I’ve never been subject to bandwidth caps or quotas, so I’ve never really paid it much heed. I have been aware of their existance, and have kept them in (the back of my) mind with my own designs in the past by keeping imagery low and abiding by the “Content is King” mantra, and keeping my content in the realm of text.
Now, with the Cr-48 Pilot Program, I’ve been inducted into the frightening world of Bandwidth Caps and Quotas, and it’s been a bit of an eye-opener. My own estimates of how much data I throw about in a typical browsing day fell dramatically short of the mark. To their credit, they do say the free plan is “…enough for hundreds of emails or occasional browsing” (emphasis mine), I just wasn’t listening. That’s assuming your e’mails don’t include attachments or crazy signatures with images (any signature with an image is crazy, but that’s a subject for another post in which I lament the demise of plain text as the primary e’mail delivery format).
Their Plans
To help us preview their new OS, Google, in cahoots (ok, in cooperation) with Verizon, initially offers the following plans:
- 2 year 100MB of data per month for $0.00
- 1 day (24 hour) limitless pass for $9.99
- 30 day (720 hour) 1GB pass for $20.00
- 30 day (720 hour) 3GB pass for $35.00
- 30 day (720 hour) 5GB pass for $50.00
All plans are effective from the moment they’re activated. Though most of the plans are for 30 days instead of calendar month, I believe the 2 year plan is by calendar year. So, starting the 1GB plan on 12/01/10 means it’s good through 12/30/2010 (30 days from date of plan activation). Starting the free plan on 12/01/2010 (as I did), however, means you get 100MB free per 30 day period until 12/01/2012. It would end on 11/20/2012 if it were a 720 day (24 months * 30 days per month) plan. I’m sure this is all documented somewhere, but half the fun is guessing!
I’ll take note when my data cap is reset to 100MB to verify my assumptions, but it should happen on 1/19/2011.
My Plan
I plan to spend most of my time connecting via Wi-Fi, rather than 3G, so I opted for the free 100MB/month. However, burning through nearly 90MB over the space of 3 days while at my parent’s house with *exceedingly* careful usage has got me thinking about how much a typical browsing session uses.
By “*exceedingly* careful” usage, I avoided, as much as possible, all streaming media, all file downloads, any image heavy sites, online gaming, and kept my forays onto the Web as short and sweet as possible. Mostly, to be honest, I was just writing my Initial Impressions post. And that was mostly offline, with occasional textual updates online to make sure I didn’t lose anything (it is, after all, such a fine post… meh). Unfortunately, advertisers aren’t worried about the bandwidth capped or those charged by the MB. There are far too many bandwidth heavy flash and streaming ads out there for my taste, and in some of the most unlikely places.
So… Here are some numbers I’ve put together. It’s not scientific, terribly regimented or documented, but I wanted to get a general sense of how much data is transferred in a typical session for me. I’m using NetWorx on my Win7 laptop, b/c there isn’t a bandwidth usage monitor available yet for Chrome OS that I found (that would be incredibly useful, if someone wanted to put that together). I don’t feel like hacking my router just yet to install DD-WRT, Tomato or whatever other alternate solutions are available, nor do I feel the need to implement Squid, so I’m going to deal with local monitoring for the time being. Most of my time is on Google Reader, Gmail, Google Docs, and my own site. My Google Reader usage is primarily text, but there are some feeds that are fairly image intensive, including a few online comics thrown in for good measure.
My Results
Tonight, over the course of about three hours of intermittent browsing broken up by an episode of Firefly, some financial talk with my wife, and dinner, I burned through 18.8MB of data. No single site I visited carried a heavy media payload, and I didn’t honestly browse around that much. I caught up on a few feeds, read some articles, and fixed some books on Goodreads. Nothing was that intense. Truth be told, I saved this video for my Chromebook so it wouldn’t be counted amongst the bits tallied.
I’ll keep monitoring my usage to see, but it’s certainly looking like 100MB/month truly is a pittance that would fulfill only the most spartan of Internet users.
As an aside, just collecting links by visiting the site to copy/paste the URL, and polishing this post burned another 14MB. Ain’t that something?
Bandwidth caps is the devil’s work. It’s like charging you for minutes of long distance. Limit the rate, pay for the rate.
I love my two lines with unlimited text, data, and voice for $100/mo.
Sunflower has bandwidth caps, so they will tell you how much you’ve been using. A typical month for the two of us is 30 GB of bandwidth. The funny thing is, that’s 90% browsing. We stream about 1 movie a month. Picture management is upstream, so we can see it’s less than 5 GB.
It’s amazing how much extra crap comes along with any given web page.
I thought part of participating in the test was that you’d use the device as your primary computer. That would be fine if it were a desktop … but you’d think that a netbook would mean they want you to go outside to play. Tough to do with the free limit they’re set.
That’s a fine point you make, sir. At home, on my home wi-fi, it’s easy to use it nearly exclusively. Outside the home where free wi-fi isn’t available, it is very limiting.