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Comment by wheelerwj | Hacker News Reader

I've been traveling more so i've been studying data and usage as it applies to my personal usage.

The result: I've had to completely turn off cellular data for web browsing.

I can use mobile apps fine; chess.com, slack, telegram, email, etc. Streaming even pandora is out, but luckily they have an offline mode that allows you to download your station when you're on wifi and then play back whenever. But I can't browse the internet at all.

I'd be willing to spend up to $50 a month for a limited package, but at most that seems to get me is 1-2GB when I'm in Canada unless I want to sign another long term contract.

Every page i download, every news article, easily 2-3MB, and when your total data allotment is 500MB, you just can't browse the internet. Even hacker news, a popular post ends up being 1MB worth of comments.

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Even hacker news, a popular post ends up being 1MB worth of comments.

That's the unpacked size, the transfer size (gzipped) is never over 100KB, even for posts with 1000+ comments.

> Every page i download, every news article, easily 2-3MB,...

That's typical, and completely insane. I run an image-heavy (but ad-free) blog using standard Wordpress, and the 8000-word homepage is around 1.1 MB on first load. I would never use a cellular data connection without aggressive ad- and tracker-blocking.

(FWIW, HN seems to have about 3x markup overhead, 2x compressed, for a typical comment page, which is not that bad.)

Turning off JavaScript usually works well and does not break as much mobile sites as it does with desktop versions.

The difference for me is 70-80% less data, but I usually browse mainly text content with relatively small amount of images.

>I'd be willing to spend up to $50 a month for a limited package, but at most that seems to get me is 1-2GB when I'm in Canada unless I want to sign another long term contract.

http://prepaid-data-sim-card.wikia.com/wiki/Canada

Some of the roaming options on there look a bit better.

I guess Canada doesn't have the population to scale the cost down. It's a huuuuuge country with a big spread of people.

$50 for couple of gigs is insane. I pay $50 with T-mobile for unlimited everything except international calls. You could say unlimited for 20 gigs before I get a bandwidth cap which is still usable. LTE speeds are faster than my home Internet with Frontier Fios

The issue is that whenever resellers pop up in metropolitan areas with great prices they get aggressively acquired by the big players and prices stay up.

I'm just not sure how this works. AFAICT there's four networks in Canada. Why would they onsell their network, then have to acquire the company to stop the competition? Why not just not onsell it in the first place?

Maybe there's some regulation saying they have to onsell it?

Just curious because it seems a bit similar in Australia.

I was with Vodafone then discovered a much better deal through Kogan which uses the Vodafone network. I asked Vodafone to match the deal to keep me as a customer, and they couldn't! They wanted me to pay something like 30% more for the same network/data usage. I told them thanks but no thanks.

e.g. Public Mobile would have a small network that operated only in cities and metropolitan areas. Unlimited data, unlimited talk time over the entire Canada and unlimited text messages. This cost me around $35/month. Telus purchased them and changed it down to 1gb of data and incrased the price to around $40-45. They killed all the Public Mobile physical stores and made it so that getting support was a pain.

A few month ago every Public Mobile clients received a SMS. The SMS was a promotion to switch from Public Mobile to Koodo. We would get the same deal we had right now (or better price), a new cellphone and $150 in Koodo store credits to get goodies. Everyone switched over. Right now I'm on a $50/month plan with Koodo that is worst than the $35/month PublicMobile could give me.

Now nobody offers unlimited data or Canada wide data for $35.

(Disclaimer: I have a bad memory for dates and prices. This should however describe the situation correctly enough.)

But how could Public Mobile afford to offer such a good deal?

Presumably they were onselling another companies network, why would that company sell their own network so cheap?

I don't think it has anything to do with size or population. Compare Canada with Australia. Canada's area is roughly 10 million km^2. In 2015, the population of Canada was ~36 million (3.6 people/km^2). Australia has an area of 7.7 million km^2 and a 2015 population of 24 million (3.1 people/km^2).

These numbers don't even take into consideration of the fact that 75% of all Canadians live within 200 km of the US border. Assuming the population in the south subsidizes the cost for expanding to remote locations it's hard to believe we need to pay as much as we do.

Canadians pay too much because the big companies like Bell and Rogers control the networks and push out competition. They charge as much as they want and we just accept it.

I currently do not own a cellphone (even though I'd like one) because I'm not willing to pay the fees.

Firefox for Android has an option to disable images when using data.

Opera has an even more powerful data saving tool, with the caveat that the data goes through their servers (no privacy). I can spend 20 minutes browsing the news, and end up with just 3-4 MB used.

We can all agree the Web is a giant mess when it comes to efficient bandwidth usage esp for mobile. TCP protocol will restart over with single packet when a packet gets lost rather than optimising for throughput.

The worst offenders are ads and tracking. A fuck ton of bloat that needs to be loaded. Every little action results in a http call. If you visit a page with disqus comments it loads every ad tracker it can find in the world and shove it in your browser.

> TCP protocol will restart over with single packet when a packet gets lost rather than optimising for throughput.

It will back off to an earlier window size. It won't just jump to 1 packet. As of 2010, the default initial window size is 10 packets across OSen, so it's unlikely to ever get to 1 packet unless you're on a really lossy network.

I've been playing with using safari content blockers to not load images/other resources when on data. See https://github.com/jacklightbody/Data-Diet I'm curious if anyones found any better alternatives though, as it's definitely not an ideal situation

Make sure you're blocking ads and privacy invasive JS trackers. Those account for most of the bandwidth on most sites.

You might consider using Opera Mini [1] and turning off photos -- worked fine on a 100mb plan.

[1]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.opera.mini...

Though they did get bought recently, so if like me you have a warm feeling towards the company historically, you may want to re-evaluate that. Especially as using mini necessarily redirects all your browsing via their servers (in order to compress it).

Have you tried Opera? They have a way to reduce the size apparently.

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