Astro b.Player: How much data do you need to watch a World Cup match?

The 2010 FIFA World Cup is now underway. Although we’ve witness pretty entertaining first matches, we’re not seeing a festival of goals just yet, with two matches producing just two goals.

Here’s hoping will build up as the tournament unfolds.

Ok, so that’s that about the World Cup. We’re pretty sure that many of you would have already tried out the Astro b.Player on your iPhones to catch the first World Cup games live last night.

As far as we can decipher, the b.Player streams live content to your iPhone, so that means you need to have a data subscription to enjoy the privilege. But how much data does it take for you to watch a full 90 min game on the b.Player?

As you know, Maxis offers what it calls an “unlimited” mobile broadband plan. But there’s a catch, you’re allowed full speed (of whatever speed you can get off the network) up to 3GB (total upload and download) after that your speed is throttled until the next billing cycle.

So far from our experience if you’re casually tweeting and Facebooking, uploading photos to twitpic and watching YouTube on your iPhone, 3GB is plenty data for you to use a month (if you tether your iPhone a lot to watch videos etc., 3GB might not be enough). But this month if you plan to watch some World Cup games on the Astro b.Player get ready to be throttled.

Last night for the first match between South Africa and Mexico, we reset the data counter on our iPhone and let the game run it’s 90 minute course. The data consumption after the game was quite a bit.

We’re looking at around 380MB (total up and down) per live game stream. That’s about 10 games before you reach you monthly limit (assuming you’re on Maxis “unlimited”). Take note that this includes halftime and fulltime commentaries plus ad breaks.

With 62 matches to go in the tournament, you’ll need about 24GB worth of data access this month — if you want to watch all the World Cup games on your iPhone.

So, watching full time World Cup matches on your iPhone might not be practical, it may not even be possible.

If you’re wondering how the iPhone battery held up, with a full charge, you’ll have about 20% left after 90 minutes.