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Slashdot ran an article today, titled “AT&T Caps Netflix Streaming Costs At $68K/Yr”. The title immediately reaches for net neutrality fiends, but really, they’re not capping anything.

The summary says that streaming Netflix for 24 hours straight will consume 2.81GB. I’m not about to dispute that. However, it also says that can result in charges as large as $68,376. In my last post, I figured that the cost per megabyte on the 300MB plan is $0.067, and 2810 megabytes times $0.067 per megabyte times 365 days is pretty close to their figure. But there’s a third variable they forgot.

How stupid does someone have to be to pay their cell phone bill 12 months in a row, each for over $5000, and never think to upgrade to the $30 plan for a rate of $0.01 per megabyte? Forgetting stupidity, if you’re anyone I know, your cell phone would be shut off long before then because you don’t even have enough money, so you’d end your experiment in big numbers. Assuming you started the year on the $30 plan, your end result would actually be 2810 megabytes times $0.01 per megabyte times 365 days, or $10,256.50.

To ice the cake, the summary proposes an analogy, that you walk into a gym and are told that your bill will be between $360 and $68,376. This analogy doesn’t hold true at all, because if I walk into an AT&T store and kick and scream all day, I’ll never be offered a $30/month unlimited plan. They haven’t offered those in almost two years. Please quit comparing to it. You don’t see anyone saying “Ivy Bridge processors are so much faster than an i386!”

Mobile data is expensive, but not nearly as expensive as some crazy with a calculator would have you believe. If you want to stream Netflix 24/7/365, do it on your home internet at fixed rates.