How many HOURS of internet would use one gigabyte of data?

Answer 1

That depends on the speed at which you're connected. For example:

If you're on a fast dial-up modem - 56 kilobits per second - that gives you about five kilobytes per second. One gigabyte is 1024 megabytes, and one megabyte is 1024 kilobytes, so it would take (1024 * 1024) / 5 seconds to spend it on a good dial-up connection. That's a little over two hundred thousand seconds, or about fifty-eight hours.

If on the other hand you're using a high-bandwidth DSL line, that gigabyte could be transferred in a matter of seconds or minutes.

The catch is, when you're using the internet, most of your time is not spent downloading large quantities of data. A moderately large web page might be one or two hundred kilobytes, in which case you'd need to go through about five thousand to ten thousand such web pages before using up a gigabyte.