Gaurav Gupta's Blog

Most people in India still browse through the Internet with “broadband” connections of 256 Kbps. (Thanks to TRAI for that, no pun intended). In a smart move by some service providers, bandwidth was upgraded for free to a whopping 2 Mbps. That was certainly good news for consumers. However, there was a catch. Download limits still remained the same.

Simple mathematics will tell you that it’s now 8 times easier to exhaust your monthly download limits and then enter the vulnerable zone of being charged per MB of data exchanged.

It surprises me that people (including the guys at customer support) aren’t even aware of what actually constitutes a “download”. Most people tend to believe that files “downloaded” (say, Games, applications, MP3’s, movies etc.) will count as “downloads”, whereas “simple” activities like surfing websites, chatting over messengers, talking over Skype is “free”. That’s obviously not the case, and don’t be fooled into believing so.

A good idea is to download a neat software called NetMeter from http://readerror.gmxhome.de . The software is freeware, and is just about 600 KB. (It shouldn’t cost a lot of bandwidth to download a bandwidth monitoring tool itself!) NetMeter will help you monitor all data exchanged to/from your computer in real-time and will help you keep track of how much of your bandwidth limit you have consumed.

Tip: If you find yourself being too constrained by the data limit imposed by your providers, it makes sense to upgrade to unlimited data plan. Not only will it be more cost-effective, it will also open up a new range of options of what you can do with your Internet connection.