To keep things simple, a gigabyte is one billion bytes and a byte is a standard unit of measurement on your computer. You may say “This file is 1,000 bytes” or “This song is 2,000,000 bytes”. Just like you would say “This cup holds 8 oz of water” or “This bucket holds 640 oz of water”. You would not really say 640 oz but rather 5 gallons. The same can be said for bytes. Instead of saying “This file is 1,000 bytes” you can say “This file is 1 kilobyte”. Technically there are 1024 bytes in a kilobyte, but we are going to keep things simple.
1,000 bytes = 1 kilobyte
1,000,000 bytes = 1,000 kilobytes = 1 megabyte
1,000,000,000 bytes = 1,000,000 kilobytes = 1,000 megabytes = 1 gigabyte
When talking about file size we usually shorten the names to k for kilobyte, meg for megabyte, and gig for gigabyte. The chart below will give you an idea on how large certain things on the Internet are.
These are just rough averages, but should help you compare how different things on the Internet stack up.
Why do I care about any of this?
First, knowing the size of a file and how measurements work will help you determine how long it will take to download. If you are going to download a movie that is HD and is 1.5 gigabytes in size or a movie that is standard definition and is 600 megabytes in size. You will know that the HD movie will take almost 3 times as long as the SD
movie.
Second, knowing the size of a file will help you manage your usage so you don’t go over your monthly limit. Do you really need to download the 2 gigabyte HD version of Avatar using up about 10% of your monthly usage for one movie?
While we are talking about limits, what gives?
Our current basic plan lets you use 20 gigabytes a month. This is a combination of uploads and downloads. If you go over that limit we will NOT cut you off, but just charge you extra based on your overage. Only about 1-2% of our customers go over their limit per month. The easiest way to explain this is comparing it to your electric bill. If you keep your house at 68 degrees all summer while your neighbor keeps their house at 80 degrees, your electric bill will be higher. If you leave the room and leave a light on, the electric company is still going to charge you for the electricity to run that light. Just like if you are streaming a video or listening to Internet radio and you leave the room, it will still count against your usage. Anything you upload or download to or from the Internet will count. E-mail, gaming, facebook, youtube, etc., it all counts.
Yada, Yada, Yada – I get how it works, but why are you doing this to me?
Once again not to get to technical – The Internet was designed for bursting traffic and not constant traffic. Back in the old days when Al Gore invented the Internet and you had to use your phone to surf, not much was being done on the Internet. You would read your e-mail, do some shopping, do some research, etc. The common factor was, even though you were on the Internet for hours and hours, you would really only be downloading for a fraction of that time. Five minutes to download your e-mail and 30 minutes to read and respond. Same with web pages, a minute to download
and a few minutes to read. It was a shared resource. Some of us remember the days of dialup where if you were inactive for too long or online for too long, the other side would disconnect you. A dialup Internet company would have 10 modems at their home office and 100 customers. So, only 10% of the customers could get online at any given time. The rest would get the dreaded busy signal.
Dialup, modems, Al Gore, Yada, Yada – That was years ago, I’m talking about NOW!
Modems and dialup are old school and the Internet has evolved from a geeky fad to the family entertainment system. It seems like everything needs an Internet connection today. The problem is that we have gone from bursting traffic to sustained traffic. The easiest way to demonstrate this is to think about the water coming into an apartment. The water comes in a main line and is connected to several different devices (Showers, sinks, toilets, etc). These ‘devices’ are bursting devices. You take a 5 minute showers, wash your hands for 2 minutes, toilet takes 1 minute to fill, etc. But, what would happen if all your neighbors decided to run their sinks or tubs for 24 hours a day, what do you think you shower would be like? The same goes for the Internet, there are certain bottlenecks on the information highway, when these bottlenecks get congested things slow down and people get angry.
Toilets, showers, congestion – whatever. You still haven’t told me why I have a limit!
We live in a rural area and do not have access to cable or fiber (coming soon), all of our Internet must be delivered via wireless. Wireless has less over all capacity than a wired system. This means the congestion is on the wireless system. We work very hard expanding and upgrading the system to keep it running smoothly. However, we are limited in what
we can do by the FCC and the laws of physics. This is not unique to our system. Satellite Internet, aircards, and cell phone systems all have these problems. Even cable and fiber have congestion problems, but to a lesser extent. Different companies handle this in different ways. The satellite industry uses a ‘fair access policy (FAP)’. This policy will allow you certain about of usage (usually in the megabytes) per day. When you hit that magic number they will
either cut you off or slow you down to unusable dialup speeds. The cellular industry has a policy similar to ours, where they give you a certain amount of bytes per month and start charging when you go over. We have taken a hybrid approach. We will let you run full speed for a certain amount of time then slow you down for a certain amount of time to allow other users in. Even at the slow down speed, you are still running about 10-15 times faster than dialup. We also have a monthly usage limit that if you go over you will get charged for your overage.
You must be making a killing on the extra charges – can I go out on your boat sometime?
Wish I had time for a boat, but in reality this ‘extra’ money is being used to add more radios to the towers and buy
more bandwidth. This year we’ve added new backhauls between all of our main towers to make a better redundant ring for outages. We’ve also upgraded several towers for capacity and began moving older customers over to those upgraded sectors. This year we also upgraded our total internet bandwidth by 150% to sustain some of the people not understanding what Netflix and Hulu do to our network. In fall of this year we also began to deploy new WiMax 4G gear on 2 towers.