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at educating people on this topic, before giving up and letting people wallow in their own ignorance.

A dedicated OC3 costs about $7500/mo. 155 Mbps, 149 Mbps after you subtract overhead. That's what you need if you want 149 Mbps without any data caps. (Yes an OC3 is symmetric. Cable can be too, they just dedicate more bandwidth to downloads since people mostly download stuff. It is not an inherent limitation of the technology which makes it "different" from an OC3.)

How then are Comcast, AT&T, etc. able to offer you 50 Mbps for just $50/mo? By doing the equivalent of putting 150 customers on an OC3. $7500/mo / 150 customers = $50/mo per customer.

But this only works if none of those 150 people hogs up all the bandwidth. If one person has torrents running at 149 Mbps for the entire month, everyone else's Internet bandwidth is going to be seriously degraded. So how do you prevent someone from hogging up that much bandwidth? You implement a monthly data cap. 149 Mbps * 1 month = 49 TB. And 49 TB / 150 customers = 326 GB per customer. So if each of those 150 people used the same amount of bandwidth, you'd expect them each to use 326 GB per month.

Not everyone uses that much though, so you can make the cap a bit higher without everything falling apart. That right there is why most ISPs are setting their caps around 300-700 GB/mo. 1 TB/mo is actually pretty generous. And being able to remove the cap for an extra $50/mo ($30/mo for AT&T) is an incredibly good deal. $100/mo is a helluva lot better than the $2500/mo you'd have to pay for a partial OC3 giving you 50 Mbps.

Yet profit reports show that it's almost 99% profit on internet usage for the various Internet providers. So let me guess, you work for CentuaryLink or Comcast?

A dedicated OC3 costs about $7500/mo. 155 Mbps, 149 Mbps after you subtract overhead. That's what you need if you want 149 Mbps without any data caps. (Yes an OC3 is symmetric. Cable can be too, they just dedicate more bandwidth to downloads since people mostly download stuff. It is not an inherent limitation of the technology which makes it "different" from an OC3.)

Why would any sane business owner use OC3 in 2016? 10GE is widely available and pretty much the only logical solution when doing long (or short..) distance connections. Well, if the majority of carriers in the US are still using SONET OC3 or similar garbage that would explain the ridiculous prices you have to pay. :-/

at educating people on this topic, before giving up and letting people wallow in their own ignorance.

A dedicated OC3 costs about $7500/mo. 155 Mbps, 149 Mbps after you subtract overhead. That's what you need if you want 149 Mbps without any data caps. (Yes an OC3 is symmetric. Cable can be too, they just dedicate more bandwidth to downloads since people mostly download stuff. It is not an inherent limitation of the technology which makes it "different" from an OC3.)

How then are Comcast, AT&T, etc. able to offer you 50 Mbps for just $50/mo? By doing the equivalent of putting 150 customers on an OC3. $7500/mo / 150 customers = $50/mo per customer.

But this only works if none of those 150 people hogs up all the bandwidth. If one person has torrents running at 149 Mbps for the entire month, everyone else's Internet bandwidth is going to be seriously degraded. So how do you prevent someone from hogging up that much bandwidth? You implement a monthly data cap. 149 Mbps * 1 month = 49 TB. And 49 TB / 150 customers = 326 GB per customer. So if each of those 150 people used the same amount of bandwidth, you'd expect them each to use 326 GB per month.

Not everyone uses that much though, so you can make the cap a bit higher without everything falling apart. That right there is why most ISPs are setting their caps around 300-700 GB/mo. 1 TB/mo is actually pretty generous. And being able to remove the cap for an extra $50/mo ($30/mo for AT&T) is an incredibly good deal. $100/mo is a helluva lot better than the $2500/mo you'd have to pay for a partial OC3 giving you 50 Mbps.

Nobody except filesharers use their bandwidth that way. The vast majority of users' usage is bursty, hitting the cap for a fraction of a second, then dropping to zero for several minutes. Even sustained usage like Netflix tops out at about 5 Mbps per 1080p stream. So it's meaningless to break down usage into "approximately 60 or 70 hours" unless you're a filesharer who's always maxing out their bandwidth.

For some REAL perspective, bandwidth without caps requires a dedicated connection. An OC3 costs about $8000/mo - that's a dedicated 155 Mbps line, or about 149 Mbps of data (rest is overhead). That's how much you should be paying if you plan to sit at your max bandwidth all month. That's 49 TB/mo.

The UVerse 45 Mbps plan is $65/mo with a 600 GB/mo cap. 600 GB/mo is 1.22% of the above 49 TB/mo. And 1.22% of $8000/mo is $97.60/mo. So AT&T is actually giving you a helluva deal for what's effectively a partial OC3 metered based on usage.

To top it off, if you do want to sit at your max bandwidth 24/7, AT&T will remove the cap if you pay an extra $30/mo, or subscribe to a combo Internet + TV + phone package plan. This is by far the most generous Internet service I've seen, period, of any cable company, DSL company, or dedicated service company. You can get the equivalent of an OC1 (for download purposes) for just $95/month!

According to the veritable T1 Shopper Calculator, it would take 197 Days 19 Hours 27 Minutes 34.32 Seconds.

Does what you signed guarantee you a certain bandwidth, or is is an "up to x" sort of thing? I strongly suspect the latter.

Indeed, it's almost certainly the later. A actual guaranteed minimum speed can be had for certain types of account, notably dedicated T-Carrier type lines, but generally at much increased cost over standard consumer or small business broadband accounts. Depending upon the area, provider and speed, prices can range from several hundred to tens of thousands of dollars per month. So yes, a guaranteed minimum speed can be had here in the US but it's going to cost you a lot more than $50 per month.

Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

Residential DSL has asymmetrical downstream speed up to 50Mb/s and cost around $30 per month, while T1 lines run at 1.544Mb/s, yet cost $550 - $1200 per month. Why do you suppose that is?

If you want 24/7 guaranteed 50Mb/s, get yourself a T3 connection. It costs $6000 minimum. If you want cheap useable internet for the home, stick with residential DSL. You're not being sold short, you're just putting too much confidence in the manufacturers spec.

You're behaving like a PHB, which around here should be anathema.

very quickly, thanks to http://www.t1shopper.com/tools/calculate/byteconverter.shtml

Even though they state the limit up here in canada, they don't always enforce it. :)


The provider I am with (Cogeco) for 10MB service, gives us "100GB up/down" combined. In actual practice, they have never enforced this limit, and don't even issue warning letters, unless the RIAA/MPAA sends one, then they just anonymously forward it to the customer without telling the RIAA/MPAA who it was. While 100GB seems like a lot, it depends on who you have living in the house. With 4 people in their mid 20's here, with a total of 4 laptops, 3 towers, 2 servers, Xbox360 PS3 & Wii, 4 DS's & a wifi PDA, we get our money's worth. There are months when we go over a TB of up/down traffic easily. Now, before you freak out and say that is impossible on cable, consider 1TB @10Mb of continuous transfer would only be 10days, 4 hours, 20 minutes & 9 seconds of usage - less than 1/3 of the month.
http://www.t1shopper.com/tools/calculate/downloadcalculator.shtml

Even if you took into account non continuous usage combined with overhead and rounded that number up by an extreme 50%, you could still pass 2TB of traffic a month on cable...

The closest I have gotten to this was 57 days of usage (tracked thru the wan port of my router, between restarts) at 3.2TB.

And no, that doesn't mean I'm stealing every movie known to man. We just watch a lot of streaming stuff, like divx.com & download a lot of game demos.

Here's a secret...your resedential broadband company doesn't really have enough bandwidth to support all of their users...but that's been ok in the past, because before P2P and before streaming HD video, the RATIO (thats a big word there) was good enough that it wasn't a problem for them...or to simplify it a little, they were (and still are) betting that when you want to visit /. and eat up some of their bandwidth at the head-end that your next door neighbor is not doing anything with his/her connection...

This methodology is actually a hold-over from the dialup era...at that time it was modem lines...we may have 5000 paying customers, but we only need to have 300 phone lines...

I don't know if you have ever priced a T1 line to your house, but you would probably be surprised if you haven't...1.5MB of guaranteed bandwidth is expensive...a 3MB down/328 up cable modem line is a STEAL at the prices they are giving...now if everyone suddenly has VOIP and IPTV, that's extra bandwidth usage that the system (and pricing structure) was never designed for...luckily, the dot-bomb era left a lot of dark fiber in cities and hopefully these companies can buy them up to keep giving us relatively cheap access...

Actually "Gigabyte" means 1,000,000,000 bytes. This is because "giga-" is a metric prefix meaning 1,000,000,000.

1,073,741,824 bytes would be properly described as a "Gibibyte", as per the International Electrotechnical Commission's (IEC's) International Standard. This was adopted in 1998.

http://www.t1shopper.com/tools/calculate/

lamers