Getting the most out of SLT Happy Broadband

SLT’s finally increased their data caps. 25 GB to 35 GB? Good. We needed that.

However, this doesn’t really solve the problem for many of us surfers. We live in a world where HD Youtube is the norm rather than the exception, where our game setups hit 20 gigabytes with ease, where even flash ads count the toll on that wee pipeline that we have.

This isn’t necessarily the fault of the ISPs. Sri Lanka, despite the BMWs on the road, is still a poor country. Our 1% might be as wealthy as anything. But our data infrastructure is still nowhere near the countries that we compare ourselves to. Until we break even (which will take years if not decades), there’s but one thing to do: buck up and use data wisely.

Well, actually, we can moan about it. Not that it does anyone any good.

Hence our tips on what you can do to preserve data – specifically within the box given to us by SLT. Since most readers are using the Web Family package (which used to be the olde 25-GB-a-month thing), that’s what we’re going to be basing these tips on.

1)      Figure out your data allocation. Don’t believe the marketing headlines and start downloading thinking that your 25 GB cap is now magically increased by 40%. It has, but in a much more devious way. 

SLT now gives 25 GB during  “peak hours”. For the uninitiated, this is a confusing way of saying “between 8 AM and 12 midnght”. The other 10 GB kicks in between 12 midnight and 8 AM of each day. So rather than one single 35-GB limit, you have two data limits: 25 GB during normal hours, 10 GB between midnight and 8 AM. 

We’re not quite sure why they’ve done this: perhaps their marketing division decided that vampires, witches and all manner of midnight creatures need to get their YouTube kicks as well.

2)      Schedule and manage your torrents. We all torrent. Humanity would like to believe that we torrent free and useful things. I think we can safely skip the flowerfields and say that most of us leech a metric ton of movies, music, games and porn.

Figure out what you need and what you don’t. Watching movies on a laptop at 1366×768? You don’t need that 4GB+ HD movie torrent, you need a 720p version less than 1 GB in size. See whether you can chew through that off-peak 10GB first before cutting into your daytime internet.

Set your files to download when you aren’t at the computer. At office? Leave your torrents in the morning, set your torrent client to shut down your PC when everything’s downloaded. Get home and enjoy. If you value your data, do not seed. Keep a weather eye on that downloading bar.

3)      Turn off Flash, go click to play. Many websites use plugins like Flash to display ad videos and banners. These things suck up data. Seriously. Those random videos playing on the sites, those anime pictures being streamed, those popups that start playing video – all of this is data wasted. Turn off Flash in Chrome / Firefox (whichever’s your poison). You can watch Flash-based videos or play games by clicking only on what you need to run Flash for that thing only.

4)      Use less tabs. We all have those friends who keep 21 tabs open at any given time. That’s 21 potential scripts accessing data off the Internet. If you aren’t using it, close it. If you need to remember it, use bookmarks. That’s what those things are for.

5)      YouTube less. Seriously. We know TV is boring, but if you spend your entire life on YouTube, no amount of free data is going to help you. If you play songs while you work at your PC, don’t YouTube them – download the 320 kbps album and listen to them offline, in higher quality than the video, and at significantly less data expense.

*If you do YouTube a lot, cut down on the video quality. Browse in 480p when you can, 720p when you need to go full screen, and stay away from 1080p HD. Even the smallest videos can change the course of the futu – er, we meant “waste your data”.

6)      Get Opera. Go Turbo. While Opera has yet to beat Chrome’s ease of use and integration, it does have one useful feature: Turbo mode. Turbo uses Opera’s servers to compress site data before sending it to you. Your browser unpacks it on the fly. Result? Less data used!

7)      Throttle WiFi. Your neighbour might be piggybacking into your WiFi. Your smartphones will be pushing stuff back and forth. Your grandpa might be in the other roam YouTubing like a boss. Be evil. Don’t let them. Unless you really need it, turn off WiFi.

8)      Disable automatic updates. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Your anti-virus should always be up to date, but why let Windows update language packs and install Mandarin support?

9)      Turn off images. For extreme Zen and desperate times, turn off images. The majority of a site’s data is image detail. Entire 400-page novels of text can be expressed in a paltry 500 KB. If you don’t need those happy smiling beach babes, turn them off. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but it’s also worth a thousand KB. It’s entirely possible, though not recommended, to survive on 6 GB a month with such extreme tactics. 

One interesting, but rather random observation is that SLT HAS given people more data, even they’ve done it in a ridiculously arcane manner. Which means that somewhere, someone inside the machine may* have been listening to the legions of users muttering about the data cap. So, just in case said person exists, we’d like to make a request: more speed.

Yes, please. Speed. You might think 8 Mbps internet is fast, but it isn’t. 8 Mega bits per second translates to a little under 1 Megabyte per second of data transfer speeds. Factor in the inefficiency of wires, noise, random MPs holding up traffic and whatnot and we end up getting download speeds that are on average little better than 500kbps. 

This isn’t fast. Singapore, which does a lot of work for us Internet-wise, has an average download speed of 59 Mbps. (*data collected from Ookla NetIndex, based on Speedtest.net results). THAT’S fast. We’re not making a case for ungodly download speeds – which would be nice but practically impossible – but a decent speed increase would suffice. Anything that can send those download times from thirty minutes to fifteen. Time spent is time wasted, after all.