BGAN unit send receive how much data

Question

I am trying to find out how much data is exchanged with a send/receive. We are going to be using a BGAN unit from our field location and I am trying to calculate how much data to buy.

Answer 1

I could not give you a number, but it all depends on the project and what has been done. Things like inserting illustrations can cause the repository to expand. Many things that can be included in S/R are optional. Things like shared layouts, changes to project plans, use of the project interlinearizer etc,
Help lists most of this information, but you can also find it in the recently updated Project Sharing Manual and Appendix.

docs.google.com

Paratext 8 or 9 Project Sharing Manual v.1

Paratext Project Sharing Manual This document is a manual for setting up Project Sharing (Send/Receive) for a project using Paratext 9.(9.0 or 9.1). To implement these instructions, every project user can be running either Paratext 8 or 9 or Paratext...

docs.google.com

Project sharing manual appendix-v1

Paratext Project Sharing Manual Appendix: This document includes more detailed information than the Project Sharing Manual for those who need more information about project sharing. Paratext Help is another source of information on project sharing...

Answer 2

My gut feeling is that it won’t be much after the first “send/receive”, since it is all text, and not audio-visual media. Paratext uses Mercurial version-control behind the scenes, which knows how to send and receive only the latest changes, rather than the whole text.

Answer 3

I’ve used BGAN for send/rec. You can make an estimate just by watching the numbers tick up when you do a send/rec. For good measure, double or even quadruple that number. BUT, the biggest problem with data usage are these modern operating systems (Windows 7,8,10). Every app, it seems, feels the need to “phone home” and if you leave the computer connected to the BGAN, data usage can run to megabytes per day. Setting the computer to “limited connection” does not help. Turning off Windows Updates and AntiVirus updates does not appreciably help.

Our group of five or so translation projects use maybe one or two megabytes per week. We do it mostly for email (limiting all attachments to under 100kB), but also weekly send/rec-s. (We do daily send/rec-s to a USB stick. But the amount of data sent daily versus weekly would be roughly the same in the long run, daily being slightly more with the extra introductory “handshaking” when you make the connection to the PT servers.) But we only keep it that low by plugging into the BGAN, immediately doing a send/rec, then immediately unplugging from the BGAN. That limits the time window in which the OS and its friends can shoot data up and down the connection.

Another point is that we have not found a good way to track how much data we are sending over the connection, so the only warning that we are nearing the limit is when we go over and our connection is cut off. Then it takes several days for us (perhaps because we go through an intermediary, who pays for the service) to restore the connection. We always seem to run out on the weekend, so it takes longer to restore it.

Hope that helps.

anon645281

Comments

PS We’ve gone to mostly doing our send/rec over cell phone data connection. But you may not have that option where you are.

Answer 4

We use an older refurbished Thrane&Thrane Explorer 500 satellite phone for data. We do not have cell phone coverage available in our PNG allocation.

I use the web interface to see a chart of connection times recorded by the Explorer 500, and copy it into Excel. That does not tell you what data was sent/received, so the only way to specifically track PT data transfer would be to connect, do the PT Send/Receive, then immediately disconnect, and record the time. Then compare that to what is recorded in the web interface. My sat phone web interface records the UTC time, not my PNG local time, so I have a cell in the spreadsheet that calculates the PNG time from UTC time cell.

We used this method to separate our use, and a colleague’s use when he was working from our village. He would connect in the AM, us in the PM, then we could split the unit charge quite accurately.

Just some thoughts that hopefully apply to other satellite connection hardware.
anon589069 (from Manitoba, because COVID no we don’t have it, we are just of “more mature years”, so we left PNG at the beginning of the pandemic)