Wi-Fi Diet: Going with only Wi-Fi for a week

Monday, July 9th, 2012 Chris Churilo, VP Product Management & User Experience

As iPass employees, Zoe Paknad and I spend a lot of time thinking and talking about Wi-Fi. We both have the iPass Open Mobile client downloaded on our smart phones and are frequent enough users of it. One day, it occurred to us– what would happen if we chose Wi-Fi over 3G every single day for a week? Could it be done?

We decided to try it out, and we’re calling it the Wi-Fi diet. The Wi-Fi diet means putting our smart phones on Airplane Mode and enabling the Wi-Fi setting so that we can only use Wi-Fi. For phone calls, we can use a voiceover IP service. For texts, an app. For a week we will say goodbye to the traditional smartphone experience, so that we can attempt to operate in the way of the future—using only Wi-Fi.

Throughout this journey, we will chronicle all of the obstacles we may encounter. Is it as difficult as everyone says? Are the savings on our phone bills substantial? To prove our commitment and demonstrate our progress, we will show our data usage via the Open Mobile’s clients Usage Meter—so we can see exactly how much data we are using and ensure that we never accidentally use 3G.

Will we last the whole week without cellular data? Stay tuned for this week’s Wi-Fi diet with Zoe and Chris!

Tags: wi-fi access