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Author Topic: [SORTED] how big is a webpage :) broadband - 1 or 10GB?  (Read 7997 times)

tomos

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[SORTED] how big is a webpage :) broadband - 1 or 10GB?
« on: March 21, 2008, 05:27 AM »
a friend of mine is thinking of getting a broadband connection (via mobile phone network actually)
that offers 1GB per month or 10GB per month
They dont download music or films but will be surfing a bit (average - does that exist :tellme:)
probably the odd YouTube session

I have absolutely no idea - had a look at the software that came with my connection and I seem to be averaging 3GB per week - but I tend to have 60 tabs open in FF and download a bit of software, but no music or films or, eh, anything else..mind you I listen to Last.FM a bit

So wondering have ye any opinions on whether they should go for the 10GB or the 1GB offer -
of course the 1GB is only half the price of the other in spite of being a 1/10th of the usage... :-\
Tom
« Last Edit: March 21, 2008, 07:23 AM by tomos »

mediaguycouk

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Re: how big is a webpage :) broadband - 1 or 10GB?
« Reply #1 on: March 21, 2008, 06:28 AM »
When I discuss these things with people at work I ask them to find out how much it costs to go over the limit.

For example if 1GB costs £20 and costs £1 per gig extra and 10GB costs £25 and £1 per gig extra then 1GB is worth while. You'd have to use 5GB before you'd be losing money.

If they are more like Pipex where 1GB costs £20 but 1GB extra costs £3 then you'd only have to install Vista SP1 to have made it an expensive choice.
Learning C# - Graham Robinson

tomos

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Re: how big is a webpage :) broadband - 1 or 10GB?
« Reply #2 on: March 21, 2008, 07:22 AM »
good point mediaguy

1GB costs €15, each extra gig costs €20 (that's O2 @.ie)
10GB cost €30

Clear choice there thanks for the tip :up:

I hadnt even thought of updates for example
in the first post in my mind I was comparing my week & their month if you follow :-[
Tom

f0dder

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Re: [SORTED] how big is a webpage :) broadband - 1 or 10GB?
« Reply #3 on: March 21, 2008, 06:02 PM »
An extra gig is €20? That's insane :o
- carpe noctem

tomos

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Re: [SORTED] how big is a webpage :) broadband - 1 or 10GB?
« Reply #4 on: March 21, 2008, 06:40 PM »
An extra gig is €20? That's insane :o

that true - I suspect a lot of people get screwed that way
pricing in ireland is fairly crazy, in britian too but there's more real competition there for this type of thing so better value there.
I'm lucky that way, I live in flatrate-land@de

:-\ my maths is correct I think :-\ 
ignoring the extra 24 MB:
2c per extra MB X 1000/100 = €20

EDIT/  also they seem to be trying to cap usage to 10GB per account - I guess that way they can get more customers for their bandwith so-to-speak.  But for charging 2c.p.MB to the poor unfortunate who chooses a 1GB p.m. connection there's no excuse
Tom
« Last Edit: March 21, 2008, 06:44 PM by tomos »

f0dder

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Re: [SORTED] how big is a webpage :) broadband - 1 or 10GB?
« Reply #5 on: March 21, 2008, 06:46 PM »
I live in .dk, ~€50/month for 20/1. They upgraded me to 20/2 for free, but apparently the copper quality wasn't good enough, so it was more like 12/1.2, so I asked them to put me back at 20/1 instead.
- carpe noctem

Renegade

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Re: [SORTED] how big is a webpage :) broadband - 1 or 10GB?
« Reply #6 on: March 21, 2008, 09:14 PM »
An extra gig is €20? That's insane :o

Especially considering that bandwidth @ $2.00/GB is expensive... (You can buy it for $0.18/GB through Amazon S3, but that's servers, not home use.)

Makes me glad that I live in South Korea. Bandwidth is like water here. I'm pretty sure that I chew up more than 10GB per month, as I can chew 1GB in a day fairly often. I kind of feel sorry for everyone that can only get metered accounts.  :wallbash:





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J-Mac

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Re: [SORTED] how big is a webpage :) broadband - 1 or 10GB?
« Reply #7 on: March 22, 2008, 12:35 AM »
An extra gig is €20? That's insane :o

Especially considering that bandwidth @ $2.00/GB is expensive... (You can buy it for $0.18/GB through Amazon S3, but that's servers, not home use.)

Makes me glad that I live in South Korea. Bandwidth is like water here. I'm pretty sure that I chew up more than 10GB per month, as I can chew 1GB in a day fairly often. I kind of feel sorry for everyone that can only get metered accounts.  :wallbash:

@Renegade:

Is that Amazon S3 bandwidth? Or storage/Disk space?  I thought that was disk space but could certainly be wrong about it.

@tomos:

Problem is that the wireless companies, at least here in the USA, charge for overages by the KB rather than GB. They don't make all that money they rake in by being generous, that's for sure! Here it is almost always beneficial to go with the higher plan if they are uncertain how much they'll use. Unless they become locked in for a long period of time. If they want to be careful and try to save as much as possible, they should go with the 1 GB plan and use it normally but track usage daily. If they get too close, stop for the rest of that month, and then jump it to the next level the following month.

Jim

J-Mac

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Re: [SORTED] how big is a webpage :) broadband - 1 or 10GB?
« Reply #8 on: March 22, 2008, 01:06 AM »
Tom,

If you want to calculate a representative bandwidth monthly for your friend, let's try it.

Average web page = ~200 kb   (That's a little high, I think; Yahoo is about 70 - 80 kb/page while CNN is about 200 kb/page).

Assume he will download (view) 20 web pages daily:  200kb X 20/day =  4,000 kb or 4 MB daily  (I'm using nominal conversions rather than actual)

For a monthly total, say 4 MB/day X 31 days = 124 MB or .124 GB/month.  Allow a factor of 1.5 or 2.0 for "financial safety". That makes it .124 X 2.0 = .248, or about a quarter GB per month.

Now that's assuming viewing 20 pages daily only. No ringtones, games, etc. downloaded. If you want to include something for that (and I certainly would!):

Allow ~ 5 downloads a day @ ~ 100 kb/download = 500 kb X 31 days = 15,500 kb / 15.5 MB / .0155 GB X 2.0 safety =  .031 GB / month

Add that to the web browsing and it's about 0.248 + 0.031 =  0.279 GB

Remember, though: 20 web page views daily is extremely minimal.  I'm using that only if your friend is financially prudent.  In reality if he is going to be checking email also he will be up at or near the 1 GB limit.

Hey -- Wait a minute - Is this for browsing on a mobile phone device? Or tethering?  (Using the mobile device to connect a PC to the web.)

If a PC, get the 10 GB plan at a minimum!!

Jim

tomos

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Re: [SORTED] how big is a webpage :) broadband - 1 or 10GB?
« Reply #9 on: March 22, 2008, 05:44 AM »
Renegade,
true they actually charging by the kb
thing is too in the first month they going to have to get about a 100 updates for windows...

Hey -- Wait a minute - Is this for browsing on a mobile phone device? Or tethering?  (Using the mobile device to connect a PC to the web.)

it's pc using mobile phone network - "tethering" new word for me but that's it allright
So I recommended her the 10GB -
you know the way anyways. once you start you just cant stop. :D
Tom

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Re: [SORTED] how big is a webpage :) broadband - 1 or 10GB?
« Reply #10 on: March 22, 2008, 06:25 AM »
Amazon S2 pricing here.

It's $0.18 / GB data transfer out for the first 10TB.

Storage
$0.15 per GB-Month of storage used
Data Transfer
$0.10 per GB - all data transfer in

$0.18 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.16 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.13 per GB - data transfer out / month over 50 TB

Gee... Kind of puts things in perspective again... ;)

As for some of those web page estimates, remember that servers will have HTTP compression turned on. Your 200KB page can be 50KB then (or lower even  -- all depends). Images still won't compress much though, and admins won't turn it on for images.

If you've ever been to a web site and downloaded a ZIP file or EXE but couldn't tell how big it was, that's because HTTP compression is turned on. I wrote a bit about problems with HTTP compression here. It's IIS specific though.

In any event the real bandwidth cost will be in images, Flash, and multimedia. To really minimize things, use Opera and click the "images off" toolbar button.

Slow Down Music - Where I commit thought crimes...

Freedom is the right to be wrong, not the right to do wrong. - John Diefenbaker

J-Mac

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Re: [SORTED] how big is a webpage :) broadband - 1 or 10GB?
« Reply #11 on: March 22, 2008, 11:16 AM »
Renegade,

I think those estimates are for actual tested downloads, which would probably include compression. Don't have it now but it was on a web-hosting Q&A page I found last night by Googling.

Not certain though - it didn't mention compression there.

Jim

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Re: [SORTED] how big is a webpage :) broadband - 1 or 10GB?
« Reply #12 on: March 22, 2008, 08:48 PM »
Jim.

Just to kind of put this in perspective, the page for this thread before I posted was 123,127 bytes, but comes out to 17,645 bytes when compressed for about an 85% compression ratio.

The images, css, js and all that comes out to 141,965 bytes. Of that, 63,873 is CSS & JS files that compress to 13,937 bytes for a 78% compression ratio.

The images come out to 78,092 bytes, and compress to 81,191 bytes for a compression ratio of -4%. (That number would be worse in real life as I'm compressing them all at once and not individually, so the compression overheard is only counted once per se.)

Still, the textual components (31,582 bytes) of the page are about 40% the size of the images. Not compressed, they're 3.4x larger (340%).

If the numbers were coming from some kind of researcher, it's most likely that the 200KB figure includes compression for text elements (htm, js, css, etc.).

Not wanting to be remiss in this, from a random porn forum page I get 423,208 bytes of images. i.e. Surfing porn will kill bandwidth very quickly. At that rate, you could surf about 2,000 pages before you ran out of 1GB of bandwidth. At 20 pages per day, that's 100 days, but who only surfs 20 pages of porn? ;)

I did the same for the front page of Amazon.com and there you get 282,658 bytes of images, which is comparable to surfing porn (607,248 bytes total without compression). i.e. Online shopping malls are visually intense. Again, if you're looking to buy a new bike, some clothes, or a book, you're likely to surf more than 20 pages if you're doing some comparison shopping. 

Basically, I think the 200KB number is a bit skewed. It was probably true about 5 years ago, but sites are moving towards much richer and visually intense experiences now. The money is in delivering fantastic experiences to people that are likely to spend it. i.e. Those with broadband. I'm not saying that people with dialup are poor and won't spend money, but there is a much better chance to make a sale to someone with broadband.

I remember when Windows XP came out, and consistently I saw that sales were heavily skewed towards people with XP over those with Windows 98. Same basic principle there. The web skews towards the latest & greatest, and leaves behind the old & tired (dialup, 98).

I suppose the point is that the web is skewing towards image and multimedia heavy pages that can easily shoot over 200KB, and often in the MB range. Take a blog page with a video for example. i.e. The web is bandwidth intense now.

In either event, the upshot is that I agree with you: "GET THE 10GB!" I just think that I should "raise the panic level" a bit there. :)

Slow Down Music - Where I commit thought crimes...

Freedom is the right to be wrong, not the right to do wrong. - John Diefenbaker

J-Mac

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Re: [SORTED] how big is a webpage :) broadband - 1 or 10GB?
« Reply #13 on: March 22, 2008, 09:59 PM »
… Basically, I think the 200KB number is a bit skewed. It was probably true about 5 years ago, but sites are moving towards much richer and visually intense experiences now. The money is in delivering fantastic experiences to people that are likely to spend it. i.e. Those with broadband. I'm not saying that people with dialup are poor and won't spend money, but there is a much better chance to make a sale to someone with broadband.…

It's certainly possible that the data was dated - as I mentioned above it was a web hosting site - not a site that hosts, but a forum or advice-type site - and was showing how to determine bandwidth for those who are trying to select a hosting plan at various hosts. I do remember that it had some examples and one was CNN.com at 200 kb; another was Yahoo at 70 kb. It showed the sizes of several different well-known web sites and seemed to average close to 200 kb for the types of sites that would commonly be browsed on a mobile device -- remember, at first I thought that was what tomos was talking about.

But like I said, this data could be old; I looked for a date but did not find any on the page. I looked at about 8 or 10 sites from a Google search and I wasn't really looking at which ones I used - I didn't expect to have to pull it up again!

But you do seem to have a lot of knowledge about this so I most humbly bow to your expertise!   :D

Thanks!

Jim

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Re: [SORTED] how big is a webpage :) broadband - 1 or 10GB?
« Reply #14 on: March 22, 2008, 11:11 PM »
I just checked Yahoo's front page - 321,032 bytes. About 50KB in images and the text compresses to 60KB.

However, the difference between 70KB and 110KB is HUGE when talking about Yahoo. Those guys are very well known for being major gurus in this area. They run the largest site on the Internet, and have dedicated massive resources to making sure that they do it right. Yahoo is an excellent site for people to look at when thinking about creating a site.

Slow Down Music - Where I commit thought crimes...

Freedom is the right to be wrong, not the right to do wrong. - John Diefenbaker