April 15, 2015 / by ykwc staff
Managing Bandwidth
Password Protect Router
By now everyone should have a password on their home router. The fact is that some still do not. It’s an obvious protection when dealing with security, identity theft and fraud but what about your Internet bill? Having the password in place allows the account holder to limit and regulate who has access to the connection. This also stops people who scan for open connections from abusing what you’re paying for!
Limit Downloads
When browsing the Internet, most people are eventually going to stumble across a site prompting them to download something in order to get something else. Avoid doing this! If it is necessary to download a file, make sure that all other “bloatware” is unchecked or it too will be installed. If possible, choose Zipped option, for download as they are compressed meaning it requires less to download. For videos and music, most can be watched on sites like YouTube rather than downloaded. Once a link is opened, the video can be replayed over and over while not adding to bandwidth use. For estimates on how many movies you can watch/stream, Click Here.
Also, when using a search engine for finding a specific site, use your best judgment and decide intelligently which sites you want to click on, rather than clicking multiple. Avoiding this saves the bandwidth by not having to download all of the pages data.
Disable Automatic Updates
This step not only applies to your operating system but also applies to all software that is downloaded or needs updates. Antivirus should be updated regularly regardless
Anti-virus, software applications, operating systems and many others either suggest or require updates. Select which downloads you feel may be most important and start there. You may find that by the end of the month you have some leftover bandwidth and can finish all updates at that time.
Helpful Links for disabling Auto Updates: Windows, Apple, Norton Antivirus, Adobe
Control Media Streaming
Good quality video viewing can be achieved while still reducing usage. In the instance of Netflix, the quality can be controlled in three levels (see picture below), with the transfer amount listed in GB per hour. By setting the quality to the lowest use, the bandwidth is reduced greatly while quality only changes a little.
Turn Off Internet Devices
If you are unsure if your connection is being used without your knowledge, turn it off when it’s not in use.
Don’t Use Torrents
Yellowknife policy states that we do not allow the use of torrent sites or P2P file sharing. While they may appeal at first glance, the reality is that the use of torrents not only strain our network, but also leave the end user with high wireless bills and an open door for viruses.
BitTorrent and uTorrent are a couple of the clients used to handle the downloading of material. The various movies and games on these sites are actually hosted on a community of computers at houses like yours and are downloaded, a bit from each computer in the community(hence bit torrent), from files seeded on home computers. It’s called File Sharing. What most don’t know is that, as soon as this process is finished, the files are then available to others who want to download the same file you did. This is called Seeding and Leeching.
What this means to you:
- Files downloaded add to bandwidth
- Then files are seeded
- Files you downloaded are then available for upload by leechers
- File uploading adds to bandwidth as well
- Total bandwidth per hour could be very high (multiple down/up-loads)
- Files have to be manually removed or will automatically seed
