How Much Bandwidth Do I Use?

How Much Bandwidth Do I Use? #

How Many MB in an Email? #

We may as well ask, how long is a piece of string. If you search on the Internet you will get quite a variety of opinions.

I went thorough my inbox and sent box for one month and found that I had received 371 emails and sent 151. Of these, a quarter page of formatted text was about 2KB, a half page was 3KB and a full page 8KB. A two minute video attachment that someone sent me was 5000KB. A PDF attachment with an invoice was about 180KB. A joke email with about 6 pictures in the text was 370KB. 

The average of 100 emails was about 130KB per mail and if I took out 3 of the larger attachments it averaged 40KB per mail. According to International Data Corporation (IDC) the average email, worldwide, is about 59KB. 

So for a total of 486 emails that I sent and received in one month, my typical monthly email usage would be somewhere between 19MB and 63MB per month. When you think about $5 to $10 per megabyte, this can be quite expensive at $100-$630 just for email (without any web browsing), and for only one user onboard.

Of course, this will vary considerably from user to user, and you would need to do your own analysis of your own inbox and sent box, and everyone else onboard that will have access to the Internet.


MB MegaBytes and Mb Megabits #

It is important to differentiate between Bytes and bits. There are 8 bits in a byte. The symbol for bytes is a capital B and for bits a lower case b. It is amazing how often this format is not followed on brochures and publications, and it makes a big difference.

A bit is a binary digit and is just a ONE or a ZERO (or an ON or an OFF). They string 8 bits together to form a byte. Each character is made up of a byte of 8 bits. For example the letter A in bits is 01000001. 

Most email text is in unicode which uses between 1 and 4 bytes for each character. In UTF-8, the ASCII equivallent characters use only one byte, but all the others require 4 bytes each. The speed or bandwidth of a data circuit is typically expressed in Bits, Kilobits, or Megabits per second (kbps or mbps)

The amount of data used, is typically expressed in Bytes, Kilobytes KB, or Megabytes MB.

References #

How much bandwidth do I use? (2012, November 28). Retrieved February 08, 2018, from http://www.marinesatellitesystems.com/index.php?page_id=867

Leave a Reply
