Question About Interwebs Usage

[colchar]

I think I might have asked this at some point in the past but I can't be bothered searching for the answer so I figured I would just ask again as people here will certainly know more about this than I do.

When I logged on to the interwebs this morning I got a message saying our account was at 75% of our monthly allowance (we're actually at 81%). I can't figure out how we've used so much in just two weeks (it is calculated along with our billing period which runs from the 19th to the 18th) as we normally use less than this over the entire billing period.

What I wanted to know is A) would listening to an online radio station (using the station's "Listen Live" feature from their webpage) eat up a lot of our monthly allowance? B) would watching streaming videos use up a lot of our monthly allowance (my roommate's brother, who moved in with us in September, watches shit online constantly from youtube and other sources)?

The majority of our usage seems to have come on weekends (during the first weekend of our billing period we ate up 9GB of our monthly allowance) but I can't think of anything we would have been doing during that time that was out of the ordinary. If neither of the activities mentioned above is likely to eat up much of our monthly allowance I can't think of what else might be causing this (our network is secure so I doubt anyone else is managing to piggyback onto it without our knowledge).

[CameronBornAndBred]

I would imagine streaming anything is going to eat up more bandwidth.

[Miles]

I think I might have asked this at some point in the past but I can't be bothered searching for the answer so I figured I would just ask again as people here will certainly know more about this than I do.

When I logged on to the interwebs this morning I got a message saying our account was at 75% of our monthly allowance (we're actually at 81%). I can't figure out how we've used so much in just two weeks (it is calculated along with our billing period which runs from the 19th to the 18th) as we normally use less than this over the entire billing period.

What I wanted to know is A) would listening to an online radio station (using the station's "Listen Live" feature from their webpage) eat up a lot of our monthly allowance? B) would watching streaming videos use up a lot of our monthly allowance (my roommate's brother, who moved in with us in September, watches shit online constantly from youtube and other sources)?

The majority of our usage seems to have come on weekends (during the first weekend of our billing period we ate up 9GB of our monthly allowance) but I can't think of anything we would have been doing during that time that was out of the ordinary. If neither of the activities mentioned above is likely to eat up much of our monthly allowance I can't think of what else might be causing this (our network is secure so I doubt anyone else is managing to piggyback onto it without our knowledge).

The answer to questions A and B is big ol yes.

[DevilAlumna]

Well, considering the size of a hour-long TV show downloaded from Bittorrent is about 560MB, and a full length movie anywhere from 720MB to 1.4GB, yeah, streaming video is gonna hog a LOT of bandwidth.

Nice that your service provider at least warns you about your usage. I don't think Comcast does that for us.

[CameronBornAndBred]

Nice that your service provider at least warns you about your usage. I don't think Comcast does that for us.

I think it sucks that you have a limit. Our family would reach any quoata within 2 weeks. Not because we are downloading lots, but we have a bunch of computers, and the three of them are always playing WOW, and Sweetie Pie is all into Hulu now.

[Very Duke Blue]

Using my blackberry as my modem, I have no limits on time and amount. I know its not as fast as cable, which where we live is not an option.

[DukeUsul]

The streaming video is much worse than streaming audio. Video would probably be at a minimum 300 kilobits per second whereas audio is typically streamed at no more than 128 kilobits per second. I'm finding some documentation online that says that hulu streams are 1000 kilobits per second or even 2500 kbps.

1000 kbps * 60 seconds * 60 minutes * (1/8 bytes/bit) = 450,000 kilobytes = 450 MB for an hour of video

Hulu's HD content is 2500 kbps, so that's over 1 GB for an hour video.

[colchar]

Hmmm, it seems that two of us are at fault here - but him far more so than me. He is constantly watching videos online from a variety of sources so he is eating up a ton of our monthly limit. I listen to a talk radio station from London England regularly but I'm probably not eating up that much of our limit because A) I don't listen to it constantly because I normally do so from my computer in the living room and I turn it off when others are in the room and are watching TV (which is on a lot) and B) it seems that streaming audio uses up less bandwidth than video does.

Our limit is 25GB per month and we've never come close to it before even with me listening to that radio station (IIRC, 19GB was our highest usage prior to this month). But he has been using the computer a lot more lately than he used to and, as I said, is constantly watching videos (he wouldn't know how to download them from bittorrent or anything) so I think that he might be the main culprit here.