How much bandwidth does Shoutcast use on an iPhone compared to Pandora or Slacker?

dan January 5, 2011
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I’ve read that Slacker and Pandora both use a lot of bandwidth on the 3G network, to the point that Pandora will pretty much use 2 GB of a data plan in about an hour. How does Shoutcast measure up? Thank you in advance!

  1. Dgzimmer
    January 7, 2011 at 3:16 am

    Thanks for the info !

  2. Mike
    January 6, 2011 at 3:12 am

    I hate givin' this phrase as an answer but "it always depends" ~ it depends on the streaming bitrate.

    From what I know Pandora [on the iPhone] streams 128kbit over WiFi and 64kbit over 3G network although this might have changed already.

    64kbit * 3600 [for 1 hour] = 230400KB ? 255MB per hour of music
    128kbit * 3600 ? 450MB per hour of music

    The same applies to Shoutcast radios.
    But compared to Pandora you'll have to be more carefull since Shoutcast Streams vary quite a lot in their bitrate! There are streams from 32kbit up to 320kbit [a bunch of them even more].

    • Berto
      January 14, 2011 at 2:12 pm

      Unfortunately you didn't convert Bits to Bytes correctly. There are 8 bits per byte. 128kbps * 3600 / 8 = 57.6 Megabytes per hour.

    • Andrewna
      August 3, 2011 at 2:34 pm

      What berto said is inline with what I have found with Pandora.  With my 200 MB a month limit on my data plan, I was wondering where the chunks of 25MB was going on my 30 min ride home from work.  Looks like I've got to shut off Pandora...bumma.