Imagine the joy on the faces of Internet Service Providers all around the world when they realise that thousands of people would be increasing their monthly download by about 500%…
That may seem like an exaggerated figure but when you think about MySpace, YouTube, Facebook and other social media site profiles all containing music, slide shows, uploaded pictures, videos, games and animations it isn’t hard to imagine.
Let me give you a case study:
A friend of mine has the internet which she uses for checking her bank account, paying bills, emails, and university research. She is on a cheap plan with a small monthly cap with a 300 MB transfer limit. A friend invited her to join MySpace to “keep in touch and share photos”.
Many of her friends had music, videos, and many photos on their MySpace profile and she had a great time looking through all the photos and leaving comments… until she got her next internet bill!! Her monthly download had gone from around 100MB to over 5 gig! And of course had a price to match for exceeding her cap.
She didn’t understand and asked me how she had “downloaded” so much when she hadn’t “downloaded” anything! After explaining to her the best I could the ins and outs of data transfer, she has since given up on using MySpace on her home computer.
There must be thousands of people jumping onto other social media sites unknowingly downloading tonnes of data and then being hit with the bill, thousands more parents screaming at their teenage children and ISP’s laughing all the way to the bank.