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Browsing Frugally Without Wasting Bandwidth?

Posted by Soulskill on from the ix-nay-on-the-orn-pay dept.

forrestm writes "At home, my internet connection is limited to 1GB / month before I have to pay extra. At my university, I'm charged around 2.5c per megabyte. I rarely download anything big, but I often go through a large amount of bandwidth by simply browsing around. For example, when I play a YouTube video, click a link, and then return to the video, the whole video reloads. When I read some websites, such as BoingBoing.net or Cnet.com, my status bar shows a whole lot of data being transferred through other domains. Some pages seem to send/receive data at certain intervals for the duration of my visit. When I begin to enter a search in Firefox's search bar, a list of suggestions is automatically downloaded. In addition to this, Firefox often requests internet access of its own accord, even though I have automatic updating turned off. All this is costing me! How do I stop unsolicited use of my internet connection? How do I go about not wasting bandwidth like this?"

4 of 450 comments (clear)

  1. No Script by Coldeagle · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If you're a FireFox user I would recommend the No Script and adblock add on. That way you're not actually loading anything unless you specify.

  2. To quote Adam Savage: by Weaselmancer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    At home, my internet connection is limited to 1GB / month before I have to pay extra.

    "Well there's your problem."

    --
    Weaselmancer
    rediculous.
  3. Squid. by bmo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Install a cache server. Like Squid.

    http://www.squid-cache.org/
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squid_cache /thread.

    --
    BMO

  4. Re:That's lousy by MoonBuggy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'm still amazed to hear that your university is charging you such a high rate for access (well, actually I'm surprised they're charging you at all for on-campus access); obviously connections differ depending on where you are, and the number of cables from New Zealand to the rest of the world has an impact on that, but having had a quick look around it seems that even a fairly pessimistic bit of number crunching at NZ prices has your university paying less than 1/10 of the cost they're passing on to you. Has anyone complained about this? Do they provide a reason for the inflated costs?