Low-/Limited- bandwidth surfing?


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I've recently moved from the US to Hungary. I've also just moved from an unlimited bandwidth cable modem with Adelphia to a 200MB (up and down combined)/month GPRS plan with Vodafone Hungary (soon to be migrated to a GPRS subscription with PannonGSM, though I don't know the bandwidth limits on that yet - I think 300MB/month).

Realizing that this means radical change to my surfing habbits (no more nightly upgrades to Firebird or Thunderbird, no more "collecting every version of every flavor of linux", no more WindowsUpdate or up2date checking every night), I needed to change some things to keep myself under the low-bandwidth limits.

So far, I've unchecked image loading in Firebird, I've made sure everyone in the States sends me plain-text emails, and I do the same. I even went as far as to remove the Flash plugin to stop Flash from loading. The problem is, some websites NEED images or Flash. Hell, the forums in the Customizing section here are kinda hard with image loading turned off, let alone DeviantART or other such sites.

I'd love to go to a land-based solution, however in Fot (just outside of Budapest), Vivendi has said it will not install the proper cabling for even ISDN because of the costs, and POTS dial-up is poor (the copper is just old) - V.90 compression will get you 19.2kbps speeds at the best times, so GPRS is the best solution, with upwards of 42-48kbps.

Does anyone else have these kinds of issues or any good solutions they can think of? Or am I stuck being on the text-only end of the Internet (anyone seen Lynx for WindowsXP? :D)?

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Depends on what you do while surfing.

If your an avid browser of forums then I suggest you get in the habit of visiting only once or twice a day. I would also change the board settings to show less posts per thread. (Mean you wont see loads of posts youve already seen).

Apart from that its avoiding the F5 key and generally changing habits.

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I've no solution, but man does that suck... when I moved 2 years ago I chose my new place by availability of cable internet, since I couldn't get it at my old place...

maybe my priorities are just fubar'd

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This caching program might help

http://www.gedanken.demon.co.uk/wwwoffle/

Also always use HTTP 1.1, standard on Opera at least, Moz and Firebird have options.

If you can get your favourite sites to send pages by email ( daily or whatever) that also helps.

Try the Public Libraries over there, maybe they got internet for members.

Thanks for the suggestions. I'm going to go ahead and give this a whirl and see if it helps. Also, thanks for the suggestion on using HTTP 1.1.

I've no solution, but man does that suck... when I moved 2 years ago I chose my new place by availability of cable internet, since I couldn't get it at my old place...

maybe my priorities are just fubar'd

Trust me, broadband is a priority for me :D However, my fiance and I are living with her parents until we can get situated. Being the network engineer/admin geek that I am, after 3 weeks of being here, I've already started throwing together plans for a WiFi ISP around here (the main section of the city has fiber available, just not here (up on "the hill")). Hungary's governement seems to be very helpful in providing funds for city/infrastructure improvement companies. I'm to be meeting with the head of the Telecommunications Department of Fot later next week to discuss what would need to be done. I'm hoping that I'm taken seriously with a plan like this.

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