luminescente

Today at work I used Pandora to provide me with background music. I left the Powerbook with my extensive mp3 collection at home and decided to give Pandora a try after listening to Nuno Markl’s podcast.

I must say I’m impressed. For the playlists created the suggestions were ok. Some dubious, some spot-on. The sound quality is fairly good and the interface is nice, even if a little slow in my 1Ghz G4 eMac.

But then, this got me thinking and coming to the conclusion that this is a good example of how bad we are here in Portugal regarding internet connectivity. This is not something to use at home with my miserable Netcabo 300MB download limit, as this is obviously not national traffic. I don’t know what is the bitrate the songs are in, but assuming a 96 Kbps bitrate, a hour listening to this equates to 43,2 megabyes. Given 8 hours, the monthly limit is gone. So, my 640Kbps cable sits idle most of the time and relegated to light (and I mean light) browsing and email.

What’s the use of a faster connection? Despite having larger limits, they are still small and just mean I can get to the limit of the monthly usage in less time.