What does GB in terms of broadband usage?
Question by big_friendly_giant01: What does GB in terms of broadband usage?
I’m planning to get BT broadband. There are alot of people in my family – always wanting to use the internet at some time, either for homework or research etc…, so I was looking at the usage – the top package is unlimited – but I can’t afford that, so I was thinking of the next package down or the cheapest – but the usage is limited – it says 5GB for the cheapest and 8GB – I looked on the website to find out what this actually means, but it doesn’t say – will this be enough for the month for a family of 5? I thought GB was gigabytes or something – but isn’t that to do with storage?! Help!
Also in reference to the time you’re allowed on – is it limited or does the GB just depend on how much you download?
Best answer:
Answer by * ~ *
GB does mean GigaByte.
Its just saying how much you can download.
cause each page uses memory, same goes with anything you download.
Hope it helps! 
Add your own answer in the comments!
GB – GIgabyte, though often confused with GigaBits.
You’re absolutely correct, it’s to do with storage, however that data going down the phone line is still data even if you’re not storing it all on your hard disk!
eg – a webpage is 200k, it gets cached on your machine for a while then deleted, if you visited it 5 times (and a little bit more) that would be 1Mb used, you’d have to do that 5000 times to get close to the limit.
Be careful though, if your large family intends to download 2 movies and 4 episodes of a soap/drama in a month you’re going to get very close to it – that’s before any MP3s and high bandwidth (watching webcasts or flash enabled websites).
I would read the small print, start off with a small package that you can increase with little or less notice. Tie ins are not good for anyone on the net these days and you will be expected even with an unlimited package, to abide by “fair useage policy”.
Happy surfing;)
ps with any family surfing make sure you protect the young ones with some safe browsing/net nanny, guardian type software.
1 GB =
1 GigaByte =
1,000 MB =
1,000 MegaBytes =
1,000,000,000 kilobytes
That’s enough bytes…………