You have probably heard it already. The magic number being thrown around by Internet service providers nowadays is 256 Kbps. Most people wouldn’t really care much about internet speeds until they suddenly notice they can’t upload an email attachment or view Photos they were tagged in on Facebook.
256 Kbps — which fun fact is also Uganda’s country code — is the speed that your internet will drop to once you have climaxed your data cap. This is especially true for users who are subscribed to “unlimited” internet bundles. For instance Smile Uganda will throttle your speeds to 256 Kbps from 2Mbps once you clock 100GB mark for Smile’s UnlimitedEssential plan while MTN Uganda’s new Basic Plan will drop you to 256 Kbps up from 2Mbps once you max 1GB a day until the next day. Same goes for Tangerine.
Related post: Smile Uganda further caps Unlimited Premium data plan to 100GB for superfast internet
Now we did some math for you. We wanted to know how much data you can consume a day or month with 256 Kbps. These tests assume you are constantly maxing your internet without power interruptions or internet outage from your provider. At 256 Kbps, your device is able to download at most 32 KB or data every single second. If you run for one hour, that’s about 112 MB of data, 2.636GB/day and 79GB/month.
Related Post: MTN Uganda finally launches unlimited data bundles: Here are the prices and speeds
So if a provider is offering you “unlimited” internet lets say 2Mbps and throttles the speeds to 256 Kbps once your clock 50GB data cap, we can safely assume that they are giving you 130GB/month of data.
The fact is, you don’t want to browse the internet at 256Kbps because realistically speaking your speeds will drop further between 20Kbps and 120Kbps which is super super slow for using applications such as Facebook, Instagram, Youtube etc.
