Having moved to a regional area from the city I decided to drop my broadband internet plan. At over 50% higher price and at a reduced bandwidth, it is no longer justifiable for me.
I have transitioned to tethering data from our phones which in all I only have 2GB per month.
If I have any major or large downloads to complete I will do them at a wifi point, usually the local club or pub which has relatively fast and free internet.
To minimise my data consumption, I have made the following changes to my internet habits:
For super-fast, lightweight internet browsing – use a combination of Opera w/Turbo mode enabled, text only(no images), no java/plugins, and no flash. It’s Spartan browsing and not very pretty, but something you get used to, in a minimalistic Zen kind of way. It’s nice not to see any extraneous crap rendered on the page either. Once you get used to not seeing images it will make you appreciate reading the text more fully to understand what is on the screen. E.g. Instead of using images to guide what you are looking for you are actually forced to focus on the text as a navigational aid. There is also an underlay behind most images which identifies/describes what the actual image is, which I believe is an accessibility feature for vision impaired users. There is one caveat however, not all pages or sites will render properly when you have java or plug ins disabled and will often have a hissy fit over it. To overcome this, I use a different browser that is not shackled down or simply add an exception for a single website within Opera to have permission to use these web services.
Switch to metered mode and turn off all automatic updates and background activities – Windows 10 is notorious for chewing through data and not giving you a heads up about it, especially automatic updates via p2p, so this is essential to do right away if you are serious about saving on data. I turn off all notifications for windows and other software updates, which is not recommended, but I am obsessive compulsive about it and don’t want to worry too much about updating my machine when I am not on a wifi connection. Rather I will wait until I’m on a free wifi connection and then download and install all of these pending updates, at a time and place that suits me (usually the local club).
Use Ad-Blocker – this goes without saying and is the first thing I do when I install any browser on a computer. Not only does all the ad space look like crap and irritate the hell out of me with its intrusiveness but it wastes precious data, lots and lots of megabytes of it.
Curtail your youtube streaming addiction – Drop the quality to 240p which will make you not want to watch it anyway and put on a DVD instead which will look 10x better.
If you have any other tips feel free to share them for us tight ass data savers.
Any neighbours have wifi? They may be willing to split costs.