That's the unpacked size, the transfer size (gzipped) is never over 100KB, even for posts with 1000+ comments.

That's typical, and completely insane. I run an image-heavy (but ad-free) blog using standard Wordpress, and the 8000-word homepage is around 1.1 MB on first load. I would never use a cellular data connection without aggressive ad- and tracker-blocking.

(FWIW, HN seems to have about 3x markup overhead, 2x compressed, for a typical comment page, which is not that bad.)

The difference for me is 70-80% less data, but I usually browse mainly text content with relatively small amount of images.

http://prepaid-data-sim-card.wikia.com/wiki/Canada

Some of the roaming options on there look a bit better.

$50 for couple of gigs is insane. I pay $50 with T-mobile for unlimited everything except international calls. You could say unlimited for 20 gigs before I get a bandwidth cap which is still usable. LTE speeds are faster than my home Internet with Frontier Fios

These numbers don't even take into consideration of the fact that 75% of all Canadians live within 200 km of the US border. Assuming the population in the south subsidizes the cost for expanding to remote locations it's hard to believe we need to pay as much as we do.

Canadians pay too much because the big companies like Bell and Rogers control the networks and push out competition. They charge as much as they want and we just accept it.

I currently do not own a cellphone (even though I'd like one) because I'm not willing to pay the fees.

Maybe there's some regulation saying they have to onsell it?

Just curious because it seems a bit similar in Australia.

I was with Vodafone then discovered a much better deal through Kogan which uses the Vodafone network. I asked Vodafone to match the deal to keep me as a customer, and they couldn't! They wanted me to pay something like 30% more for the same network/data usage. I told them thanks but no thanks.

A few month ago every Public Mobile clients received a SMS. The SMS was a promotion to switch from Public Mobile to Koodo. We would get the same deal we had right now (or better price), a new cellphone and $150 in Koodo store credits to get goodies. Everyone switched over. Right now I'm on a $50/month plan with Koodo that is worst than the $35/month PublicMobile could give me.

Now nobody offers unlimited data or Canada wide data for $35.

(Disclaimer: I have a bad memory for dates and prices. This should however describe the situation correctly enough.)

Presumably they were onselling another companies network, why would that company sell their own network so cheap?

Opera has an even more powerful data saving tool, with the caveat that the data goes through their servers (no privacy). I can spend 20 minutes browsing the news, and end up with just 3-4 MB used.

The worst offenders are ads and tracking. A fuck ton of bloat that needs to be loaded. Every little action results in a http call. If you visit a page with disqus comments it loads every ad tracker it can find in the world and shove it in your browser.

It will back off to an earlier window size. It won't just jump to 1 packet. As of 2010, the default initial window size is 10 packets across OSen, so it's unlikely to ever get to 1 packet unless you're on a really lossy network.

[1]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.opera.mini...