4.6 home: average update size? Relevant to non flatrate users.

[1st_Moon]

A friend of mine is just started with a DSL volume fee. She can transfer 1GB/month which is quite sufficient for browsing the web/e-Mail/news but I'm wondering if the regular updates of Avast Home could blow this limit espcially as her provider does round up to one full MB on every login. Any estimates on this? TIA!

[Lisandro]

The updates are incremental. This is the wiser method of updating I have ever seen in a antivirus 
Very few bytes each time.
Program updates (maybe three per year) won't harm that much (about 7Mb).

[TAP]

The average size of virus database (VPS) is about 2-80 KB, this is smallest antivirus updates I've ever seen.

[zivilist]

Yap: without notification you don't notice any updates of signatures with 56k modem  .

[DavidR]

The update sizes are negligible and not worth worrying about, however the ISP policy of rounding up to 1MB for every login stinks. So that policy would be more of an issue than the small incremental VPS updates.

I'm on dial-up but as and when broadband become available I would be looking for a compromise between unlimited bandwidth (which I don't really need) and what this very restrictive 1GB limit and 1MB round up is. There are probably better deals out there where you don't have to pay for unlimited bandwidth without having to constantly worry about exceeding the 1GB bandwidth. Heck XP's SP2 full download was 266MB.

I don't know how this works with DSL, I thought you logged in once and that was that and only data downloaded or uploaded counted towards bandwidth. So being logged in but not active shouldn't be clocking up these 1 MB round up blocks, logging on for short periods is most likely to eat into this 1GB bandwidth than any updates.

[1st_Moon]

There are probably better deals out there where you don't have to pay for unlimited bandwidth without having to constantly worry about exceeding the 1GB bandwidth.

Nope, not in Germany there isn't. You see, the German Telekom still has some kinda monopoly so if you wanna get DSL from her or it's resellers you're bound to pay a basic fee of

down/up
1024/128 kbit  16,99 Euro
2048/192 kbit  19,99 Euro
6000/576 kbit  23,99 Euro
16000/1024 kbit 29,99 Euro

just to have a DSL connect at home. On top of that you gotta pay 4,99-9,99 Euro for a real flatrate (= unlimited traffic) which comes with other features (.de-domain, 50 E-Mail adresses, etc.) depending on where you sign on.

Now if you live in major cities like Cologne you can get really good bargains from city carriers like Net Cologne who have their own lines and can make different prices. If you do live in smaller cities where there's no alternative carrier you can try one of those carriers that cover most of Germany like AliceDSL etc. but the cheaper fees there are paid by connection time and not transferred volume!

So my friend joined the large Telekom competitor Arcor where she now has ISDN+DSL whereas contrary to those other carriers she does not have to pay such a huge basic fee (16,99 Euro) but 10 Euro for DSL+1 GB traffic which is the cheapest she can get in her town.

And since she does not download music or movies 1 GB is sufficient for her. Even that annoying 1 MB minimum traffic is acceptable since she does not log in more than thrice a day and always stays on till she's finished.

Of course I think it would be much better to have prices like back in the day when ppl paid a basic fee of 5 Euro for their DSL connect and then had to pay more for the traffic. Many more ppl could afford DSL and they would only have to pay more if they transferred more which makes a lot of sense to me. But hey, what do you expect from a country that still hasn't managed to force it's monopolist to allow the resellers to offer ISDN lines that are charged by volume rather than time? I know a lot of ppl that would be happy to surf on 64 kbit for a small fee.

[DavidR]

As a very general rule you can convert the Euro rate in your chart to Pounds £ and that is roughly what we pay on average, so about 1.5 times greater, but we don't have it as a Basic fee it comes with different bandwidth options included in the overall charge. Although we are only seeing the introduction of an 8MB service, but you have to be very close to the exchange to get that.

I am too far from a broadband enabled exchange (9 KM) to get a regular good quality broadband connection estimated at 256KB but you have to pay for the 1 or 2 MB standard connection. So I have a dial-up package 56KB (49-50KB connection on a good day, 4 weekly charge) for £10 about 15 Euros, this gives up to 42 hours per week, so broadband rates for a dial-up service

What we also have is you usual telephone monthly charge (line rental), which since most use BT costs £11.50 and you have telephone charges also.

We do have many more operators offering Broadband services that should in theory the competition should make our broadband cheaper; however, according to your pricing we aren't getting as good a deal as we think, which for the UK is not unusual