Broadband Usage Guide

We've put together a guide to the size of the broadband plan you'll need. Your usage of each service may vary so this is just a starting point with more detail below.

With so many options for online entertainment these days it’s becoming difficult to figure out just how much data we should plan on using in a month. As a result finding the correct broadband plan can be difficult, especially for families with multiple children.

We’ve thrown together a rough broadband usage guide which should help you make an educated estimate of around how much data you can expect to use up in a month so you can figure out who is to blame each time you hit your cap.

All of our measurements were taken using an ADSL2+ connection that usually maxes out in the 16Mb/s – 20Mb/s range.

But first we have a quick lesson for you on the difference between Bits and Bytes. It’s not 100% necessary information for this guide, but we definitely recommend it to assist your understanding. We promise not to geek out too hard during the description.

Bits and Bytes

Much of the confusion that results in the hitting of internet caps stems from the difference between Bits and Bytes. This is because when you download something the speed at which it downloads is usually measured in Bits, but both the size of the file and your monthly cap are measured in Bytes.

Have you ever been downloading a file and seen something along the lines of “168.2Kb/s”? That’s talking in Kilobits (NOT KiloBytes). It’s a simple way of measuring your download speed. “168.2Kb/s” would mean that you are currently downloading something at 168.2 Kilobits per second.

The way you can tell the difference between Bits and Bytes here is simple. Where the “b” in question is lower case it’s being used in reference to Bits. If it is an upper case “B” (i.e. KB/s) it is being used in reference to Bytes. The simplicity factor comes in by remembering that a Byte (B) is bigger than a Bit (b), so the upper-case lettering is reserved for the largest measurement.

How much bigger? Exactly 8 times. 1 Byte = 8 Bits.

Where this confusion messes with people and their data caps is that people seem to think that their download speed and the size of the files they’re downloading don’t seem to add up, so instead of paying attention to the important one (the size of the file) they instead respond in a very usual way that people do when something is confusing and just ignore the both of them.

This is a bad idea. You should always try to be aware of how much data you’re using, at least in a ballpark-figure kind of way. You don’t have to keep a diary with all your internet usage, just make a mental note whenever you do something out of the ordinary.

Uploading Counts 

Everyone knows what a download is. Well uploading is exactly the same thing but in reverse. It is the amount of information being sent out of your computer and off in to the never-ending ether of the internet.

You will almost always be uploading while doing things on the internet, but at a much, much slower rate than you are downloading.

Uploading used to be unmetered by ISPs, but most plans now count your uploads as part of your usage allowance. For most of us it still shouldn’t matter too much as it only counts for a small percentage of your internet traffic, unless you are uploading or swapping large files like music and video or using an online back up service. 

Finding this all too confusing? Don’t worry, we’ve simplified things for you below.

YouTube and Video Streaming

A common misconception about video streaming seems to be that it doesn’t use up as much bandwidth as downloading a movie and storing it on your hard drive. This couldn’t be more incorrect. It’s important to remember when using streaming services like YouTube that every time you watch a video you’re using the same amount of data as if you’d downloaded it in file format. Probably more seeing as many files come in Zipped form, allowing them to be transferred in a simple format before ‘expanding’ on your hard drive.

So watching a YouTube video, then coming back another time and watching it again is therefore equivalent to downloading the video twice. The only situation in which this wouldn’t apply is if you left the page open and simply pressed “play” again without refreshing it.

Even if you click “play” on a video and only watch half of it, chances are you’ve still downloaded the whole thing.

Ever noticed that light red bar at the bottom of a YouTube clip? That’s how much of the video you’ve currently downloaded. The solid red bar is how far in to watching the clip you actually are. So even if you’ve only watched half, by the time that light red bar hits the end there’s no point in stopping to save on bandwidth; you’ve already paid for the whole thing out of your monthly cap.

We’ve decided to use YouTube as the primary example for video streaming simply because of its massive size and world-wide proliferation. But these figures will be similar for most other video streaming services.

YouTube has become a global phenomenon. It is estimated that YouTube now exceeds 2 billion views per day, making it the world’s largest single distributor of video content. But how does it affect you and your monthly cap?

We downloaded an internet usage meter and logged just how much data YouTube eats up of our cap every month. Despite our own familiarity with all things technological we were still surprised at some of the results.

We tested all of the video resolutions offered by YouTube and found an average usage for each one. Here are our findings.

For accuracy we measured the speed at which each video downloaded, as well as the amount uploaded per second and the final amount of data that had been downloaded. The final amount of data downloaded for each resolution type has been displayed as what would be expected for a 5 minute video.

240p

• Bits Per Second (down): 400-500Kb
• Bits Per Second (up): 5-9Kb
• Data used per 5 minute video: 8.333MB

360p

• Bits Per Second (down): 900Kbps - 1.1Mbps
• Bits Per Second (up): 15-20 Kbps
• Data used per 5 minute video: 13.333MB

480p

• Bits Per Second (down): 1.5-1.6-1.7Mbps
• Bits Per Second (up): 20-26Kbps
• Data used per 5 minute video: 20MB

720p

• Bits Per Second (down): 20+ Mbps
• Bits Per Second (up): 320Kbps
• Data used per 5 minute video: 37.5MB

1080p

• Bits Per Second (down): 20+ Mbps
• Bits Per Second (up): 320 Kbps
• Data used per 5 minute video: 62MB

We’ve traditionally been big fans of 720p videos on YouTube and always knew that they used up more data than the standard 360p and 480p versions. However, we were surprised to find out that for every 5 minutes of video footage we loaded we were using up 37.5MB of our monthly cap.

Now remember, the speed at which you download has little to do with your monthly cap. We were only able to find the final size of the YouTube videos by physically downloading them as files in each resolution and finding an average size.

You might think that you don’t watch even nearly enough YouTube for this to matter to your monthly download cap, but think carefully. Videos are embedded in everything from online newspapers to review sites and even Facebook these days. Every time you stream a video you’re most likely using one of these resolutions. We’re not saying you should stop streaming online content, we just want you to realise the amount of data you could be potentially using each month, even if you think you’re not a heavy internet user.

Facebook

Due to its dominance in the Social Media world at the moment we’ve gone with Facebook as a representative for social media platforms. Yes, things like Twitter and Digg won’t use as much data as such a content-intensive service like Facebook. But if we covered every SM platform we’d be here all day.

We sent one of our youngest team members on to Facebook in 10 minute blocks and recorded the amount of data used for each period. With their consent, of course.

This time we were initially pleasantly surprised at how little information was being sucked up by this most prolific of social media tools.

During the course of this casual Facebook browsing – chatting, browsing photos, status checking and clicking a few links (NOT clicking on any YouTube links) – only slightly over 1MB of data was consumed per minute.

After this happy discovery we thought it would be a great idea to check out just how much time the average Facebook user spends online every month. The answer? 7 hours.

7 hours at this rate of download is somewhere in the vicinity of 500MB per month per Facebook user on your connection. Have teenagers? They’re going to be in the premium user’s end, clocking up way more than the world-wide average. According to these figures 2 teenagers with Facebook profiles will probably use up at least 1GB of your cap each month, but probably a lot more.

Suddenly Facebook doesn’t seem so cap-friendly any more.

Internet TV (IPTV)

While a lot of IPTV is unmetered there’s a lot that are only partially unmetered or don’t have unmetered content at all. As such it’s a good idea to get at least a basic feeling of how much usage you’re potentially looking at. 

There are many forms of IPTV and each differs in how much of your monthly usage their content can eat up. It’s a good idea to check your IPTV provider for specific information (try looking in the FAQ section). 

We’ve gone with ABC’s iView service and Foxtel Over Xbox 360 as our chosen examples, although you could consider the catch up TV offerings from SBS, Seven, Nine and Ten as IPTV offerings and they will equate in usage to video streams via iView. 

ABC iView:

250MB per hour of standard definition (SD)

Foxtel Over Xbox 360:

High Quality: 800MB per hour Medium Quality: 540MB per hour Low Quality: 360MB per hour.

Once again we urge you to check out your own version of IPTV, as there are simply too many to review them all. We also suggest you read the fine print if your IPTV service claims to have unmetered content, as you will usually find that this unmetered content does not cover every video service your IPTV has to offer.

General Web-Surfing

For web-surfing we followed a similar pattern as we did with Facebook, but this time all of us chipped in. A bunch of news sites, review blogs, online magazines and even a train timetable or two later we discovered that web-surfing had devoured, on average, 2.5MB per minute of our cap.

That’s almost two and a half times more than Facebook.

Once again we had streamed no videos. Our loaded content was purely pictures, ads, text and search results. That’s only an astonishing 8 hours of web-surfing per GB of monthly cap, once again remembering that we didn’t even stream any video content.

Skype

Skype is pretty awesome. It’s become the “Xerox” or “Hoover” of the Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) world. You can call someone on your phone, or “Skype” someone on your computer. If you don’t know what VoIP is then it’s basically a phone call over the internet where the person at each end has a microphone and sometimes a camera. It’s a free, easy and generally fantastic way to communicate with people from all over the world free of charge.

But how much data does it use?

Not a lot. For your standard no-camera call it’s only about 360KB per minute. For a camera call you’re generally looking at the lower end of YouTube-style usage. Video streaming is video streaming, after all. And remember, you’re not only downloading their videos but uploading your own as well.

Adding more people to the call of course uses up more data. But unless you have under a 10GB per month cap you really shouldn’t ever worry about video calling a bunch of people over Skype, unless you do it for hours every single day.

Online Gaming

Online gaming is renowned amongst much of the online community as an infamous data hog. But is this true? You’d expect a game that has to not only record, track and manage the movement of every character, bullet, puff of smoke and ray of light but then also transmit this information simultaneously to anywhere between 8 and 64 players in a 3D environment to be pretty bandwidth intensive. We decided to test this using a few of the more popular modern PC titles Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Call of Duty: Black Ops, StarCraft II and Counter Strike.

If your particular favourite game didn’t make our list then we apologise, but there’s only so much time we could spend playing games and pass it off as “research”. We’d love to have done a more thorough study, but unfortunately we live in a world where spending an entire day laughing at our computer screens and fragging pixelated opponents in the middle of an office is generally frowned upon.

To our surprise gaming was far less of a data hog than we expected. The first person shooter (FPS) titles all came in at around 20-25KB/s (yes, that’s KiloBytes, NOT Kilobits), putting them at around the 1.5MB per minute mark. That’s definitely a startling result considering that it puts gaming firmly between Facebook and regular internet browsing.

What was even more unpredicted was StarCraft II’s amazing 1.5KB/s average when playing online. Yes, this average was taken purely from readings recorded while in a match and wasn’t tainted by time spent sitting in the lobby. After a little research it was clear that these readings make sense, as SCII is similar to a super-intricate game of chess. So all that is required is for computers to send moves to one another and let your computer do all the work in interpreting them. Basically there’s no real way just playing SCII can make a dent in the average monthly broadband plan.

Before you go running off to tell your housemates or parents that it can’t be your fault that you hit the cap last month and show them these figures as evidence we’d like you to consider something. That is; when was the last time you spent between 4 and 16 hours straight on an epic web-surfing run? Gaming might take up less per minute that other web-related pass-times, but it certainly ends up using at least as much (except for SCII), if not more data if you’re an avid gamer.

Online gaming’s data usage doesn’t stop with online play, either. There’s still the issue of patches and game downloads to consider.

Every major online game will be patched from time-to-time. A patch is what happens when the developer finds problems with the game and attempts to fix them via a mandatory mass-download for all its players. So if, say, a developer messed up and you discovered a glitch that lets you fly if you hold these three buttons down then that’s probably something they would want to fix before everybody started abusing it. There’s always the issue of balance and fair-play to be considered, after all.

Patches can be anywhere from a few Megabytes (MB) in size to over a GB. They’ll almost always tell you their size as you’re downloading them but there’s no option to not go along with it. If you want to play their game online then you have to download the patch and that’s the end of it.

As is usual with online trends gamers tend to lead the charge when it comes to, well, just about anything. One such example is the online purchasing of entertainment media. More specifically: Games. Companies figured out long ago that gamers tend to be more receptive to the idea of paying for a download (sometimes) than your average middle-aged parent. As such games are now frequently purchased online and then downloaded straight to the computer, cutting out the need to go to a store or use a CD/DVD.

This is great, we’re all for using the internet to its fullest potential but it’s important to remember that modern video games are often huge. Big title games these days tend to range between 4 and 8GB. They can come in any size, of course, but this range seems to be the norm. This massive one-off download is the unpatched version of the game. So if you’re a late-comer (i.e. you got the game any time later than a month after its release) then there’s going to be at least one, if not many patches for you to download after you’ve installed the game. By the time you’re done you could easily be looking at the 10GB range for the game + patches. That’s a pretty heavy toll on your average monthly cap.

So just remember that while gaming doesn’t use up as much as web-surfing or YouTubing per minute, it still all adds up in the end.

Remember that if you ever need an exact number you can probably just look up how far in to your cap you are on your ISPs website. We do recommend doing this from time to time if you’re afraid at all of hitting your cap.

Hopefully we’ve lifted some of the veil surrounding online content consumption and you’re now a more educated and responsible web-user. So go forth and entertain yourself with the freedom of mind that comes with the ability to remain safely within the confines of your monthly download limit.