Over 100MB's to load a stupid webpage?
On the cell phone family plan that I share with my brother,
sister and brother-in-law, we are constantly running up against a data plan
crunch. It’s been surprising to me. I look at my phone a fair amount, but I don’t
watch videos on cellular data, and I rarely stream music. I’ve always felt that my data usage has been
fairly normal. Also, being a neophyte,
I’ve never bothered to figure out how to check my data usage. Just the other day, however, after getting a
75 percent data usage message in the middle of the month, we siblings banded
together and upped our data plan. It was
a good move, didn’t cost that much, and is better than paying the $15 that
Verizon charges for an extra gigabyte.
Upping the plan though didn’t get to the problem of where was all the
data going?
After a Google search I found out how to check my data usage
so I could see how much responsibility I had for the overages, and I was kind
of floored. I have had my phone since
February, and in that time I had used over 60GB of cellular data. I figured that was kind of a lot. Thinking more about it, maybe it wasn’t my
sister on subway rides or her husband that were using all of the data. It could be me?! Seeing the number I reset the counter for my
data usage, and though extremely cowed by the high previous number, I proceeded
to use my phone in my fairly standard way.
I work at a computer all day examining the driest of documents, and,
having a phone, I like to check sports and news headlines probably too
frequently. It’s a boring job, so any
salacious headlines I see on profootballtalk.com or CNN’s website are welcome
distractions.
My hunt for interesting headlines is generally confined to six
websites: nytimes.com; cnn.com;
startribune.com; espn.go.com; bleacherreport.com; profootballtalk.com. By visiting these six websites, I generally
figure that if anything important, kind of interesting, or just plain old dumb
has happened in the news or sports world, I’ll find out about it. Especially when I am off of Wi-Fi, I thought
that sticking to the same old websites would be okay, and this is my group, no
big deal.
After resetting my data clock, I did not venture outside of
my group of sites, and I was doing really quick-hitting headline scans – I was
in and out of the website fast. On the
first afternoon, by limiting my website viewing, and by turning off the
cellular data use of non-essential apps, I was able to limit my data use to
about 50MB. I’m sure it’s naïve, but I
still thought that was kind of a lot of data for what I was getting out of it,
but I figured it was doable. This
morning at work I maintained the same routine, and I would check the cell data
use after opening a webpage in Safari.
My last search for something more interesting than the bank spreadsheets
I look at for work involved three websites:
profootballtalk.com, bleacherreport.com, and espnfc.com. Checking my cell data after another
unfruitful attempt at livening the day, I was stunned. My cell data usage had gone up over 100MB’s
in the span of 3 minutes of looking at my phone. What the hell had happened? 100MB’s for viewing three websites seems
unconscionable, and these three were my buddies! I let my brother and sister know what had
happened, and that I was pretty sure that I was the data sponge costing
everybody extra. I felt, still feel,
crappy about it. They were cool about it,
of course, they’re great folks, but I felt betrayed. I hadn’t streamed any video. The ads didn’t seem overly obnoxious. What happened on those websites to cost so
much data?
As soon as I got to my home Wi-Fi I downloaded the Opera
Mini app, which is designed to minimize data usage in mobile website browsing
(wish I had known of that earlier!).
Exploring the app, I found that it has a nifty feature in which it tells
you how much data its special compression technology has saved versus if the
site had been viewed in a non-compressed browser. I thought that was pretty cool, and it dawned
on me that I could retrace my steps.
Which of those three esteemed sites was draining my data plan?
Profootballtalk.com was my first stop. I love the website. It has great headlines and content. The founder of the site, Mike Florio, appears
as a weekly guest with Paul Allen on 100.3 KFAN in Minneapolis, and it’s appointment
radio, it’s great. Going to the website
with Opera Mini shows me that it uses 1.5MB of data to load the website’s main
page. That seemed reasonable.
Espnfc.com was the next website I visited. I have been a Liverpool F.C. fan for a long
time, and soccer headlines can be interesting.
A quick visit with the new browser showed that it saved me 1.1MB out of
a possible 1.5MB’s. Again, that does not
seem out of the ordinary.
Finally, I visited bleacherreport.com. For an awful long time Bleacher Report has
been a favorite stop of mine. Its
headlines can be splashy and funny. The
“Team Stream” feature in which it aggregates news articles and twitter feeds
about individual teams is great. My
feelings about the site, however, have changed since visiting it with Opera
Mini telling me how much data has been saved.
A quick visit to the front page of bleacherreport.com required 32.2MB of
data. Again, 32.2MB of data! That is shocking to me. It looked like I had found my culprit.
Diving deeper into the Bleacher Report data black hole, I
thought I should check out how much data individual articles take to pull
up. Here I found a more reasonable, and
seemingly standard, number of 1.7MB’s.
What about the Team Stream? I
check that pretty regularly at work to see what is new with the Vikings,
Liverpool, and my beloved Timberwolves. It
nearly made me cry when finding the number.
Simply to load Bleacher Report’s mobile site, navigate the menus to
access the Timberwolves’s Team Stream, and then load the Team Stream took
106.9MB’s of data. 106.9MB’s!!! That’s the size of a two-hour podcast.
Checking out the Team Stream’s of my favorite teams had been
something I enjoyed. I was naïve about
my data usage when browsing the web on cellular data, but it is absurd that a
mobile website should be so data demanding.
I am sure there were days when I checked the Bleacher Report website
numerous times. Knowing what I know now,
those visits without Wi-Fi could have used as much as half a gigabyte of
data. That is absolutely
ridiculous. I will not be visiting
Bleacher Report’s mobile site again.
