Skype bandwidth usage ?
 

So.....We have recently been joined by an au pair for half a year and as a fully paid up member of the computer youth movement :} she is busy Skype-ing family, friends and boyfriend for several hours each evening. The rest of the time streaming various sites and simple surfing. The wifi is blinking at such a rate that the diodes almost look like they're not blinking and this has got me thinking.....We have a (generous) bandwidth limit per month, but at the rate the au pair is using her laptop i am afeared that the limits will be breached long before the month is out.

I've tried Google, but most of the results are from several years ago and there didn't seem to be any real numbers of the usage that Skype can generate. Has anybody got hard numbers or even anecdotal evidence through experience ? I am aware that if your connection is set up as supernode or not will have an effect as well. Anyhow, any and all answers/advice gratefully received.



SHJ

If you are lucky, your ISP has given you a "Control Panel" where you can see your usage to date this month.

I don't think Skype is particularly heavy, but some streaming stuff is a good user of bandwidth.

Yes, yes, yes, but the important question hasn't been asked....



















....is she fit? :ok:

Probably not or she wouldn't be at home Skyping all night!

You geeks just have no style - first work your way in as a computer bandwidth analyist helper for SHJ, offer to check her dexterity while Mr and Mrs SHJ hoof it out and you might then get to explore the permissions of the au-pair......................

I think my wife might complain about that one :) I'm being selfless here and expecting webcam pics for us all :ok:
:8

If you use Firefox and if your ISP has provided the necessary XML facility which it requires, this little net usage meter is brilliant. It provides a visual "meter" on the Firefox toolbar of your data use and a pointer which indicates the reference point for the current day of the billing month.

More details here

Regards
FoR

Hmmm :hmm:

You lot make me laugh, a technical thread turned into a letchfest :} Sadly, although said young lady is attractive, the operative word is young and if the real police wouldn't come after you, the moral police would :=

Am with Sky broadband, operating computers are Macs, so sensible answers couldn't help due to being PC orientated. Apart from restricting her usage and risking triggering teenage petulance i'm not sure how to proceed :confused: Back in the (recent) day, people read books/newspapers and phoned home every week.....how times and expectations have changed.



SHJ

SHJ,

The amount of bandwidth Skype uses depends on the speed of each caller's connection. The way to get a ballpark figure for your connection is to call someone yourself and see what speed the connection is running. Skype will display this information if you go to Skype>Preferences>Advanced and tick "Display technical call info". You could then extrapolate an hourly usage.

Applemacster

try this one thinkbroadband :: Broadband Usage Meter

Thankyou Applemacster, have ticked the box and will see what happens :) No one on-line in my contacts yet, probably out enjoying the weather or cuddled up in bed no doubt.

Oldbeefer, thanks, but this meter is just PC supported and not Mac thus far. Any more advice happily accepted :ok:



SHJ

Tenuous link between au pairs and aviation.....

The opening credit reel sequence of the woeful 1972 Tigon film "Au Pair Girls" (which, later in the film, featured some spectacularly revealing scenes of the divine Gabrielle Drake...:E) was shot at Heathrow airport. At one point, the remains of the Trident damaged by the July 1968 BKS Airspeed Ambassador accident can be seen being removed from the area near what became Terminal 1....

An interesting variety of aircraft in both the opening and end credit sections.














(But Gabrielle Drake was even more 'interesting'....:ok:)

It would seem that so far Skype alone, on in the background, but not being actively used, uses approx 10mb per hour, speech call only, 25mb per hour, but video call uses between 300-500mb per hour. All that is assuming one's laptop isn't a 'supernode'. So if usage is 3hrs per day, 7 days a week and 4 weeks per month, the approx usage of bandwidth is 33gb :eek: Our monthly limit is 'only' 20gb, which has always been more than enough and then some for surfing/streaming/downloading/uploading/anything and yet we are but mere amateurs in usage it would seem......



SHJ

I'm confused by the abbreviations used above. Are they consistent?
Some authorities say:
b=bit, though some other authorities say bit should always be written out. ie. bit.
B=byte, though B officially means "bel", a power ratio, as in dB. [named for Alexander Graham Bell]
o=octet (8 bits), mainly used in the non-English-speaking world.

Good point Seacue.

I believe that a data rate is given in bps (bits per second), while a data quantity is in Bytes. So you might have a 10Mbps connection (rate) , with a download limit of 20GB (quantity).

But I doubt it's an absolute standard, or if it has been tested legally!

SD

But SD, shirley 10 seconds with a calculator would tell you whether SHJ is using units consistently, and whether his use of "b" and "B" is correct. I know you can do this :p

Thank God for Unlimited bandwidth.

What is God charging?

I would reckon its about 5-16kb/s its using for speech max.

Which translates to 57MB per hour.

Which gives you 350 hours a month on your 20gig quota. Or 11hours a day.

Video is through the roof though at 30-70kb/s which is approx 80 hours per month on your quota or 2.6 hours a day.

Usage meter
 

PC or MAC, doesn't the router have a stats page which shows total download since last reset ? Over a few days you could at least get the average and then extrapolate away. Depending on how clever the router is it may also offer parental control which lets you switch off every hour or so by way of disincentivising.

Also, does sky count all usage or only peak time ?

The things to watch are music and video downloads, especially torrents.

mad_jock said: My calculator tells me that 16 kb/s is 2 kB/s or 7.2 MB per hour. Which I compute to be 5.2 GB per month at 24 hours use per day.

Likewise, 70 kb/s would be 8.75 kB/s or 31.5 MB per hour. Which I compute to be 22.7 GB per month at 24 hours use per day.

Am I still confusing bits and bytes (octets)? Shirley an ISP doesn't limit one to 20 gigabits (2.5 gigabytes) per month.

Netflix at 3 Mb/s would appear to use 1.35 gigabytes per hour.

seacue

My understanding, like SD, is bits for speeds and bytes for downloads.

Seacue, the numbers are even better if you insist to your ISP that a GB = 1024 MB = 1024*1024 KB! :)

SD

kilobytes/sec was what i was meaning sorry for mucking up my units