download cap

sohappy

looking for a phone/broadband 1mb package and i'm looking at the download caps imposed by the different providers ie; utv 6gb eircom 10gb . my question is how much can i expect to use in a month if im only online for about 4 hrs a day which is only for surfing? wont be downloading music or anything much,

Yakuza

Using a rough, back-of-the-envelope calulations:
According to http://www.optimizationweek.com/reviews/average-web-page/, the average size of a web page is 130k these days.

If you spend, say, 2 minutes reading each page on average, in a 4 hour session you will visit 120 such pages, thus downloading 15/16 MB (megabytes, not megabits).

Doing that for 30 days a month, you would download around 450/480 MB, or somewhat less than half a gig. (To put it in perspective, that's around 2/3rds of a downloaded movie, or about 1.5 normal 42 minute TV episodes encoded in divx)

So, for surfing only, I don't think you'd be in any danger of breaking any caps. Even adding in emails, perhaps another 100 MB a month (including spam), unless you have some friends who insist on forwarding on bazillions of powerpoint slides, so bump it up to 200 in that case).

So, in short, if you only use your internet to surf / read email you won't run into any caps any time soon.

Do you play any online games? This would have some traffic associated with it, but not that much.

It's only really the peer to peer stuff that racks up the amount you download.

Hope this helps

sohappy

thanks yakuza

kleefarr

You know what it's like though...

Once you have had it you always want more!