~~It seems to not run any scripts when testing, so 1.5MB is the basic JS + CSS.~~
In reality, it's much, much worse. (On a desktop)
Even with an adblocker, reddit.com downloaded 18MB in the first 10 seconds. That would put that cost at over $1.
I stopped after that because it seemed to be just continuously downloading... something.
I know Reddit is quite media driven these days, but it seems to be unnecessary prefetching a lot
Edit: Looks like I was testing the desktop version, see jefftk's reply.
However, it doesn't help reddit's case that much. After looking into what it's actually downloading in my "desktop" test, there are lots of huge PNG images (1000x1000 +) that seem to be displayed as tiny thumbnails.
And for an infinitely scrolling page, it prefetches all the images in the feed at full resolution.
If I turn off my adblocker, I get an autoplaying amazon ad (~5MB).
Additionally, it starts auto-playing a livestreams which is just below the fold.
They source their claim to a WebPageTest run [1], and WPT does run scripts. I can reproduce their results as:
1. Open an incognito window in Chrome
2. Open devtools, and configure it as mobile
3. Navigate to reddit.com
4. See ~1.5MB transferred
[1] https://www.webpagetest.org/result/210707_AiDc36_6f01cdff93b...
I was using Firefox, but I could get the 1.55MB result by trying that.
firefox: 17.85 / 12.54 MB transferred, brave: 15 MB, vivaldi: 9.6 MB, chromium: 13.1 MB,
https://blog.webpagetest.org/posts/understanding-the-new-cum...
That would make it $200+ to load the page including the advert.
Highest I've actually paid was in China at £3 per megabyte, and not only did I use normal phone stuff like data and email, because the UK network I was on allowed connections to my company, but the local wifi didn't, when I accidentally connected plugged in my phone without disabling tethering, the laptop started downloading stuff - ran up a $400 bill in about a minute before the flood of text messages I get every 5MB started to arrive (out of order) and I realised what was going on.
I recall getting a text about that £7.20 fee during a flight a couple years ago.
Yet they still have a worse video player than what was available in the early 2000s
I'm not able to reproduce this either. Here's a desktop WPT run: https://www.webpagetest.org/result/210707_BiDcXB_65148b09266...
Could you share a screenshot, or a link to one of these oversized PNGs?
I'm not sure how to replicate this but I would be curious what old.reddit.com does via an equivalent methodology.
Edit - after waiting about a minute it crept up to 5.2MB transferred for somehow the same amount of uncompressed resources.
I loaded https://www.reddit.com/ in Firefox with an adblocker; the network inspector showed 4.8 MB transferred.
Why on Earth is it so expensive?
Both an indictment of general bloat and Canada data prices.
More interesting is how much it costs for people in poorer countries — Where the absolute value of visiting a site is less, but relative to income is far greater.
Understandably you don't see much about this online — people with expensive data plans don't use it all up complaining about it online.
In Poland it's around 0.25$ per GB for mobile networks. So 1MB is 0.00025$ and a visit to reddit according to the above calculations would be 0.0003475$.
The prices in the US and Canada are ridiculous from that perspective.
There's a furniture chain here that has a website so terrible, I just gave up on trying to buy what I wanted from them. So much happening in JavaScript to make things happen on the page. I have to imagine it's also terribly written, since it freezes up the tab most of the time, and Firefox suggests killing the script.
If you drop support for MSIE 11 and only support modern browsers the modern javascript is surprisingly compact.
But then your CV looks stupid: no frameworks on the list. How would you ever get a job again?
How do you get any respect if you say "I just code javascript directly on the browser", sounds like you're too stupid to learn a framework.
You will only get respect from the very best developers but not all the copy/paste 'developers', no respect from the HR department nor mediocre managers.
It's an uphill battle.
Some of the cause of all this has to do with market forces and prioritizing speed of development over customer experience. But I don't think that's the whole story.
1.3mb seems optimised to me at first glance
> "Prices were collected from the operator with the largest marketshare in the country, using the least expensive plan with a (minimum) data allowance of 500 MB over (a minimum of) 30 days. Prices include taxes. Because these numbers are based on the least expensive plan, they are best case scenarios."
I disagree that it is necessarily the "best case" but it is a sensible way to count. Depending on the specific offering you may get unexpected results. For example, the 500MB plan may be barely cheaper than a 10GB plan, which can make sense if with that 500MB you are mostly paying for phone calls and SMS. Heavy internet users will most likely pick a plan with much more data that will be more expensive per month, but way cheaper per byte.
Also, it is split into two section: prepaid and postpaid, and Canada is at $0.07 postpaid. They just picked the highest number on the list.
You have it backwards. The chart says $0.17 postpaid, $0.07 prepaid.
The chart implies a cost of 120 USD per GB, which implies it's based on a 500MB/month plan costing 60 USD. There's no way in hell the cheapest way to get 500MB in Canada costs 60 USD. I'm in Canada and I pay 40 USD for 8GB per month.
The only way I figure they can get to such an absurd number is that no one sells 500MB plans in Canada anymore, so they had to choose a zero data plan + 500MB of additional data to make up a "500MB" plan. With my carrier, additional data is 104 USD per GB.
My anecdotal guess is that the infrastructure costs are higher in Canada due to lower population density. Lots more area to cover to achieve the same coverage.
Other countries like Australia have similar densities and infrastructure costs yet still have way lower prices. The Canadian telecom industry is sheltered and there's really only 3 big players. Foreign competition isn't allowed so there's no possibility of Verizon or Vodafone coming in and shaking things up.
There is one thing to note is that there are similar observations for other market segments like cars. People will pay up to 20% more for the same car in Canada vs. the US. I remember when I lived in Canada I saw multiple news segments with the gov't getting angry that Canadians were going to the US to buy new cars in order to save money. During one news segment, the Canadian car dealer being interviewed replied with "Canadians are just willing to pay more," when asked why cars are more expensive in Canada.
Google Fi (in the US, at least) is $10/GB. So 1000mb is $10, or $.01 per mb. It'd be only $.0139 on Fi.
That's quite a huge difference. The chart even says that US data would be $.09 which is still hugely different.
It claims to use the cheapest plan from the dominant carrier in the country. That doesn't mean that everyone is getting screwed like this, just most people.
They say they get the prices from ITU, but I don't know where on ITU they found that data, but I feel like maybe something is being used wrong.
For reference, I'm paying about $23/month for unlimited everything in NL. I'm pretty sure that's not even the cheapest plan you could get, I just haven't switched providers in a couple of years.
It always seemed like calling it "unlimited" was just boldly lying, especially when the limits are there in the fine print.
It’s easier and cheaper to provide cellular service to dense populations like NL.
The population density of NL is over 100X more dense than Canada. Of course, once you exclude the largely uninhabited areas of Canada the difference isn’t as large, but it’s still significantly more costly to build cellular infrastructure across large and spread out places like Canada and the United States than smaller, densely populated places like NL.
It's not something I would recommend as a substitute for wifi, but definitely worth it if you travel to multiple countries, and don't want to deal with getting and/or swapping sims at every destination.
Bill pay plans end up way worse on the low end though. The cheapest bill pay plan from my provider is €40/month, only includes phones that are €30 outright, and comes with 20gb of data. A year or two ago it would have been €30/month with only 1gb of data included.
It still ends up cheaper than our previous unlimited plan because we just make sure to use Wifi whenever possible.
Fi has an unlimited plan, but it costs more and it doesn't include roaming (outside of country) data.
We've got a huge credit because we got deals on a couple expensive phones, but after that credit runs out (in like a year, I think) we'll probably re-evaluate.
Also, I assume mobile networks are doing heavy QoS when towers get congested, where people who result in more profit for the mobile network get higher priority/more bandwidth.
Mint Mobile in US is $15/4GB/mo , which is plenty for everything except extensive video chat/streaming movies.
Your deal seems far better than all the plans mentioned here:
I will be honest, it usually isn't too bad when I am in my work-home routine due to having Wi-Fi in most of places, but becomes quite obvious (and painful) once I travel.
I would take those numbers with a large grain of salt at the very least.
By default, it shows the costs when using the cheapest post-paid plan with at least 500MB allowance for at least 30 days – cheapest in absolute terms, not per GB.
You can toggle the option to show prepaid plans with the same parameters (at least 500 MB for at least 30 days).
But since it takes data from the ITU and not from the real market, the numbers do indeed seem inflated. One of the cheapest (in absolute terms) prepaid plans for mobile internet in Germany is AldiTalk at 4€/1GB/4 weeks, so that the pageload should cost even less than 1ct (0.0056 EUR). Similarly, your Telekom plans are for 4 weeks. Maybe they've excluded these plan because it's not for at least 30 days.
If a service provider offers a $20/month plan with 500 MB of data, their $40/month plan will almost certainly offer a lot more than 1000 MB. The cheapest plans are usually designed specifically for people who don't plan to use a significant amount of data.
At my rate, reddit.com should cost $0.0002363
Unrelated, wow, thank you for reminding me how badly we're getting screwed in Canada :). Approximately $90 CDN here for a 15GB soft-cap with "unlimited" slow usage beyond that.
Two things:
1. The data is in the process of being updated. Prices change quickly and from the trend of past changes I fully expect these prices to drop as soon as I make the change.
2. While the ITU (and other data sources) try their best to look at all sources, I have to take them at their word. I've heard several times that they seem to have overlooked plan A or plan B, so it doesn't surprise me if there are other plans lurking out there.
Long-story short, it's absolutely best to consider this as a gauge/appromixation, rather than a scientific exact number.
The site also says "Prices were collected from the operator with the largest marketshare in the country" but follows it with "Because these numbers are based on the least expensive plan, they are best case scenarios." which doesn't logically follow. But going with that, the largest carrier in the US is apparently AT&T, and just the first plan on their site offers a 4GB plan at $50, or ≈$12.50 / GiB, which is an order of magnitude lower than the figure on the site?
For example your calculation is that 1.39 MB costs Canadians 0.17, that would mean 1 GB costs Canadians 125 US dollars. There isn't a single plan in Canada that charges 125 dollars for 1 GB of data.
This isn't just a minor inaccuracy of +/-10%, this is off by literally a factor that's closer to 15-20x.
So these prices often reflect the few options that are (visibly) available for tourists.
These cost analyses are always popular for people to brag about how much cheaper their country's data plans or broadband speeds are, but I seriously doubt that many Canadian Redditors are paying $0.17 for every page load. Simply browsing the front page and clicking on a few comment sections could cost $10 or more. Doesn't pass the sniff test.
Even additional data (if you go over plan limits), which is by far the most expensive way to get data, is less than that, it's $104 per GB with my provider.
> Because these numbers are based on the least expensive plan, they are best case scenarios.
Which is... a weird statement. Best case scenario for what? The cheapest plan is the best case if you wanted to access the site once per billing period. But then price per visit is the cost of plan? I don't know what they're trying to say here.
The only thing required to buy a SIM is a passport so every foreigner can buy one.
> The Big 3 Canadian telecom companies (Bell, Rogers and Telus) own 90% of the market and charge higher prices due to a lack of competition.
Here you get 20GB for 20 euro on prepaid with unlimited calling (which I never use at all - all my calls are on Whatsapp etc :') ). Or 5GB for 10 euro. I use the 20 euro plan as my 4G backup for when my fibre goes down and I worked a whole week off the 20GB during the first lockdown when there was such an issue (I do shut down some stuff like steam downloads and netflix with a script on my router when it's on failover). It really saved my bacon. The good thing about it is that it's even prepaid so I can just load money up on it when I need it.
Strange thing is, we have 3 mobile operators here too (not counting the many MVNOs). Shouldn't be a barrier to decent competition. If you have more than 3 the available radio spectrum starts getting diluted anyway.
MVNOs would only disrupt their ability to buy sports teams. This does come up in elections, but so far they have gotten away with window dressing.
For a period of about two months I was tethering my smart TV to my phone while the broadband was being upgraded and was a bit shaky. I was using around 200GB a month.
I would never want to go back from unlimited.
The speeds are fast though so you can be sure when you tether just as MS Office is updating you run out of data in about a minute.
- Newspapers
- TV stations/channels
- Radio stations
- Content streaming services (a la Netflix)
- Land-based telco (phone, cable, fiber)
- Wireless telco
Each of the providers in Canada does all of those things to some degree or other and because they own news outlets they wield a lot of political influence. Combine that with the fact that most of the people who have been in charge of our telco regulator have ties to these media conglomerates, it becomes pretty clear it's a captured market. So much so that it's newsworthy when someone actually doesn't just rubber stamp everything[1]. It also means external competition is limited to being unprofitable, so newcomers who enter the market don't tend to stay long and generally just get bought out by the incumbents.
It's a mess and no political party seems to think it's an issue worth pursuing.
[1]: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/careers/c...
Pathetic? Sure. But just don't use mobile data unless you need it. 250MB is enough for data plan based messaging, Strava, Google Maps (with cached maps) and whatever information you need to look up. You don't really need to watch 1080p streaming video outside the house.
If anything this actually encourages healthy phone habits.
If you do need massive data, suck it up, pay the CAD $80/month for the big data package, then the incremental cost of visiting a given web site is zero.
Cheaper? Look it up. It's Public Mobile prepaid. $15/month minus $2 for autopay (which everyone uses), minus $1/month for every year you've been on to a maximum of 5, minus $1/month for every referred friend (or spouse!) that is currently using it. I think the wife and I together are running at $21 or $22 per month currently.
Yes, would be nice to have dirt cheap internet and mobile data, but we don't. So make the best of what we do have.
"Just don't use it, plus good phone habits"
What about value added uses for the phone? I looked up how to harvest basil today and watched a 60 second YouTube video. Or reading an encyclopedia. Or fixing a car.
None of those are bad phone habits. And those previously mentioned don't necessarily have the luxury of wifi.
>"Just don't use it, plus good phone habits"
Agreed. For a couple of years I had 1-5GB mobile plans, often free (thanks to the late great RingPlus). I never used more than 1-2GB a month so they were quite sufficient for my needs.
I then got unlimited service from Sprint (thanks to the late great free unlimited year offer). My usage patterns did not change. To my surprise, however, I found that no longer having to think about the usage limit—even if the limit was never a real problem before—perceptibly eased my daily life.
I find it super annoying that low bandwidth information (i.e. a paragraph or two of text) has been replaced by ad-riddled Youtube videos! I've been able to avoid this usage pattern while on mobile data, but I can see that not everyone feels they can.
Wikipedia is lightweight, no problem on frugal data.
They say it's "best case" but that appears to be based on the minimum hurdle to get a data plan, rather than the minimum data price.
I think a better measurement would be a range based on a few different price levels (cheapest/most expensive/modal) but I understand that would be much harder to implement.
Eg. Ask 100 citizens how many gb's they have and how much they pay. Calculate cost per gb for each. Take median.
> using the least expensive plan with a (minimum) data allowance of 500 MB over (a minimum of) 30 days
Is just rubbish.
It's just impossible to price things like this, take EE's pricing per GB for a 1 month sim:
* 1GB - £14 - £14 per GB
* 120GB - £20 - £0.16p per GB
* 10GB - £20 - £2 per GB
* 200GB - £23 - $0.115p per GB
* Unlimited - £35
The total price of the cheapest contract is £6 cheaper than the next step up, which is 100 times cheaper per GB.
The Free Mobile team email me every couple of years to tell me that my mobile 50GB limit has gone up to 100GB and then transformed into unlimited data. I don’t think I’ve ever gone over about 40GB on mobile, anyway, and a lot less than that in the pandemic - but good to know I don’t have to think about it.
In India, it costs me 7.43 USD for 84 days of 1.5GiB high-speed 4g data per day (plus unlimited calling). After that it drops of to a lower speed, but you can top off cheaply.
That's $0.058 per GiB or $0.00005 per MiB
How many people even need that much? In the UK I would guess most people are on 1-3GB plans; these cost <£10pcm.
Edit: or maybe I'm horribly out of touch? In the age of TikChat and Snapstagram, maybe most people (shudders) need 'unlimited'/lots more than that?
The <20£ plans often have caps but it's not so much more for unlimited.
In most of the rest of the world, when you run out of data the only website you can access is your bank to make another payment to the phone company...
Further, I bet that 10GB is effectively equivalent to unlimited for 90% of people.
At this point, I can't even treat Reddit like a collection of community forums anymore... They make it impossible to read a thread when you come in from a Google result (unless you know the cheat code, change www in the url to old) and their content filtering is something out of a dystopian novel written by a schizophrenic bot. Trying to find any specific piece of info? Good luck.
And this conclusion is the opposite:
> Because these numbers are based on the least expensive plan, they are best case scenarios.
They are the worst case scenarios at the very least in Brazil where I have purchased such packages
I know there are folks that defend it and possibly enjoy it, but I think they have somehow built the muscle memory to not fuck up and accidentally look the wrong way while browsing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipal_wireless_network#Uni...
By "unlimited" you mean an unlimited plan that does not throttle/deprioritize after ~50GB of usage, right?
I pay $23 a month for two Sprint unlimited lines, but both deprioritize after 50GB (although I think I only exceeded 10GB a month once for unusual circumstances, and I hear that in many places deprioritization never happens anyway). On the other hand, there is no obstacle to my purchasing and swapping in a 5G phone on those lines.
It wold be nice to see Facebook offering a few pennies for the marketing data we pay to give them. It would be nice to be paid for high ranking comments too. Say for instance, a guy writes a researched answer to a question on Reddit, and it blew up. Reddit would pay pay that individual a few dimes. The quality of comments would probally increase? Maybe less bathroom humor, and real thoughtful answers?
Could anyone imagine if we got a bill at the end of the month detailing what we pay per website/download incident?
You went to facebook 40 times, at a bandwidth, or percentage you pay us, at a cost of $6.00
You went to Reddit 30 times, at a cost of $3.00
(It will never happen because the big players are becoming very good Lobbiest's. If it ever did happen, I can guarantee, there would be no bloat. If it ever did happpen, it might redispute some if the obsence profits these guys hide? I still think most people would cheerily contribute to sites they respect without any form of enticement.)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...
Fizz for example is for Quebec subscriber only (but offer coverage over the whole country). It's still quite expansive per GB if you get the smallest amount of data, but still you would get for 16$ CAD per month for a 1 GB mobile plan. That means 0.0178$, which is an order of magnitude cheaper than what they said.
I don't know how they got their price, that's really not clear from their page. Canada is a HUGE country, there's not a single provider that has an unique price for the whole country. Some province get far cheaper price for many different reasons (competitive market, population density, type of users, etc...). Even the big providers doesn't keep the same price in every province.
Out of the countries listed, I only have recent experience with the U.S. It says $0.09 for 1.39MB using "the least expensive plan with a minimum data allowance of 500MB over a minimum of 30 days". That works out to $30.6-$34.2 for a 500MB plan. I'd say the pricing data is several years out of date.
We've reverted the title as the site guidelines ask:
"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."
Thanks, super useful, now I know I gotta work on some assets optimization.
- [1] https://rdddeck.com
- [2] https://www.webpagetest.org/result/210707_AiDc8S_8ed51fd2240...
By this point ads, and the tracking scripts associated with ad networks, have grown so large that they may cost more in bandwidth than they generate in sales. People are famously hesitant to pay for content, but in this case it’s “free” if it means dumping the ads.
It bothers me that many similar websites (i.e. text content) load 2-5 MB of data for just text on a page. Pretty much everything past the first few kilobytes are useless to the reader.
These websites fall apart when you're not on a recent Macbook with a wired gigabit connection. Developers forget that people browse the web in the subway, on intercity trains and on crappy hotel/airport internet.
The cost of using different sites on mobile networks around the world - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14192503 - April 2017 (90 comments)
What Does My Site Cost? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9187128 - March 2015 (1 comment)
I use a telephone plan that gives 1GB/day for 3 months for 8USD. That comes to around $0.0001 cents per MB.
Really, though, I’m part of the problem. The product I’m working on is a heavy JavaScript-based content editor. It’s definitely a much better UX than the lighter weight previous version. But we made the user-facing content pages Preact-based simply to keep our stack consistent. We’re a small team, and that’s been a real time saver.
Hopefully, we’ll get around to optimizing things in the future, but it’s not something anyone other than the dev team cares about.
That is a wildly incorrect claim. The only people I know on limited data plans are elderly. Everyone else is either on a cheap, slow unlimited plan or an expensive, fast unlimited plan. Even if I count my deprioritization quota of 22GB as my "limit" visiting Reddit only costs me 0.16 cents.
Its Hong Kong not Honk Kong
This means on that continent at least unneeded JS in web pages is literally AIDS.
