Overuse of your monthly broadband allowance

[Pedronicus]

I read somewhere that a lot of people who have unlimited broadband, have actually got broadband with small print that will get you kicked off a deal if you overuse you monthy allowance (Even if it's supposedly unlimited)

I've never understood what (apart from downloading music and films) uses up a lot of bandwidth, or whatever it's called.

Can anyone out there explain what things are heavy useage to a non tech man like myself.

(is youtube surfing heavy useage?)

[william18]

Youtube surfing is very heavy usage. The vidoes take ALOT of bandwidth.

[hecter]

You're not going to use up your bandwidth. Period. Your ISP sets it so that with just normal browsing of most sites, being Flickr or YouTube or CC, ect. you will not exceed your monthly allowance. Unless you're doing heavy downloading (no william, youtube does NOT take up a lot of bandwidth), then you'll be fine. If in doubt, call your service provider and ask how you can monitor your usage. I know Bell has it so that you can log into their website and see your average monthly usage and your usage so far this month and stuff like that.

[hecter]

I ran a few numbers on the youtube thing... The average youtube video is only 10 megabytes, because they compress the hell out of it. So, I've got a 90GB bandwidth limit. On average, I use about 25 of it a month, so I've got a whopping 65GB left over. Want to know how much youtube I'd have to watch to fill that gap? About 11 hours a day.


*This is assuming that the average youtube video is 3 minutes long and 10mb of data. Calculation is 65(gigabytes)*1024(turn it into megabytes)/10(size of youtube video)*3(length of each video in minutes)/60(turns the minutes into hours)/30(days in a month)

[pimpdave]

I ran a few numbers on the youtube thing... The average youtube video is only 10 megabytes, because they compress the hell out of it. So, I've got a 90GB bandwidth limit. On average, I use about 25 of it a month, so I've got a whopping 65GB left over. Want to know how much youtube I'd have to watch to fill that gap? About 11 hours a day.


*This is assuming that the average youtube video is 3 minutes long and 10mb of data. Calculation is 65(gigabytes)*1024(turn it into megabytes)/10(size of youtube video)*3(length of each video in minutes)/60(turns the minutes into hours)/30(days in a month)

This is a highly valuable post. Well done. You should get a medal for making a highly valuable contribution to our knowledge of the web.

And I'm being completely serious here, hecter. Many thanks.

[Ditocoaf]

I ran a few numbers on the youtube thing... The average youtube video is only 10 megabytes, because they compress the hell out of it. So, I've got a 90GB bandwidth limit. On average, I use about 25 of it a month, so I've got a whopping 65GB left over. Want to know how much youtube I'd have to watch to fill that gap? About 11 hours a day.


*This is assuming that the average youtube video is 3 minutes long and 10mb of data. Calculation is 65(gigabytes)*1024(turn it into megabytes)/10(size of youtube video)*3(length of each video in minutes)/60(turns the minutes into hours)/30(days in a month)

This is a highly valuable post. Well done. You should get a medal for making a highly valuable contribution to our knowledge of the web.

And I'm being completely serious here, hecter. Many thanks.

I also want to thank hecter for teaching me something I didn't know...but it comes out weird when I try to type it. Is the culture of the internet really one in which compliments always sound sarcastic?

[hecter]

I think it's a mixture of the internet and the persona I've built for myself. Let's face it, how often do you thank the "King of Spamalot" for a valuable post?

[pancakemix]

I ran a few numbers on the youtube thing... The average youtube video is only 10 megabytes, because they compress the hell out of it. So, I've got a 90GB bandwidth limit. On average, I use about 25 of it a month, so I've got a whopping 65GB left over. Want to know how much youtube I'd have to watch to fill that gap? About 11 hours a day.


*This is assuming that the average youtube video is 3 minutes long and 10mb of data. Calculation is 65(gigabytes)*1024(turn it into megabytes)/10(size of youtube video)*3(length of each video in minutes)/60(turns the minutes into hours)/30(days in a month)

This is a highly valuable post. Well done. You should get a medal for making a highly valuable contribution to our knowledge of the web.

And I'm being completely serious here, hecter. Many thanks.

I also want to thank hecter for teaching me something I didn't know...but it comes out weird when I try to type it. Is the culture of the internet really one in which compliments always sound sarcastic?

I suppose it is. Nice work on discovering that.

[browng-08]

Is the culture of the internet really one in which compliments always sound sarcastic?

I suppose it is. Nice work on discovering that.

lmao!

[bedub1]

Normal web traffic, youtube, chatting, online gaming etc won't come close to that limit.

Downloading lots of music won't have much effect. The problem lies with High-Definition video. You can download it with your xbox 360, stream it from netflix etc. As more and more tv/video is sent across the internet instead of the old medium of cable or satellite, you will find your GB/month usage increasing dramatically. If you watch HDTV 8 hours a day on the weekends, you can easily fill up your cap. I've downloaded xbox360 demos and they are about 1.5 gb per game. If game manufactures were to switch to an entirely download based product release style (don't buy dics, just download them) then you are more serious problems. Blu-ray discs are 25-50 gigs in size. To download a true blu-ray movie, or a Sony PS3 blu ray game, could eat a massive portion of your allocated use.

These companies have set in place these limits to try to hold onto their dwindling customer base, as customers are moving to the Internet as a source for data. The last thing your cable TV/Cable Internet company wants to happen is you cancel your cable TV, and buy HDTV channel by channel from some website. They are too stupid to react and come up with something better, so instead try to prevent progress by setting these limits. It's the exact same thing the music industry did. They rejected technology instead of embracing it, and got screwed by napster and their user base.