With a few simple tweaks to your
browser and apps you can save a packet
Skill level:
could be tricky
It will take: 60 minutes
You’ll need:
a Mac, a broadband internet connection, a bill you’d like to reduce
When you’re buying into a broadband bundle,
the adage about getting what you pay for is almost always true. Unlimited
accounts with high-speed access cost the most slower speeds or capped deals
often work out cheaper, but could cost more in the long run.
With
a few simple tweaks to your browser and apps you can save a packet
Every internet service provider (ISP) has
to pay for the bandwidth they send to your house, and they pass on these costs
in the form of a monthly subscription. There’s plenty of competition, so each
tries to keep their costs low, which is good for consumers as we’ve seen
entry-level prices steadily fall over the last 10 years.
In theory, if you want to upgrade your broadband
it should be as simple as paying a little more to have your cap removed or your
speed increased, but that’s not always possible.
If you’re too far away from the exchange,
or one of those green metal cabinets dotted about your neighbourhood that amplify
and distribute the service to each loop of homes, your broadband will never be
as nippy as if you’re living in a city centre. Likewise, if fibre broadband
hasn’t been rolled out to your area and you’re not served by cable (provided by
Virgin Media in the UK) then the best you’re likely to achieve will be In the
region of 8mbps (megabits per second).
To put that in layman’s terms it’s roughly
150 times faster than dial-up, but still just a twelfth the speed of Britain’s
fastest cable-based broadband. If any of these speed limits apply to you, then
you may well find yourself hampered on the capacity front, too.
Data stream
Internet service providers are well aware
that we use our connections to download music, transfer large files and stream
TV and radio, but many don’t expect those of us on a slower connection to have
quite so voracious an appetite for digital media as our cable- or
fibre-connected friends. The result can be a lower data cap. Should you exceed
it, you’ll pay for the privilege.
BT-owned Plusnet, for example, offers fibre
broadband connections with download limits of up to 250GB per month from as
little as $29.99. 250GB is enough to fill the flash drive in the top end
MacBook Air every month (or the entry-level model four times over), without
incurring any extra costs.
If
you want to upgrade your broadband it should be as simple as paying a little
more to have your cap removed or your speed increased, but that’s not always
possible.
Its most generous regular broadband deal
for anyone living outside of a fibre area costs a lot less just $17.24 but
carries a download limit of just 60GB. and for every 5GB you use on top youll
be charged an extra $7.5. So, use as much as you could have done on the fibre
deal, and the bill will come to $302.2. Even the most avid X Factor fan would
agree that that’s rather a lot to stream your missed TV.
Trim the excess
But with a few simple tweaks to your Mac
and the way you treat your allotted bandwidth, you can reduce the chances
you’ll ever exceed your limit and incur an excess fee. Better yet, you may find
that your bandwidth consumption falls so far that you can downgrade your deal
to a cheaper package.
Your first step should be to look for
wriggle room in your existing broadband package. Some providers, including the
aforementioned Plusnet, stop counting your usage outside of peak hours, so you
can surf as much as you want between midnight and 8am. If you want to download
last night’s soaps, get up half an hour earlier and fire up iPlayer at half
seven instead of later in the day. The same goes for podcasts, as well as app,
music and movie downloads from the iTunes Store.
Turn off iCloud app synchronization: on
your iOS devices, tap Settings > App Store and set the switches below
Automatic Downloads to OFF. On your Mac, open iTunes > Settings > Store
and uncheck the tick boxes in the Automatic Downloads section, Automatically
downloading several hundred gigabytes of applications to each of your devices
when you might use them on only one is wasteful; if you really want them on
your iPad as well as your iPhone, download them manually on your second device
from its own App Store during off-peak hours. Your other devices will detect
that you’ve already paid for the app elsewhere, so you wont have to pay a
second time.
In Mountain Lion, turn off the option to
automatically download OS X apps purchased on other Macs in System Preferences
> Software Update.
Likewise, turn off the option to
automatically download Software Update patches. You’ll still be notified when
there are patches waiting, but you can choose to retrieve them Out of hours
rather than when OS X chooses to, which could well be peak time. On OS X 10.7
and earlier, go to System Preferences > Software Update > Scheduled Check
and clear the tick box beside Download updates automatically. In Mountain Lion
you’ll find that this option Is labelled ‘Download newly available updates in
the background’ on the same Preferences panel.
While you’re at it, disable automatic
checks from third-party update tools like Adobe Updater and Microsoft
AutoUpdate, and put a reminder in iCal to instigate a manual check once a
month, fortnight or week, depending on how diligent you are, to make sure that
you can update your apps at a time that suits you.
This bandwidth saver works in both
directions, so if you’re using an online backup service like Crashplan, set the
client to only upload files to the remote server during the off-peak hours.
Your Mac will still be backed up every day, while a local Time Machine drive
saves incremental changes on an hourly basis without touching your net
connection.
