If you are using capped data or pay as you go data then bandwidth usage in current South Africa is very expensive.  I bought  1Gig for R289 and it lasted me 5 days. That is unexceptable, so searched the web and here is what I found:

Here are a few ways you can save on bandwidth:

Firefox Extension to Save Bandwidth

Blocking images using imgLikeOpera

ImgLikeOpera button in firefox provide an easy way to enable/disable images on any web page

imgLikeOpera is an addon which when installed, will easily allow to block or enable images in webpages.

In the settings of this add-on, you can set a default policy for images in a new window or new tab. The available options are

• Don’t load images – No images are loaded, only place markers are shown for each image.
• Load cached images only  – Load only those images which is already in browser cache.
• Load images for the originating Web site only – Load images from the same site only.
• Load All images – All images are displayed.

ImgLikeOpera is not supported by the newest version of firefox browser but is supported on older versions. If  you have the newest browser installed then disable your images via the firefox options dialog and enable it again when you want to view images. This can be frustrating but images consume much of your data cap and by disabling them you will save a lot of bandwidth usage.

Go to the Tools >> Options dialog in Firefox. In the content tab, uncheck ‘Load Images Automatically’. By clicking on the exceptions button, you could add a few sites which can be allowed to display images. This way, you can set Firefox to download images from only a handful of sites. That means less bandwidth consumed.

Blocking Flash using FlashBlock

Flash contents consume lot of bandwidth and mostly even before you realize that there is flash in the page it may have loaded or started loading.

FlashBlock is an addon which will just replace all flash contents in a page with flash icon buttons. You can press these buttons to load the blocked flash content. This is very useful, as it often happens, when you go to an YouTube page and you are reading the description or comments, even before you decide to view it or not, video has started loading. So this addin helps to load only the required flash contents on demand. Also, there is option to create a list of sites as whitelist, for which flash is not blocked.

Block Obtrusive and Bandwidth Consuming ads using Adblock Plus

Adblock Plus is a neat addon for Firefox that blocks banner ads and images that consume your bandwidth hugely. Once installed, you can use the settings to add filters and block advertisements on webpages. Wildcards and regular expressions supported.

Right click, and set an image/ad to be blocked, it’ll never appear again. Otherwise, use the icon in the toolbar to view the page’s multimedia elements along with the networks that serve them, and block them.

Block Javascript, Java and other Special Executable Content from running with Noscript

NoScript blocks all scripts (ex. animations) in sites, and allows only a few trusted sites to run such applets on your browser.

Besides saving tons of bandwidth, you’ll also get improved security because only these executable elements do harmful things to your computer, most of the time.

Cap Download/Upload rates and monitor your bandwidth consumption

Firefox Throttle is a very interesting addon for Firefox that lets you limit the upload and download rates (throttling) for Firefox – this will affect not just the speed of your downloads, but also the loading time of web pages. Basically, by using Firefox Throttle you are able to reduce the speed of your connection.

You can also exclude websites from being ‘throttled’. There’s a little button to immediately turn on/off throttling. The Options dialog has a Stats tab that displays the amount of bandwidth consumed – how much data has been uploaded and downloaded. Quite useful if you’re sharing an internet connection across multiple computers.

Disable Firefox Prefetch And Save Bandwidth

You might not be knowing but all Mozilla based web-browser’s including Firefox prefetch websites and images that you might be visiting next, for faster loading times as instructed by webmasters, prefetching is enabled by default and webmasters can make the web-browser download webpages and images in-advance (including third-party content) using rel=”prefetch” in their code.

You might want to disable this behavior if your ISP charges you pay-per-byte for network bandwidth or you are privacy conscious and don’t want to get cookies/images from websites that you yourself never actually visited, to disable simply follow the instructions below:

1. Type about:config in your Firefox address bar and press Enter.
2. Type network.prefetch-next in filter text box.
3. Change the value to false by right clicking .

ONSPEED

Onspeed is software using slipstream technology which has receive numorous rewards internationally. Basically it shrinks all the information that you access from the internet which speeds up your internet and saves bandwidth usage. You can expect to save 50% plus on your data usage and 5 x plus your normal browse speed. It cost £24.99 Pounds/€29.99 Euros/ $39 US Dollars/ R349 South African Rand for a yearly license.  For £2 Pounds/ €2.5  Euros /$3.30 Dollars /R30 per month this is a must for any internet user that is looking to speed up their internet connection and save bandwidth usage.

Visit www.onspeed.com