Barry Collins is tired of companies stealing bandwidth for software updates and patches
Here’s a simple maths puzzle. If your monthly broadband data cap is 10GB and Microsoft secretly swallows 4GB of that without your permission, how angry would you be (show your working)?
That’s the very scenario facing some Windows users, who’ve been hit with extra bills from their broadband provider because Microsoft decided to download the installation files for Windows 10 to their PCs, even if they would rather share a bath with a toaster than run Microsoft’s new operating system. These massive files were downloaded in the background, with no warning whatsoever – they were simply shoved down the pipe to anyone who had switched on Windows Update, a system designed to deliver critical security updates, not gigabyte upon gigabyte of operating-system files.
And so the poor folk on BT’s cheapest broadband package, paying £5 per month for an ADSL line with a 10GB cap, not only get their speeds choked by Microsoft clogging up the line with unwanted downloads, but have to pay £1.50 for every gigabyte by which they exceed their monthly allowance. “Sorry, kids, you can’t download Horrible Histories on iPlayer: Microsoft’s chewed through our quota with an operating system we didn’t want.”
It’s not only Microsoft that plays fast and loose with your bandwidth. I’m sick to death of picking up my iPad to find a dozen different apps downloading updates. And when you click to see what’s included in those updates, it’s risible. “General improvements,” say the update notes for Skype 6.2, which came down the pipe in September, and was seemingly no different to Skype 6.1. “Bug fixes” claimed Netflix, for an update that came two days previously. And while a 40MB update here and a 78MB update there might seem trivial, they soon add up. Especially in households where everyone has their own phone and tablet. Which, these days, is pretty much every household.
Games consoles are massive data thieves, too. The PlayStation and Xbox frequently require system updates that are hundreds of megabytes in size, but they’re nothing compared to the updates for the games themselves. A colleague of mine popped the new Forza 6 racing game into his Xbox One over the weekend, only to find it “needed” a 2.2GB update. You should be even more wary if the kids ask you to download the game itself from the Xbox Store – it weighs in at a colossal 45GB.
These multi-gigabyte patches for products are sheer sloppiness from software developers, who push products out the door before they’re ready, safe in the knowledge they can fix the bugs after us poor mugs have paid. Indeed, if you’re on a limited data cap, you could literally end up paying for their mistakes.
That’s if you can download the patch in the first place. If you’re one of the millions stuck on a slow broadband connection of, say, 2Mbps, it would take almost five hours of absolutely flat out downloads to even get that 2.2GB Forza update. It could take all day to download the unwanted Windows 10.
Software makers are behaving recklessly with our bandwidth. It’s time they upped their game, instead of our broadband bills.