Using Data
 

I am curious if any one know what the average web page eats up in terms of Mb when doing general surfing?

I am using my UM sim and find I go through approx 5 euros in 10 minutes when doing basic surfing, or looking for flights etc. I guess I thought it would work out cheaper, but it seems the average website is quite Mb bloated.

What experiences do others have?

I am assuming you are talking about general surfing while tethered using your laptop right? If so, I can tell you that it eats up a lot of data. I tether on the way to/from work on most days, and during the 1 hr. or so, I average about 14 - 17 Mb. Obviously, it will all depend on what pages are visited.

I definitely will not tether on any prepaid unless there is a bundle data plan or it's unlimited. Or if it's so ridiculously cheap! I will just stick with using the smartphone. The opera/opera mini browsers makes the experience a whole lot better, and definitely cheaper.

On any webpage, right-click and then click Properties. For example this page was about 68k before this post. Then add a bit for the banner ads, one in the header and the Google ad above, plus any other images, such as the flags and buttons. Longer forum threads can run towards 500k or more if set on 40 posts and with fancy avatars. And quite a few websites go over the top with Flash animation

You might try turning off images being displayed on your phone, but that might make some sites a bit tricky

150kB per page is probably an average, some pages can be much more. Yahoo mail is about 150KB/page (mostly ads). BBC News home page, and Amazon.com home page, are over 400kB.

There will be a little saved on subsequent pages from cached logos etc but it's the ads that really eat it up.

To put it another way, at $5/MB (4 Euro), that's about 70c/page, average. A single heavy page can be a couple of dollars/euros.

It depends on if you are accessing WAP pages designed for small screens a high prices or regular HTML pages. A WAP page can be as little as a few hundred bytes. Most HTML pages these days are hundreds of thousands of bytes.

Thx for the info guys - Im accessing the net through my laptop, so viewing is full fat, I find Wap is a bit limiting.

I seem to be eating through the same MB as you bossman, Im travelling all the time and am lucky if I stay in one country for a month or two, so am not able have a contract that gives me unlimited use. :o( Um seems to be the cheapest at this stage for pre-paid data, but it really needs to be 0.50/MB to make it viable! I guess we are a little way from that yet.

If I wanted to view wap pages from my laptop is this possible? Is there a search engine that will let me hunt for just wap pages?

What countries are you in? Right now, the best roaming deals for the EU (+) seems to be Vodafone and Three. There are Vodafone Passport deals on various data deals. Right now it looks like Vodafone DE might have the best of the Voda lot. Three like home is great for Denmark, Netherlands, Ireland, Italy, and the UK (together with HK -- it looks like the prepaid doesn't work in OZ).

Im in Florida at the moment, here for a few weeks before returning to France. Spend most of my time in the Mediterranean countries for the Summer and Caribbean for the Winter. Will have a look at what Vodafone.DE has on offer, ideally I would go for unlimited usage if it was resonable.

Since you are in the U.S. see my post in another thread about T-Mobiles UMA access overseas. You pay the same, just as though you were in the U.S.

...mike

Thanks Mike