Like most Canadians, we have a bandwidth cap with Videotron, our internet (and phone + TV) provider. We have one of the larger “packages”, which gives us 120GB per month. The chart above details our usage this month, and if you add it all up, it currently shows we used 188.7GB so far, with 3 days to go until our billing cycle is over.
The above usage exploded recently, and I was trying to find the culprit, since it’s costing us extra every month now. If you look at the usage in the last 3 days, compared to earlier in the month, you’ll see I’ve now found it. Was it Netflix? Nope. Roblox maybe (a known bandwidth hog)? Nuh-uh, still not it. It was in fact YouTube!
You see, they now have this option to switch to the highest possible resolution when entering full screen mode. One of my kids is really into watching Minecraft screencasts these days. Since most players play full screen, on large screens, their videos end up being uploaded in full HD, consuming between 1 to over 2GB per hour of video.
Just see the difference turning that option off on my kid’s laptop made:
- Saturday February 18th: 18.78GB
- Saturday February 25th: 4.12GB
Keep in mind he’s running a 14″ widescreen laptop at 1336×768, which means anything over 720p is basically useless as far as increased quality is concerned. So the switch did not even downgrade his experience (he watches most at 480p now, with no artifacts).
And there you have it. No more extra bandwidth fees for a while for the Daury household (we were at an extra $36 over our regular monthly bill already this month).
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