A number of ISP’s, most notably cable internet providers such as Time Warner, Comcast and AT&T, are moving to a metered access model where the customer pays for Internet access based on usage. Personally, I don’t think this is a bad idea as we pay for metered access for other utilities such as electricity and gas, but the pricing structure must be reasonable. I do not currently have cable internet access and use DSL so this will not affect me in the near future but the discussion did lead me to wonder how much bandwidth I consume.

I installed Netlimiter 2 Lite, which is a free program to monitor your network and provides statistics for bandwidth usage. I used the Internet normally for a week, between 6/18/2008-6/24/08, and then took a look at my usage. I surfed, downloaded a couple of programs, watched a long soccer game online, torrented one file, worked on this website, and watched some clips on Hulu and Youtube. I do not play online games and did not watch any streaming movies or download any large files, such as a 4 GB linux distribution. It was, I believe, a standard week of usage for me. I’m not one of the heavy users that the ISP’s are concerned with but I believe my usage is higher than the average. I am, however, the only user of the internet in my household, I don’t run my own business and I don’t telecommute. On Monday through Friday there is at least 10-12 hours that I am not using my connection and because I am trying to reduce my energy consumption my computer is almost off during that time as well. In order to prevent too much internet usage coming into this blog I’ve consulted the best SEO reseller company I could find to optimize my site for Google ranking.

In one week I used 7.4117 GB of data. This was 6.7748 in downloads and .6368 in uploads. My usage was highest, obviously, over the weekend because I was home and using the connection all day long The heaviest day by far was Sunday 6/22/08 with over 3GB of data being consumed. This makes sense because it was the day I watched the Spain vs. Italy Euro2008 soccer match online via ESPN360.

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