I heard the story a few days ago on NPR and was taken aback by AT&T’s approach to their data plans. Citing that 2% of their users use more than 2gb of 3G bandwidth a month, which is bogging down their system, and that justifies limiting the “unlimited” plan for everyone. Now don’t kid yourself, 3G across all companies has always been capped at 5gb, but that’s high enough to not count bytes every day. Remember the days of getting upset that your conversation didn’t end at 4:59 instead of 5:03, charging you 6 minutes? Well, say hello to that stress again!
I’m on T-Mobile so this change doesn’t affect me… yet, but AT&T being the 800lb gorilla with 71.3 million users, what they do sets the stage for the industry. Which brings me to why this could impact websites.
My wife and I used a shocking ~700MB of bandwidth last month and we don’t stream episodes of “Lost”, or spend all day checking out viral videos on youtube. That 700megs is just normal checking email, stocks, tweeting, surfing the web and using the GPS navigation systems. The trend was leaning away from mobile sites because it can be frustrating to re-learn a new site and with smart phone browsers being full-featured and user-friendly it’s easier to navigate the real site. But full sites burn significantly more bandwidth, so to combat that I think you’ll stop seeing the flat, watered down sites and start seeing “mobile” sites that have been significantly sized down and compressed but still operate identical to the real one.
You might be wondering why at 700mb I’d be worried about cresting that 2gb mark or think it’d shift our way of handling mobile users, but as websites, apps and everything gets more demanding my average bandwidth over 3G will continue to rise. Heck, computers were originally designed with the crazy high, never to be reached file limitation of (1MB) – that’s 1/4th of a song. So it’s not unreasonable to think that this will affect designers, programmers and businesses as they try to reach the fastest growing form of B2B and B2C communication.
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Summary
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If you’re building your own website, you want to be bandwidth aware and still maintain a good user experience. Make sure you check for the mobile and serve them a script reduced miniature website. With a max width of ~500px wide you’ll encompass the largest screen out to-date, and those with smaller will simply start zoomed out further. Saving you substantial bandwidth for your 3G wireless viewers, making them less worried about coming to your site.
