If you are confused by what different broadband services mean when they talk about a “cap”, “monthly cap” or “monthly limit” - here are some examples.

What can you do with each Gigabyte?

I have borrowed examples from several service providers.

What follows is a very rough guide because each file is a different size (measured in Kilobytes (KB), Megabytes (MB) or Gigabytes (GB)).

• An average email is around 4KB --- or a quarter of a million e-mails for 1Gigabyte!  You would have to be very popular to get that many (or spammed alot!).
• A digital photo around 1MB --- just over one thousand  photos for 1Gigabyte (well, your baby is very beautiful, but is it really that beautiful?)
• A music track around 5MB --- roughly 200 tracks (legal downloading of music is growing fast and is popular with people of all ages - see the article on checking what your kids are downloading!)
• If you have enjoyed watching videos of the bluetits from the Lynsted Society Website - the ones marked for broadband users can be anything up to 11MB (most are much smaller).  But you get the message - videos use up a fair bit of your ‘cap’.  Perhaps around 100 such videos a month for each Gigabyte allowed - there aren’t that many videos on the Lynsted Society website! (but it is growing).
• With the arrival of more reliable on-line television programme downloads you may want a higher “cap” - e.g. if you plan to use BBC iPlayer (for example) to catch up on missed programmes or watch channels you cannot get on your TV (you must have a licence if you watch LIVE TV on a computer).  One hour of TV is equal to about 600 Megabytes - do the maths and you can see how quickly you would use a 10Gb cap!

So, if you are a light user (e-mails with only a few pictures each month) then buying a service with a low “cap” might be more than enough - most services don’t offer less than 2Gb per month.