Hey Palmy, even web surfing requires a level of downloading as
the pages are downloaded to your system for you to view. A huge part of the problem is web pages are mostly static information (I'll ignore the e-commerce aspects at this point) that show data or pictures of stock with details and prices. For many years they were written by coders using basic html and done tight with little files and no excess baggage - thus they look clean and simple. Today, most web pages, especially the ones with static information, are designed by graphics designers who abhor the idea of clean and simple; most use stuff like Flash to 'liven' the site up (even when it doesn't need it). The result is a web page that used to be 10 kb of files is now nearer 100 MB of flash and java code to show what is a simple document. Then you get to add in the code for the - let's find out where they are and target them with ads from We are ads inc' and make some money because they looked at my site, plus the ads - well the page now runs up nearer to 250 MB. That's a hell of an increase in traffic.
I redid a guy's site for him two years back, the previous web master did it all in Dreamweaver with lots of Flash shows etc. He got complaints people couldn't use the site due to the distracting Flash player shows and music they didn't like. Using basic html and jpg shots of the stock instead of walk around Flash videos with rap music, the six page site went from 500 MB of space to 3 MB of space, and I had ten times the number of images as the previous version. Sales went up and cost of hosting bandwidth excess charges went down. There's the lost bandwidth for a lot of people.
