Harvey Van Sickle wrote:
On 10 Mar 2005, T i m wrote
snip
So I was concerned when they first brought in the 1GB/day
"unenforced unless you hit it too often" cap. But I had *no idea*
what my usage was (that was the great thing about it), so about a
year ago, I started measuring my usage.
(It's pointless to try and talk about "average use": that's the whole
point of having broadband -- you do with it what suits you. But for
context, my usage is that I work from home and am in front of the
computer for between 4 and 10 hours a day; I do a lot of web-based
research (archival maps and stuff), and I maintain my own ocmputer.
So I download what I want, when I want; I listen to streaming radio
(between 1 and 5 hours a day); I update programs; I download
software to try it out and/or discard it; I upload files to the
office a couple of times a week (around 10-15 MB per file); and very
occasionally -- every couple of months or so -- I might do a big
download of something like a Linux ISO image (a CD-worth of data). I
don't do games, and I don't do file-sharing.)
Measuring that sort of usage over the past year, I have used over 3 GB
-- *per month* -- just once (a Linux month). All the other months
have been between 1.8 and 2.3 GB. That's per *month*.
In my experience, it takes a hell of a lot of file transferring to hit
1 GB per day; if people are actually hitting that sort of figure on a
regular basis, they should be paying more for the amount of 1s and 0s
they're shifting through the cables.
That's good to know.
I probably do most my downloading at work during the day. During the
evenings I use my PC lesss - but if I did use it, it would be for things
like emailing/newsgroups/sending photos to family, used to spend lots of
time doing CounterStrike - which I may do sometimes. Steam updates
automatically, so I get the Half Life 2 updates often (which can be
sizeable). As I have a work laptop, I often take that home (work from home
once a week) and this also has Steam on it, so potentially, double the
updates - although I can get them done at work. So far I think that 100M a
day average (actually 3GB a month, rather than a daily limit) is probably
okay - but its just knowing whether my usage will change in the future.
I'll give it a month or so and see what my usage is over that - and then if
its like 1.5GB or less, I'll upgrade. If I'm over 2GB I'll probably check
for another month. If I'm over 3GB, I'll stick with it for now.
David
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