Wi-Fi Diet Day 1: Did I miss a call or text?

Tuesday, July 10th, 2012 Zoe Paknad, Program Mgr

This week, Chris Churilo and I have pledged to go without cellular data and to use only Wi-Fi.

We began Monday morning upon arriving at work, and are going to try and last until Friday night without turning the Airplane Mode setting off of our smart phones. Initially I thought it would be easy— I don’t talk on the phone very much, and I can use the iPhone’s iMessage function to “text” others as long as their iPhones are running the latest iOS update.

But I began to feel the strain as I left work and realized on the commute home that I was completely off the grid without Wi-Fi.

Upon making it home, it hit me just how few people are running the same iOS update as I, and even less using apps that allow text-like messages sent back and forth between users.

I was struck by how without the 3G or 4G functionality, my smartphone was in essence no more than a small computer. It’s convenient when I was at work or on-the-go in a public area with Wi-Fi, but quickly abandoned when I had the opportunity to use my laptop.

Being unreachable via phone call or regular text message also gave me the illusion that I had many missed calls and unanswered texts from people who would be taken aback by my lack of response for an entire week. In fact, the temptation to turn my phone off of Airplane Mode for a second just to see what calls and texts I had missed was almost unbearable—I may have even cheated on my Wi-Fi diet were it not for the iPass Open Mobile client’s Usage Meter graphing my usage of cellular and Wi-Fi data.

Here is my Usage Meter as of this blog post. We started the Wi-Fi diet yesterday, July 9th, and you can see my small tab of cellular data from the morning before I came into work. My usage for today, the 10th, is entirely Wi-Fi. You can also see that I’ve used as much data this morning as I did all of yesterday. I wonder how many megabytes of data I will have used by the end of the day.

Even more pressing is the big question: Will I last using only Wi-Fi for the rest of the day? The week? Wish me luck!

Tags: wi-fi access