1GB per month limit in english please (merged)

chatta

I have just called Telewest and seems I can reduce my broadband bill by agreeing to a limit of 1gb per month. I really am not sure what this means in practice, (customer service bod couldn't tell me) will my 15 year old son hate me when he comes home from school, and do i have to stop being signed into MSE for the sake of it! Also for the sake of me calling them they have reduced my extra box by £6 have I gone a bit too mad, worried now.

bingo_bango

1Gb limit is adequate for some people, not enough for others. It really depends on what you do when you're online.

Webpage sizes:
'A web page may be very small or large depending upon the amount of text and the number and quality of images integrated within the web page. For example, the home page for CNN.com is about 200KB (200 Kilobytes = 200,000 bytes = 1,600,000 bits). This is typically large for a web page. In comparison, Yahoo's home page is about 70KB.'

An MP3 song is about 4MB, the same song in wav format is about 40MB, a full length movie can be 800MB to 1000MB (1000MB = 1GB).

If you work on the premise that you download ten songs per month, that is about 40Mb. From your 1024Mb limit, you then have enough left to view approximately 9800 webpages, which equates to about 300-350 per day. This is only an average however, and the final figure could be less or more.

chatta

Thats very helpful, I asked them what that meant but he seemed very vaque. i will call back to find out though what happens when we reach our limit. Expect i will get charged at some exorbatant rate that will make up for any savings i have made!!!!

Madasafish_Customer_Care

Hi Chatta,

It seems that as you are an existingTelewest customer - they should know your usage and should be able to tell you if 1GB will be sufficient for your requirements based on your historical usage.

Can you give them a call and ask them for a breakdown of what bandwidth you accrued per month for the last few months?

Kind regards,
Samara

chatta

I didn't know I could do that so thanks, calling them now. Yes I am female so can multi-task!!!

Dead_Eye_Jones

If your son objects to a gb limit, find out why. In my opinion people only need big limits if they donwload illegally. Quite simply, the cost of purchasing MP3s legally to use up a large limit would be £1000s and you would be talking about more music than you could listen to. But people do actually download illegally just for the sake of it, its addictive.

I tend to use 1-2gb a month, but most of that is from 24/7 online gaming, if your son is using this much bandwidth gaming you might want to start limiting his time infront of the PC before his school work suffers !

You can monitor your usage using tools such as net monitor, or your ISP will prob allow you to look it up somewhere. As pointed out above, if you just browse, email, chat, etc you will be quite safe with 1gb. Just make him aware that if hes gonna d/l a game demo or something he better do it at the end of the month so he can check the remaining bandwidth availabilty!

chatta

Just put phone down to Telewest, appears despite being put through to broadband dept apparently nobody has ever asked the question of how much do I use. Held for 5 mins and came back and said nope cant help me!!! I took opportunity to advise they look at MSE. Transferred back through to customer services who tell me their systems are all down, so I am waiting a call back. Good point about illegal downloads, guilty in the past but never nowdays! He plays games online but no more. I surf net and no more odd song from mycoke music (who have given up ghost) Wont tell son what I have done. Will wait and see if he notices. thanks for all useful advice though.

Rex_Mundi

You can give this Bandwidth Usage Guide a go. If you fill in your average details per week for each activity (including what your son does). It will give you an idea of how much you will download a month. The answer is given in a box just above where you fill in the details.

Welliesorter

There's a little program called Netmeter (http://readerror.gmxhome.de/) which you can leave running on your PC all the time. This will show the amount of data that you download.

I had it running for a couple of months and was surprised at how little I downloaded. I'd still struggle with a 1GB limit though.

For example, I might want to download a Knoppix or Ubuntu CD: perfectly legal but about 700MB each. Internet radio or streaming video would also soon eat into your allowance; there's a lot of this on the BBC web site now. If you're a Windows user, those monthly Microsoft updates and constant anti-virus updates eat into it a little too.

At a guess, if you use your connection only for web surfing and e-mail, you'll get away with it.

taffy1_2

I don't have broadband myself at the moment but when we move to our new house we are going to finally get set up with it. I was looking at Pipex as my brother has been with them for ages but you can no longer get the unlimited package for £23.

For £23 you are now limited to 15GB but this means nothing to me (typical women i suppose!!)

We don't want to download music or films, it is really just surfing and my OH wants to hook up his xbox to play games, so would this 15Gb be enough?

Is there a simple way of working out what download limit you would use?

Sorry for the long winded question.

Rex_Mundi

Try this Bandwith Usage Guide. Fill in how many hours a week you expect to use the different services, click submit, and your estimated usage will appear in a box just above where you fill in the details.

For just general surfing and gaming. 15GB should be plenty for you.