Other than EVDO ("3G"), my only other connection options at my home are
satellite (which sucks) and dialup. Ironically, I live on the hill above
the most connected place on earth, the silicon valley. On the bright
side, it's very beautiful up here.

When I was healthy enough to tinker and test on my OS, the vast majority
of my network transfers were due to downloading OpenBSD snapshots to
test, binary packages, and updating CVS. Each snapshot is about ~280MB
and depending on the arch/platform, they get rolled a couple times a
week. I have a lot of different archs and I (used to) test on as many as
time/health/bandwidth allowed. Unlike other open source projects,
testing snapshots in OpenBSD is an important and continual process. Even
when you're testing patches (i.e. compiling), the expectation is
everything else should be at the current snapshot. The snapshots are
essentially the baseline maintained so the patches/development are your
only delta.

BTW, the open source stuff is mostly FTP/HTTP transfers.

Though I do have a bittorrent client installed, it maybe gets used two
or three times a year, only for small files, and without upload
reciprocity due to the caps.

There's also very simple web browsing (without scripting by default).
These days, most all of my time is spent reading, and a lot of the
reading I do is keeping up with tech developments on the web. Once or
twice a week, I might indulge in a conference/talk video, but if the
file is too large, I won't bother. Also, about once a week I'll pull a
(legal) anime video that's about 250MB.

My total network transfer ranged between 5 and 8 GBytes a month when I
was doing active testing, so by comparison to other home users, it's not
that much.

I seriously doubt I need to remind you but for the non-network folks, file sizes do not accurately reflect total network transfer sizes due to protocol overhead. The Verizon bandwidth caps are based on total network transfer.

The most interesting, and sometimes frustrating, thing about the Verizon
cellular network is the filtering. They do some fairly brutal things to
reduce bandwidth usage and prevent "abuse" as per their unstated
definition. For example, if too much ICMP traffic originates from your
system to a particular host, it is silently blocked by their filters.
Another example would be their handling of POP3/SMTP protocols. In
minimal usage (i.e. checking mail six to twelve times a day), the
Verizon filters insert delays. If mail is checked "too often" (i.e.
idiots who configure their phones to check mail every 10 seconds), the
destination address is blocked completely. Some of the things Verizon
does in PPP are also wonky, but more or less it works well enough.

The "excessive use" throttle (filter) on old "unlimited" accounts like
mine only kicks in when a rolling average (three months I think) of
usage continually exceeds the 5GByte cap. I haven't seen it happen in
months but if memory serves, it gets limited to 128Kbit/s and only lasts
until the end of the monthly billing cycle.

Needless to say, Verizon refuses to divulge any information about their
filtering rules/triggers but even a novice at network monitoring can see
the results in action.

The latency can be annoying on EVDO ("3G"). Part of it is caused by the
nature of wireless/cellular communications crossing the distance, but
the other part is caused by spectrum resource limits of the towers and
the corresponding on/off dance the radio in the modem does. A good way
to grasp the problem is, you use a lot more spectrum when you're talking
on your cell phone than when it is sitting idle in standby mode. It's an
understandable limit of the engineering/design; Cellular data networks
are simply not designed for "always on" operation.