all be very approximate...
And also, let's imagine that in that month, we MAY ask that user to do
an
"update commcare" to get the newest version of their form.
With all that estimated... Would 1GB be enough for the month?
thanks for any rough guess!
If any general guidelines emerge from this thread, someone should paste