Upto 70% of Your 3G Packs Are Used Up in Just Ads! Your already tiny data package might be wasting half or more of its resources on ads
By Rustam Singh
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Unless you have one of those rare promotional packs often bundled with a new smart phone, such as Reliance's Jio offering a lot of data usage, chances are you're dingy and miser of your data consumption. India unfortunately is crippled with ridiculously slow internet, and even though 4G is taking off pretty nicely, what they don't advertise is how limited your data really is.
Even if you have 2MBps downloads, it's pointless if you're only allowed 1GB of data. Data usage has to be truly, and actually uncapped and unlimited for a "Digital India" dream to take off. Users should ideally have to pay for higher speeds, not data quantity – for example, in an x amount of money one should get a certain amount of data at really high speeds and then till eternity at a slower speed. But cellphone data usage has always been the opposite of that – restricting users to such tiny packets that get exhausted if you happen to watch two music videos on YouTube or a few cat GIFs on Facebook. On top of that, you've got advertisements – funding the hierarchy of free information available online. A report from Enders Analysis appears to back up that claim - at least when it comes to a sample of news websites. They used a browser that replicated an iPhone 6's Safari browser – and compared the fully loaded page with ad blockers and without ad blockers and java Script disabled.
Ads can suck up to 79% of your mobile data!
The results concluded on the sample popular news websites average data usage ranges from 17-79% of the data allotted. JavaScript elements, which are usually the flashy colorful animations and visual treat on web pages account for an additional 6% to 68% data usage!
Conclusions
The researchers concluded that it is fair to say web ads in every form account for roughly half of all the data loaded over mobile data networks on the iPhone 6. However, most internet browsers over smart phones work on fundamentally almost same concept (unless you have a browser than specifically uses a faster DNS, blocks ads, or compresses data), the results apply to practically any smart phone on any OS and using almost any browser.
What this means
You're literally paying half of your data pack for junk you don't want to see. Or imagine this – you can almost suddenly double your data usage without changing any of your browsing habits. This advantage comes with more cleaner web pages, lesser spam and content that leads straight to what you want.
Solution
The moral debate whether you should block ads and rob content providers from giving you free content goes on. On one hand, you deserve to load web pages at the fastest speeds possible. You data plan is already bloated to be super expensive. You deserve cleaner web pages. On the other hand, the content you're viewing also has to be generated by people for whom it might just be their sole profession. They deserve salaries and the web pages need money to keep running – and ads are a subscription free solution for that. However, ad blockers are completely legal leaving the moral decision to you.
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