Calculation of charged traffic in GPRS network

Question

I am working with a distributed application communicating over GPRS. I use UDP packets to send business data and ICMP pings to verify connectivity. And now I have a problem with calculating a traffic for which I will be charged by the provider. I have to consider following factors:

1. UDP payload: that is obvious.
2. UDP overhead: UDP header + IP header = 8 + 20 bytes.
3. ICMP echo request without data: IP header + ICMP payload = 28 bytes.
4. ICMP echo reply: as in 3.

Above means that for evey data packet I am charged for payload + 28 bytes and for every ping 56 bytes. Am I right or I am missing/misunderstanding something?

Answer 1

You may also need to establish whether there's any overhead from your GPRS network provider for encapsulating your packets over their network.

Whilst GPRS is fundamentally an IP network, they may try to charge you for link layer traffic, not just your actual useful data.