How much does 1GB do?
Posted in General Info, March 6, 2015
How much internet is 1GB of data?
To start answering that question we have to define what a “GB” is. I’m going to skip over the technical stuff, because it makes my head hurt thinking about what happened when computer people and marketing people tried naming these things, and simply say that 1 GB, or gigabyte, is 1 000 000 000 bytes. If you’d like to learn more about the confusing history of how we named arbitrary quantities of invisible stuff, check out this Wikipedia article.
Now we know that 1 GB is 1000 MB or 1 000 000 KB, but we still don’t know what any of those numbers mean in the real world (or the online world). So we need to find out how much of that data gets used when we venture onto the interwebs. According to the Http Archive, as of Feb 15, 2015 the average webpage is 1999Kb. 1999 of 1 000 000 000 isn’t very much at all. But browsing “average web pages” isn’t the only thing we do online. Take that info and combine it with some more poking around and we get the following.
With 1GB of data we could:
| Visit 500 webpages |  |
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Watch 750 cat gifs |
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Stream 8 1/2 minutes to 3 hours 20 minutes of video Depending on quality (think low res Youtube vs HD Netflix or Amazon Prime) |
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Upload over 16000 selfies to Instagram |