Skype / useage per hour ?

davethetaller

My brother has just taken a Vodafone contract, with no limit minutes or texts, and 2GB of internet.

Its an extra £10 for a 2GB top up.

I found estimates of half a GB for streaming utube or iplayer, for an hour, and perhaps three quarters+ GB for same in HD, but I would like to have an estimate for the useage value of Skype.

Is it hungry ?

Thanks in anticipation.

gjchester

davethetaller wrote: »

My brother has just taken a Vodafone contract, with no limit minutes or texts, and 2GB of internet.

Its an extra £10 for a 2GB top up.

I found estimates of half a GB for streaming utube or iplayer, for an hour, and perhaps three quarters+ GB for same in HD, but I would like to have an estimate for the useage value of Skype.

Is it hungry ?

Thanks in anticipation.

About half a meg a minute, for voice, web cam will be higher but hard to say depends on the quality of the web cam and the images sent.

davethetaller

gjchester wrote: »

About half a meg a minute, for voice, web cam will be higher but hard to say depends on the quality of the web cam and the images sent.

Many thanks for your reply.
I am not very computer savvy, what I think of as Skype is his mobile phone tethered to his laptop, receiving the other Skype senders voice and picture.

Is it possible to give me a fraction or percentage using GB as the scale, if he Skypt a 15 minute voice and picture call?

I realise that by giving me a measure in meg, you have answered the question, but not knowing the scale, I am still unsure.

If you or someone, can say that it is about the same or double for example, compared to BBC iplayer or Utube, then that is fine.

Thanks again.

gjchester

davethetaller wrote: »

Many thanks for your reply.
I am not very computer savvy, what I think of as Skype is his mobile phone tethered to his laptop, receiving the other Skype senders voice and picture.

Check Vodafone will allow him to do this before he does. Tethering is usually charged extra, and can be as high as £6 a Mb of data use, better to check now and do it and get a large bill later....

davethetaller wrote: »

Is it possible to give me a fraction or percentage using GB as the scale, if he Skypt a 15 minute voice and picture call?

I realise that by giving me a measure in meg, you have answered the question, but not knowing the scale, I am still unsure.

If you or someone, can say that it is about the same or double for example, compared to BBC iplayer or Utube, then that is fine.

Thanks again.

It's not that simple. The way video is sent is *usually* the system sends the changes in the image, so lets say you sent a black picture, the first frame will be details of all the pixels on the image and the next frame would just be changes, so if the image remains totally black, it would be very little data, a 5 minute video call just sending a black image would be pretty small.

Take the other extreme, the first frame is totally black, and the next frame totally white, here the details of every pixel has changed so we need to send more data, a 5 minute call of alternating black and white frames will be a lot more data.

Now in real life it's not that extreme, the image of the person will change but a lot such as the background and a lot of the face may not change too much so the amount sent will be in the middle.

The other issues is what the resolution of the web cam is. A 640 x 480 web cam will send a smaller image than a full HD quality image. Skype can also increase or decrease the quality depending on your settings.

Sorry that doesn't answer your question but it not something you can really answer without knowing the setup. If you call in full HD then it could take as much data as iplayer, call in low res and it can be a lot less.

davethetaller

Many thanks for your extensive reply gjchester.

I now understand better, even though it is an in exact science !