Now that Google and Apple are launching their own online
music services, the rise in internet radio usage is only going to keep growing
in the foreseeable future, and that could mean a rise in the amount of people
who are using up all of their monthly data allowance before the end of the
month.
According to Andy Heaps at hybot.com, the downside to this
popularity is the problem of data limits that a lot of broadband providers
place on their service, and someone who wants to listen to internet radio for
long periods of time each day, could very well find that they eat up their data
allowance very quickly indeed. And if you are not careful, you will find you
are going to get a hefty bill for exceeding your monthly data limit from your
internet provider.
The thing about internet radio broadcasts is that they use
more bandwidth the higher the quality is, and therefore that has a knock-on
effect of using more data more quickly. Internet radio transmissions are
typically downloaded in Kilobytes per second (Kbps) and the standard speed of
an internet radio transmission comes in at around 128 to 320 Kilobytes per
second.
In order to work out how much data your internet radio hobby
is going to use up, you can use a simple calculation. If you download an
internet radio transmission that comes in at 128 Kilobytes per second for 60
minutes then you will have used 57.6 Megabytes of data in that 1 hour. If you
stream an hours worth of internet per day for 30 days then you would have eaten
up 1.7 Gigabytes of data, and of course, the higher the quality of the
broadcast, the more data you will be using up.
No comments:
Post a Comment