Hands on: Costs of browsing the mobile web

Browsing on mobile phones has become much better in recent years, with quite a few phones making a decent stab at downloading pages and rendering them on a small screen.

But there are still data charges for downloads; while you can pay £15 for 3GB of downloaded data at home, venture across the channel and you’ll pay a few pounds per megabyte - hundreds of times the cost of downloading the same information a few miles away, via a network that in all probability is owned by the same company as the one you use in the UK.

As a web designer, you can probably help by detecting common mobile browsers and using a different style sheet, or even not sending graphics. A page from The Guardian’s website, even using the subscription no-ads version, can still amount to 600-800KB of data.

And surprisingly, turning off the loading of images in the browser doesn’t save a huge amount more. A mobile browser image on Barcelona’s bars still clocked up over 400KB to download. With roaming charges of a few pounds per megabyte, neither of those two screens is cheap.

If your pages are generated on the fly by scripts or a CMS, it’s worth checking the User Agent, or simply offering people the choice of a ‘light’ page layout.

However, The Guardian’s no-ads option still shows travel services, sponsored features and other material in the right-hand column of the pages, which may be tolerable at home, but costs more when you’re roaming abroad. The same is true for large chunks of Javascript.

If you’ve been caught out by high bills for roaming, don’t just grumble - use them as a spur to make sure your own site isn’t doing the same to other people.

For all articles on web development click on the tag below