More Deferral Account Update Info 07 Nov 13

Another Bell Deferral Account site is under construction in the Goulais River area. It is located near the intersection of Hwy 552 East and Bellevue Valley Road. It looks like it will be a self-supporting tripole similar to the one at Heyden Beaumont.  This map shows the location of all the known Deferral Account tower sites in the Goulais River and the St. Joseph Island area.

I gleaned this information from the public domain by means of first person reports of construction, notices about public consultation and by driving around the area.

If anyone knows of any other sites, I would appreciate it if you could let me know. I am articulately interested in happenings in the Echo Bay Deferral Account area but information about any new site will be gladly accepted.

Unfortunately, Bell has not been very forthcoming lately with their Deferral Account information.

Web Page Size Shows Significant Increase

While doing some research to answer a recent question from a reader about data charges and data caps, I came across some updated statistics on webpage sizes as measures in bytes. This is an area I had not looked at for some time. What struck me was how much the average webpage size had increased.

According to the HTTPArchive website, the average page size as of 01 Nov 2013 was 1.6 MB (megabyte).  This compares to 14 KB in 1995, 93 KB in 2003, 300 KB in 2008, 828 KB in 2012 and 1.2 MB in Jun 2013. Some commentators are expecting a page size of close to 5 MB by 2015 or sooner.

The authors attribute the significant growth of page size to improved hardware, in particular the high resolution screens used by tablets together with high resolution cameras and smartphones.  Extensive us of Flash and Java on web pages also contributes.

A few years ago web designers would build to the lowest common denominator screen size but now they tend to use more uncompressed images to fill the space on the high resolution screens. Social media users are posting images directly from their cameras and smartphones without any editing or compression. In both cases this results in images having a file size of several MB instead of less than 100 KB which is sufficient for routine viewing. In image intensive applications this can add up quickly.

What does this all mean? If you have an Internet plan without any data caps, not very much. Unfortunately, most of us have to live with fixed data caps and associated extraordinarily expensive overage fees – think $10 to $15 per GB. .

So not only are we using the Internet more either voluntarily or because in some instances it is the only way to get service but the data we are transferring is increasing in size without providing any incremental increase in information.