It was only a few years ago, that most mobile broadband companies offered no-limit service to their customers. Those days are gone it seems, at least for now, as Verizon, Sprint, AT&T and others have all pretty much implemented the 5GB cap, with per-megabyte overage charges ranging from 5 to 25 cents per MB. At that rate, going over by 1GB could cost you from $50(@.05) to $250(@.25), so it’s extremely important to know how much bandwidth you are using if you are on one of these plans.
Figure 1. It’s a good idea to turn off Windows Automatic Updates
The first step in reducing your bandwidth use is understanding just what 5GB of data represents – it’s actually quite a bit and most RV’ers who use the Internet for web browsing, email, blogging and moderate uploading or downloading of images will never have to worry too much about going over. 5GB is equal to 5,120MB. As you can see from the table below, if all you ever did was browse and email, you would be hard pressed to exceed 5GB in a month. You would have to average about 16,666 emails a day and browse 1,111 webpage's a day to go over the limit – not too likely!
This table shows the file size of normal Internet activities and how it equates to 5GB| Activity/Download | File Size | 5GB Equals |
| 1 email | 10 KB | 500,000 |
| 1 webpage visit - average | 150 KB | 33,333 |
| 1 downloaded song from iTunes | 4 MB | 1,250 |
| 1 digital photo | 100kb | 51,200 |
| 1 digital photo | 300kb | 17,655 |
| 1 digital photo | 1 MB | 5,120 |
| 1 digital photo | 5 MB | 1,000 |
| 1 digital photo | 10 MB | 500 |
| 1 3 minute video on YouTube/Google | 5 MB | 1,000 |
| 1 hour of 56k audio stream | 25 MB | 200 hrs |
| 1 typical 5 minute video on iTunes | 30 MB | 167 |
| 1 45-minute TV show from iTunes | 200 MB | 25 |
| 1 hour of Skype phone call @ 64kb/s | 28 MB | 178 hrs |
| 1 hour of Skype video chat @ 384kb/s | 169 MB | 30 hrs |
| 1 (2 hours) movie MPEG4 download | 1.5 GB | 3 |
| 1 entire DVD (MPEG-2) disk image | 4.5 GB | 1 |
But what can you do to help stay under this 5GB cap? Luckily, there are a few easy things everyone can do to effectively limit bandwidth use. Here are some of them:
- MONITOR USAGE: This is the simplest, yet most effective, way to ensure you don’t go over your limit. Check your usage on a daily basis by using VZaccess Manager for Verizon, or whatever package your supplier provides. You can usually check this at the supplier’s website as well by looking at your account stats.
- WiFi SECURITY: If you are using a router, i.e. Cradlepoint or a MiFi device, make sure that you have enabled security because you are, in effect, a “WiFi Hotspot.” You don’t want everyone in the RV Park piggybacking on your network and charging all the bandwidth to your account.
- REDUCE IMAGE FILE SIZES: My Canon camera, for example, registers images with sizes between 5MB and 10MB or more per picture. At 10MB a pop, I’m going to use up a ton of bandwidth unnecessarily. So, it’s very important to resize your pictures before putting them in your blog or uploading them to Picasa Web Albums etc. At 300kb a picture, a very good size, you could upload 17,655 images a month – that might even work for Al, of The Bayfield Bunch, during a slow month for him!
- USE FREE WiFi WHEN AVAILABLE: If you are in an RV Park, a casino lot, or anywhere else that has decent free WiFi, then use it. Don’t burn up your own bandwidth when you don’t have to. This is a great time to upload images to an online image hosting site like Picasa Web Albums. Also, if your RV Park has a clubhouse with cable internet, just put your images on a usb flash drive and upload them from there.
- CONTROL AUTOMATIC UPDATES: In your computer’s security settings(see Figure 1), setup Microsoft’s Windows update feature so that it is NOT automatic, just let it notify you when software updates are available. This way, you can plan ahead and install these updates when free WiFi is available at an RV Park or a public hotspot. You can check all your software and do the same thing – except perhaps for your antivirus definitions – I would leave those alone just in case!
- BLOCK ADS: A simple, no-brainer – turn on pop-up blocking in your web browser, they’re annoying anyway!
- FORGET P2P APPS: These applications are bandwidth killers! Disable, or better yet uninstall, all of these file-sharing and bit-torrent programs as they will definitely cause a lot of grief – and cost!
- CONFIGURE EMAIL ATTACHMENTS: Set your email client so that attachments(i.e. images) are not automatically downloaded. You can still download them if you choose to. Gmail is great for this as it does not download images automatically anyway. It just displays a thumbnail and asks you if you want to download it or simply view the image – another great feature of Gmail.
- MONITOR USAGE: This practice is so important it’s worth repeating. Monitoring your usage is still the simplest and most effective way to ensure you don’t go over the 5GB cap and thus incur overage charges.
One more point for Verizon users to consider. Verizon has recently reduced their overage charge from .25 cents per MB to 5 cents – but, it’s not automatic! If you signed up to a plan that had a .25 cent per MB cost, then you have to phone them to have it reduced. This sounds ridiculous, and it is, but if you are a Verizon customer it just might be worth it to check your plan just to make sure you don’t get charged 5 times what you should.
Make sure you have enabled security on a router or MiFi
A little long today, sorry about that, but have a great Sunday, and thanks for visiting.
0 comments:
Post a Comment