Would you be affected at all? Would you be able to access other systems and use them until Google would be up again? One serious problem with a company that has such a large market share is that their demise would affect a large part of the population. Pretty much everyone would be affected in one way or another if Google services would not be accessible anymore.

The Download Squad published an article yesterday about Google being down for 18 minutes. It turned out to be a false alarm and a problem of the Internet Provider Verizon and not Google.

Imagine how much buzz a downtime of an hour or two would create on the Internet. So, coming back to the initial question. What would you do and how would you be affected if Google went down right now?

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They did provide a switch in the user control panel to disable that feature again but this is again a company that is forcing the user to take action for something that they changed.

Open DNS has been covered before on this website and I just want to remind everyone that Open DNS can be used to get rid of search boxes from your provider. Setup of Open DNS takes a few minutes at most and should be doable for everyone.

By using the service you start using the Open DNS servers instead of the ones from the Internet Provider. DNS meaning Domain Name System which is responsible for “translating” domain names into IP addresses.

Open DNS provides additional advantages such as phishing protection (that is not slowing down your computer), parental controls, typo corrections and shortcuts. Shortcuts work like Firefox keywords, you basically assign a phrase to an url and can use the phrase to open the website.

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I was left with no choice but to wait until my Internet connection would be working again. This was an awkward situation for me because it disturbed my usual work flow which sees me working in the morning, getting out some posts, checking stats and creating new content for other sites that I own. All of this was delayed.

What could I do in the time that my Internet connection was down? I decided to run scan disk on all of my hard drives and Smart Defrag afterwards to optimize them. This are tasks that do not require my attention and I went to town earlier than I wanted to grab two Japanese learning books that I ordered and bring in my Nokie N73 cellphone which stopped working suddenly.

But the real question that would interest me is this: What are you doing if your Internet connection is down? Are you doing something else? I suppose that only a few of you are making their money working on the Internet which might mean that it is not tragic if you cannot connect to the Internet for a few hours.

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One major problem is the reliability of those speed tests on the Internet. Some show lower speeds even if the Internet connection is able to handle faster speeds. This can be due to server capacities at the speed test host, the location of the servers in the world or general routing problems that affect the measured speed.

Speed.io is the first broadband speed test on the Internet that measured the speed of an Internet connection correctly. Every other speed test was usually missing a few thousand Kbits. The service measures the download and upload speed, the maximum number of connections and the response time of the Internet connection.

The download speed test result was 14806 Kbit and the result of the upload speed test was 990 Kbit which comes close to the maximum capacities of the 16 Mbit / 1 Mbit advertised speed of the Internet provider.

The developers of Speed.io claim to utilize 50.000 servers world wide for their speed tests which seems an awful lot but would be an incredible infrastructure if this was the case. Still, it does not really matter if they have 1 or 50K servers as long as the speed tests are accurate.

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The name is Comcast who recently announced that they will limit the monthly bandwidth usage of their customers to 250 Gigabytes per month starting from October 1. Comcast did contact customers who did go beyond that limit in the past asking them to reduce their bandwidth usage which would be suspended if they did not.

Starting from October 1 customers who go beyond the 250 Gigabyte limit will receive a notification about their monthly bandwidth usage and a clear message that their account will be suspended if they go over the limit again in the next six months.

That leads to the question which is at the same time the title of the article: How much bandwidth do you need? Would you be able to stay under the 250 Gigabyte limit? I honestly have to answer that I won’t be able to stay under the limit. While 250 Gigabytes do seem a lot it becomes less if you divide it by the days of the month. A little bit more than 8 Gigabytes per day are available to the user.

If you watch high definition content on the Internet you will reach that limit easily. If you download videos, DVDs or use P2P you will also reach that limit. A lot of users will reach that limit, not only P2P users which anyone would suggest to be the only affected users.

So, how much bandwidth do you need per day / month?

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