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How Much Is 5 Gigabytes (GBs) Of Internet Usage?

, By Patcoola

*Image created with ComiPo!

Did you know, 1 gigabyte of data could equal 1024 megabytes. Please check with your service provider if they measure data in decimal or binary units. I will explain how much internet usage 5 gigabytes (GBs) per month provides you.

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What is a gigabyte?

A gigabyte is equal to a billion alphabetical letters.

1 bit equals nothing
8 bits equals a byte, a byte is equal to a letter
1024 bytes equals a kilobyte
1024 kilobytes equal a megabyte
1024 megabytes equal a gigabyte

1 gigabyte equals 1024 megabytes in binary units (real data), however, many internet service providers measure 1 gigabyte as 1000 megabytes in decimal units. Decimal units are smaller than real data and can result in high overage fees as 1 gigabyte in binary equals 1.024 gigabytes in decimals.

Daily Service (30 Day Period)

Average Daily Usage: 154.42 MB

Est Rich Media: 2 Hours 34 minutes (1.5MB / page)
Est High Media: 1 Hours 26 minutes (3MB / page)

Monthly Service (30 Days)

Est Rich Media: 3 Days 5 Hours (1.5MB / page)
Est High Media: 1 Days 19 Hours (3MB / page)

What does the numbers mean?

Rich media is everywhere and growing, rich media includes: photos, videos, games, interactive elements. The average website is full of rich media. Video advertisements are growing and many websites are publishing videos. High media includes low quality videos and higher quality photos.

Here we assume you are not using the Internet constantly by sitting and viewing content. Realistically our daily web surfing is about two hours which totals three days of monthly usage.

How much is 154.42 megabytes per day?

Understanding transfer rate allows us to understand how quickly we can eat our daily data if we were to continuously use the Internet for downloading or videos.

Example:

Download speed: 2.5 Megabits (mbps)

At 2.5 mbps we can download at a constant 250KB/s, this means we can consume 154.42 megabytes in 10 minutes and 32 seconds.

1.5 mbps = 17 minutes (High Speed Lite)
2.5 mbps = 10 minutes (High Speed)
5.0 mbps = 5 minutes (High Speed Ultra)

Internet service providers are now offering speeds of 15, 25, 50, 100 and 150 mbps. The recommended speed for high definition video is about 13 mbps for smooth playback.

How much YouTube or streaming video?

Daily: 154.42 megabytes of internet usage

17 minutes 34 seconds of 480p quality (SD)
10 minutes 32 seconds of 720p quality (Low HD)
6 minutes 35 seconds of 1080p quality (Full HD)

How much Netflix?

Approximately one (1 hour and 30 minute) movie every six days.

Reality

In reality we use the Internet for many things: email, surfing, news, appointments, videos, games, updates. All our Internet activities use data. Before we watch a video we have to find the video. If you want to download a new app, you have to find it first.

Videos on the Internet are not all the same, different websites use different compression than others. Some websites have mixed compression. A high definition video of 5 minutes could be 500 megabytes and it’s difficult to find out.

Updates and downloads are frequent. Your phone and computer download monthly updates which can be 500 megabytes to over a gigabyte per month.

We even send data. Not just emails, chats and sharing photos but with everything. Every time we surf the Internet or download we are sending data. When we use the Internet we send a request for data, this data is sometimes referred to as talk-back. Talk-back can amount to 1-10% of our monthly Internet usage.

5 gigabytes isn’t 5 gigabytes of usage

5 gigabytes per month is not 5 gigabytes of downloadable data. If your service provider measures data in decimal units we have 4.65 gigabytes of usage. If we were to try to download 4.65 gigabytes of data we would have 135.61 megabytes of talk-backs this means we can receive 4.52 gigabytes per month of data. 5 gigabytes in binary (real data) would be approximately 4.85 gigabytes after talk-backs.

Internet Service Calculator

Learn more by using our Internet Service Calculator [Click Here]

 

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