For those of us living outside the city limits, DSL or cable service for Internet access may not be an option. However, there are alternatives offered over satellite or other cellular networks, although these Internet services typically have monthly bandwidth limits. So, what can you do to stay within those limits? Here are a few basic tips.
- Turn the device(s) off at night. The technician who installed my Verizon LTE solution recommended that very thing – turn the device off, if you don’t need to use it. He has a point. Microsoft and Apple build apps that constantly “chatter” with services on the Internet. Turning off your devices stops it cold.
- Disable news apps. New OS releases from Apple and Microsoft may enable/promote stock, weather and other news apps in the dashboards (Mac) or Start menu (Windows). These eat a varying amount of bandwidth. If you’re not paying attention to them, disable or uninstall them.
- Block ads in web browsers. For most web browsers, add-ons or extensions for ad blocking are available. To review and install the latest ad blocking add-ons or extension, Chrome users can visit the chrome web store while Firefox users can see the public add-ons. Just search for “ad block” and pick a popular ad blocking app. I’ve used Ad Block, Ad Block Plus as well as uBlock.
- Stop videos from playing automatically in your Facebook news feed. For some folks, this is becoming a major bandwidth drain. Facebook offers instructions for stopping the automatic playback, so you can manually play back the videos that interest you.
- Control the video quality on YouTube. While changing the video quality on each YouTube video is always an option, there are some popular Chrome extensions and Firefox add-ons that make your video quality selection automatic. In a low or throttled bandwidth environment, you might limit the quality to 360p as your default.
Until next time …
jb