Welcome to the Fast-Air Tech Talk newsletter. The Tech Talk newsletter is a free service for all Fast-Air customers. Please feel encouraged to suggest newsletter topics.
Ten years ago world wide web users might use about 2 to 3 GB of data per month. Today that number has risen to about 50 GB per month. People who stream a lot of video use much more.
These days much of the web content is in the form of videos and video streaming versus text based and audio streaming. A significant number of people today are obtaining their media entertainment through the web rather than traditional mediums such as television and radio. Only few years ago people were watching movies and TV shows with Netflix DVDs sent through the postal mail. Now all of that content is streamed directly through the web. Video files always have been large and the technology of streaming does not change the size of the videos. Streaming videos in high definition format increases file sizes in an exponential manner. As more people seek entertainment through the web, the overall volume of data increases.
For many years only technically savvy people used computers and were connected online. Today non technical users are using the web too. An increase in users means more data being used.
Mobile technology has changed the landscape. Mobile devices today are more powerful and more capable than computers from only 10 years ago. As mobile technology usage increases, so does the demand to stream data anywhere at any time.
There is a never-ending tension between the capabilities of technology versus demand by users. For many years, because of the lower number of users and different type of data usage, software and hardware engineers were able to stay ahead of overall demand. Nowadays overall user demand outpaces the available technology.
Many people have heard of the Internet being described as a series of pipes. While not an accurate technical description, the analogy does at least describe that there are physical limitations to how much data can be moved at any one time. ISPs continually update their equipment as technology improves, but there are real physical limitations. All ISPs must buy data capacity from what is called a backhaul provider. Although much of that infrastructure is being slowly replaced with fiber optics, which has thousands of times more capacity than copper wires, only a small portion of that infrastructure has been updated.
If history is any indication, that kind of technology will reach rural areas last, which means many years away. Until then everybody must deal with the physical limitations of the existing technology. ISPs can improve their hardware but must deal with the limitations of their backhaul providers.
Backhaul providers are not going to spend money on those kinds of improvements without recovering their costs, which get passed to ISPs, which gets passed to users. Because backhaul providers control the infrastructure, they also control how much that overall data usage costs. ISPs must meet those costs.
The same infrastructure that exists in urban areas does not exist in rural areas. Unlike urban ISPs where the infrastructure is fiber optics or copper, rural ISPs resort to using wireless technologies to cover vast distances. Wireless ISPs (WISPs) face more technological limitations than their urban counterparts. While technically moving data with wireless technologies is not slower, capacity and spectrum restraints affect overall speed. Thus, WISPs face a bottleneck that urban ISPs do not.
As user demand increases — and human desire for such services is almost always unlimited, something must be done to ensure all users have an opportunity to stay connected in a palatable manner. The normal means of controlling such demand is pricing and enforced limitations on usage. Urban ISPs can offer higher usage caps than WISPs and because of the volume of customers, offer those higher caps at a lower price.
A challenge with these controls is most users do not see or deal with the underlying physical and contractual limitations. They only see content. While acknowledging they pay ISPs to be connected, they perceive the content itself as being free. There is a parallel for this kind of expectation with over-the-air television and radio. Yet TV and radio content never was truly free because advertising has always subsidized the cost of providing that content. Yet to end users, the content was nonetheless perceived as being “free.”
Advertising today similarly pays for a lot of the available online content. A significant difference from TV and radio is end users do not pay directly for over-the-air TV or radio transmissions. The illusion is the content is free. The web is different. Online advertising contributes to the amount of data being used. Many people are unaware how that additional advertising affects their own costs. Often contractual limits for usage are exceeded because of the illusion that the content itself is free.
Yet even if all online advertising was blocked to reduce bandwidth usage, end users still perceive the content as being free. Streaming movies, TV shows, and sports programming all contributes to the amount of data being used.
Pricing levels and usage limitations are not going away. The challenge for users is how to use that data without exceeding usage caps and budgets.
First understand usage. Many users have no idea of how much data is contained in 1 MB or 1 GB or how to gauge that usage. What types of usage are using the most data? Many users never pay attention. Maintain some kind of journal or log to help monitor usage.
Fast-Air customers can check bandwidth usage by logging into the Data Usage Portal at the Fast-Air web site. Fast-Air customers also receive email notifications when exceeding 75% of the usage cap, currently at 60 GB per month.
Control usage of cloud based storage services. Backing up nightly to a cloud service rather than use traditional local backups can use a lot of bandwidth. The same applies to cloud based file synchronization services such as Dropbox.
When installing a router in an urban area, ensure the WiFi access is secured to prevent neighbors and wardrivers from using the connection and stealing bandwidth.
Control online advertising. Reducing or blocking that kind of data will help with the overall amount of data being used.
Stream videos in lower resolutions. Most video streaming services default to using the highest resolution possible, based upon the connection speed. Video resolutions are related to one another in an exponential manner. The higher the quality of the stream the exponentially higher the amount of data being used.
For a “back of the napkin” grasp of video bandwidth usage, a 720p video requires approximately 2.7 GB for 30 minutes, 5.4 GB for 1 hour, 10.9 GB for 2 hours, and 16.3 GB for 3 hours. Comparatively, 480p requires approximately 664 MB for 30 minutes, 1.3 GB for 1 hour, 2.6 GB for 2 hours, and 4 GB for 3 hours.
Configure web browsers to use “click-to-play” features to prevent videos from automatically playing until actually clicked or selected to play.
When using real-time video messaging, consider whether the video is necessary or whether only audio is sufficient.
Consider recording TV shows and movies through traditional mediums to watch content at a later time. This helps avoids watching the content online, which contributes to overall bandwidth usage. Be aware that on-demand TV viewing from satellite services usually means using online services.
Use technology to limit how everybody using the same connection uses data. Sometimes this technology is referred to as parental controls, but the same technology can be used with any common connection portal. The focus of the technology is to limit how much data can be used and when.
When using multiple computers and devices — such as a home or business LAN, consider disabling automatic updates for all systems except one. Have the other computers and devices update from the one system. That keeps the bandwidth required for multiple updates confined to one system and internal to the LAN rather than every system eating bandwidth.
Be careful when using torrents. Torrent philosophy and technology encourages all users to share bandwidth in a peer-to-peer manner, which means users all around the world pull files from your computers just as much as you pull files from others.
Similarly, Windows 10 users should disable the peer-to-peer updates because this mechanism uses the bandwidth you buy..
Last of all is simple self control — do not eat an entire gallon of ice cream in one sitting.
Technical trivia: The first commercially available hard drive using a moving head was the IBM 350 and could store 3.75 MB of data. The disk had 50 24-inch double-sided platters. The drive had to be moved with fork lifts.
Next issue: The Internet of Things.
Road trip!
- Free Gift Phishing Scams (Notice 2020-001) - January 15, 2020
- Tech Support Phone Scam (Notice 2019-001) - March 14, 2019
- VPNFilter Router Malware (Notice 2018-007) - May 30, 2018