Every hosting company now seems to offer massive bandwidth allowances or even unlimited (well unlimited until you read they terms and conditions) but did you know for just normal surfing you don’t really need that much. I ran a couple of little tests and the results are quite interesting
- Listening to the BBC iPlayer for 30 minutes is around 33 mb
- Watching a 30 minute tv show on the BBC iPlayer in normal definition around 120mb
- Listening to online radio (40kps) for 30 minutes 10mb
- Doing a google search 0.11mb
- Light surfing, I chose to read the news on the BBC site, check the sports results and the weather for the weekend during my lunch break for 10 minutes rounded up a little came to a grand total of 3mb (for for 30 minutes that’s around 9mb).
Now for all you youtubers out there,
- A 2.18 minute video in standard definition is 16.17mb, lets call that 8mb a minute (excluding searching for the funny clip of the panda sneezing or a cat doing something funny.
- A 2.18 minute video in HD or 1080p was 63.01mb or around 31.5mb a minute.
Both tests done using the clip of Lady Java from previous post.
So what’s the point of this post, well basically I wanted to share, but mainly when choosing your Internet package don’t just look at the big flashy numbers. Unless you live next door to the telephone exchange you will not get more than about 15Mbit/s, and unless you stream a lot of media or download a lot of movies then you don’t need massive bandwidth.
Happy and safe surfing.