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Death of Decent Australian Broadband
iamplasma writes: "As reported by several Australian newspapers, Optus cable internet services will be switching their standard plan to a 3gb "soft-limit" broadband service (once the limit is passed, the service slows to 28kbps). This is effectively the end of decent broadband in Australia, with Optus being the only major provider to offer a service without a highly restrictive usage cap. This is also the ISP who proudly promoted themselves over their main competitor specifically over the issue of the competitor's 3gb limits."
If only they were using Open Source Software in the broadband industry...
I signed up for Optus cable a month ago! Now I'm stuck in a twelve month contract with a download limit... This really sucks.
And I thought Comcast sucked...
While I know the vast majority of broadband packages I've used either don't have a cap, or simply have a "per gb" fee after a cap is reached, I have the sinking suspicion that my current provider (1.2mb DSL) puts "heavy" users on a cycle that gradually decreases bandwidth with total amount used. In talking to others in my area with a similar file sharing setup, as we approach 2-3gb of data per week, our speeds slow to a trickle (only to mysteriously appear at 12am monday). Could this be the implementation of an unoffical soft limit? Could similar tactics be in place already with many other providers across the US with most users not aware of it? The "gradual" drop in bandwidth is the scary part though. Until I talked to friends and realized the relationship between amount downloaded and speed, I didn't see anything other that occasional "traffic jams" down the line. Now my paranoia has kicked in. . . .
Find out about my new childrens book: SS Death Camp Criminal Batallion Go To Monte Carlo For The Massacre
"Wahhh!!! The World isn't free! Mommy and Daddy aren't spoonfeeding me anymore!!! Waahhhh"
See the site of the Australian Broadband Community - http://www.whirlpool.net.au/
I was waiting for optus to lay out in this area, now they've gone and shot themselves in the foot, guess I'll be sticking with my 33.6Kb/s dialup (no session limits or download limits).
.au....
Goodbye any chance of ever having broadband in
What are they thinking? 28kbps is slower than what you'll get out of the average DIAL-UP, let alone broadband.
In fairness though, they have a point. $54.95AUS per month does compare favorably with getting a second phone line and hooking a modem up to it all day.
And it's also true that regular users don't need anymore than 3Gb per month. Unless you're a techie and downloading a lot of Linux ISOs or watching independant movies, 3Gb per month will get you a long way. It applies to Web hosting, so why not here?
Perhaps it's time for ISPs to charge per megabyte? There's no such thing as 'unlimited' or 'free'.. you end up paying in the end. So why not charge per megabyte, which will force users to consider what they're actually downloading. US$0.01 per megabyte sounds fair.
(In the UK, BT is also trying a similar scheme with dial-up. That is, their 'Anytime' service is not actually 'any time' anymore.. you can only use it for a maximum of 12 hours a day!)
mogorific carpentry experiments
The sad thing is, this is probably a 13 year old white kid.
...
Why do that? Australians don't have enough time to use 3 gigabyte per month because they're all out having sex with sheep.
trust me dere d000d , ya dont wanna get all up in my thang nigga, just sum fking advica for ya homie now chill
or a 69-year-old asylum escapee
In truth, your post is coherent and logical, but let me play devil's advocate:
I've heard I don't know how many times that "xxxx is enough for the average user" in computer-speak, and every time it's short-sighted. It may be enough given usage patterns right now, but as soon as video is distributed on the network, all software is distributed that way, and as soon as The Next Big Thing (tm) comes along, your point becomes moot. Believe me, 3GB a month will seem like a pittance sooner than you think.
Computers in general aren't even 1 1,000,000th as powerful as they need to be. Look at the latest greatest game, look at how beautiful the 3D is, and then look out your window and realize how truly shitty it looks and you get the idea. We will need more computing horsepower for graphics and AI and everything else, and we will definitely need more bandwidth than 3 lousy GB per month.
Well, it makes business sense, pure and simple. If I want to download the 500 MB Lineage installer, and that alone takes one sixth of my monthly allotment, then it ought to be my problem, right? Wrong. The problem is, the Internet is as much an entertainment medium as anything else, and it's competing with technologies that are not pay-as-you-go, like television and so forth. I think the public will demand unlimited access, if given a choice. The first time they get a bill for $1000 in a month, they'll be looking elsewhere.
Of course, the industry coould just collude and force per-download pricing, but it's ridiculous.
As a consumer, I'm already pissed off that my cable company won't allow me to broadcast. It's their way of keeping distribution in the hands of the few; a way to maintain the status quo. Yes, I understand the reasons why they don't want to host my pr0n and wArEz, but I'm being selfish here; this is about what I want.
I for one will always seek out unlimited pricing if possible.
gameDB
yyo d00d i'll take both ya asses to da ghetto and we'll settle this muthafucka out right now, yo i hope ya nigga like cracked ribs and ya betta know now to stay outta da wrong street if ya ain't up for no muthafucking scrap
1. 550Mb/Month $AU64.95
2. 3Gb/Month $AU79.95
3. 5Gb/Month $AU164.95
4. 10Gb/Month $AU305.95
The average user, according to Optus, uses around 65Mb per day (or almost 2Gb/Month). The 3Gb plan could therefore be construed as offering 50% more than the current average usage.
For comparison, the plan I am currently on is $AU74.95/Month (incl GST) for up to ten times the average monthly usage, or 19.5Gb.
So, time to start hunting for alternatives. Oh, and ways to monitor my usage.
There are 10 kinds of people; those who know ternary, those who don't, and those now hunting for a dictionary.
I'd be lying if I said I was surprised. Fortunately our equipment here has been set up to count the data going in and out. We're planning to setup a huge squid cache (not to mention a dumping ground) and we should be able to stay under 3Gb per month.
Two things that deserve a mention though are the speed being "throttled" and no extra charges. At least you don't run up a massive bill as you do with another company we know well!
Having started and run an ISP in the mid nineties, there is a simple equation. In Australia, bandwith costs money and is considerably more expensive than in the US (because of the poor deal Australia gets on bandwith to/from the US).
Asking Australian service providers, no matter how large to foot the bill for file sharing networks, movie downloads etc. is a non starter as an idea. Would you like Optus to go the way of One.Tel? No bandwith is considerably worse than limited bandwith.
As far as file sharing goes, why not start building networks using wireless links etc. in urban areas (I realise this is a non starter in rural areas), or perhaps start an ISP who's emphasis is on file sharing (connections provided via wireless or ADSL (I have a feeling such an ISP would quickly attract the attention of the Australian equivalent of the RIAA)).
As far as distributing Linux ISOs via CD/DVD is a far more efficient method while bandwith is still limited. Perhaps talk to Optus about putting certain large files like this online for download at reduced bandwith cost (i.e. the bandwith used is say 10% when downloaded from their "mirror"). This could be a different way for Optus to distinguish their service from Telstra's (perhaps some sort of voting system could be implemented to request files)
I would never pay for internet access like I pay for phonelines (or mobile for that matter). I want a flat rate, no bandwidth limits (give me what I paid for), and an IP of my own.
That said, I understand the costs involved, and because of that I am willing to pay a realistic price for a good service. I know what I get, and I know what I will pay for it. No surprises because some piece of software has gone wrong, or I installed linux a few times that month.
So, as the subject says, I see an opportunity here, an opportunity for the geeks down under to show how things should be done (don't forget to get an economics geek in with you). Start a company, and win the customers by being more reliable, having nicer and better service, and so on.
oh pleez d00d, stop with all the niggaz shit b4 I pop a cap in yoor A$$...
First all these telecom companies start going out of business because they say they put in too much capacity that is not being use, then they start creating an artificial scarity of bandwith to make more money...maybe we should put together a class action lawsuit...oh, sorry, I forgot we were not down in the States....
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
Bzzzzt!... Only an Aussie would call a Brit a "Pom". Astroturfing fucking convict...
which surely needs a feed to the net at some point ? which would need an uncapped service anyway....
sure, but if everyone on the freenet runs a proxy, everything they get off the net will also be on the freenet, effectively giving everyone a much larger cap
I guess you also want flat electricity bill
I tried ISDN for two years, but was kind of underwhelmed by the performance. Rarely above 6 kbps due to problems with the ISP, at least it was no charge (for me at the time). The second year, I decided to try filtering and found not only much faster page loading, but also found it much easier to focus on the content.
Just throwing a few lines in /etc/hosts gets many, but not enough since some hosts with content also serve ads. To get these too needs some DNS and URL regexp tricks.
FTP and other TCP hogs like audio, video and games we do to ourselves voluntarily. Ads are an unneccessary added cost. When there are bandwidth caps, then ads become far too intrusive, not worth their weight (wait / size).
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
3Mb/s, no download limit for the 1st year (100hrs a month free after that with any additional charged at about 25c an hour): US$26/month
6Mb/s, no dowload limit for the 1st year (200 hrs a month free after that with any additional charged at about 25c an hour): US$38/month
Plus you get installation fee waived and some pretty cool toys depending on which company you sign up with. I doesn't happen very often but it definitely seems that we get a pretty good deal here as far as broadband goes.
All generalisations are wrong... including this one.
I've been expecting this for a long time now.
the fact that you people are going to have to learn is that Bandwidth is expensive! It's not free, it never will be free, and especially here in backward Australia, even if it was free elsewhere, it'd still cost money here for at least another 50 years after that.
What you're going to have to realise is that the pittance you were paying these companies is NOT ENOUGH.
You download more and more and more, and you think you've paid for it, but you haven't.
While i'm sorry for you people who signed up when it was free, and have now had the terms changed, i will also say this: you gave them permission to do this when you signed the contract, so you can shut-up as well.
As for the cable companies who thought they could afford it to begin with, who were you kidding?
Did you really expect the australian consumers to just grin and bear it when you ran out of money?
You can't just give someone a free lunch, and then expect them to stay loyal.
Wake up! The world doesn't work like that, and I'm willing to bet that half of the dot.bombs were built on the same premise.
People take what they're given for free, and then shaft you when you try to ask for money. They always think you OWE them for their loyal leeching, not the other way around.
Face it, the only way you can pull that off is if you take something they HAVE to have, and then charge them so they can get it back. And then they'll hate you, but most will still pay you.
still living in the real world, ashridah
Go away Mr Troll.
i thought it was the new zealanders who shagged the sheep?
I've heard I don't know how many times that "xxxx is enough for the average user" in computer-speak, and every time it's short-sighted.
It is short-sighted, but complain when the Next Big Thing actually arrives. We have 2.4 GHz Pentium IV's, and I'm 'chugging' along on my 500 MHz Celeron, and the most processor intensive operation I do (aside from dnetc, but that doesn't count) is run mplayer, which eats 25% CPU. This is why the tech industry's in a slump, we don't have a Big Thing and haven't had a latest Big Thing for a while now.
Look at the latest greatest game, look at how beautiful the 3D is, and then look out your window and realize how truly shitty it looks and you get the idea. We will need more computing horsepower for graphics and AI and everything else, and we will definitely need more bandwidth than 3 lousy GB per month.
And in twenty years when we're at that point, we'll have a far better Internet infrastructure than what we have now. You presume that the 3GB a month limit will still be the same in the year 2022, and it won't. Sorry.
The problem is, the Internet is as much an entertainment medium as anything else, and it's competing with technologies that are not pay-as-you-go, like television and so forth.
While the Internet is an entertainment medium, it differs from traditional devices by the method of transport: Waves vs. bytes. You can put a 100,000 watt FM tower and cover millions of people with your radio station. With radio and television, you don't pay for each user like you do with the internet distribution.
Calculate the bandwith costs to cover four million people listening to 128 kbps Internet radio instead. To serve this, you'd have to be thinking 4,000,000 * 16 * 1024 bytes per second. Each OC unit (Optical Carrier, as in OC-3) transmits data at 51.84 Mbps, or 6,794,792 bytes per second. Divide out and you're going to need an OC-9645.
Even if this were a regular day, ie, not four million people listening, and you had a fraction of the total listeners, you'd still have to serve massive bandwith out; the costs of which would be far more than any large-market FM radio station could cover.
I'd rather put up my 100,000 watt FM antenna.
I hate to rain on your parade, but the Internet is not the best method of distribution for, uh, packaged entertainment, like pay per view and radio and television shows. Maybe in 2022 when we have your true-to-life 3D, things will change, but it is unfortunate that in 2002 we have advanced so far but still have a long way ahead of us.
If you disagree, reply.
"[T]he single essential element on which all discoveries will be dependent is human freedom." -- Barry Goldwater
It's just a case of greed. Corporate greed and user greed. The OptusNet cable division has turned a profit for the first time, but they need more money to pay for the other bits of optus, so to speak, that run at a loss.
The users want more. Fair enough, people like me have become accustomed to the soft download limits we have previously had. We don't use the phonebook. I don't watch TV or listen to the radio. The Internet is everywhere, accessible anywhere in the house from the nearest PC or laptop with wireless card.
Compared to Telstra users, who are used to their 3GB/month cap, this is a major blow to our habits. This also affects the broadband acceptance in Australia - we've had all sorts of politicians and companies (even Bill Gates himself) tell us that our broadband is too expensive and inaccessible.
First off 28kbps is far too low for a "cutoff". Also monthly setups mean you can go quite a while at low bandwidth. While I have posted this idea before [the idea of a cutoff] I normally mentioned a daily cutoff not monthly.
What they should have done is say limited the connection to a couple 100 MB a day, then after that quarter the bandwidth. If you normally get around 2Mbps down 28kbps is 1/71'th of the bandwidth!!!
Seriously while it would be nice to be able to listen to shoutcast 24/7 and download fresh ISO's of *nix every two weeks you have to face the fact that this "unlimited inet pipe" was really just a fluke. It wasn't supposed to happend yet!
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
All this talk about how much is enough for the amount downloaded on DSL is obviously of some debate however in my view, if you are paying more for DSL you should get at least the amount you could get on a dialup before getting charged more. As a lowly dialup user I can get around 20Mb an hour, which is 480Mb (megabytes, not bits :) which is, assuming a 30 day month, a possible 14,400Mb I can download (or share amoungst others).
Surely that would be the number that ISPs should allow as the cap.
My blog [.net, rants, general IT]
The average usage is actaully around 85megs a day. Average usage meaning the middle 90% of customers
There are better ways to give a meaningful and better customer side service other than impose a 3 GB soft limit per month
Have soft limits set up per day, and have them set higher (or, atleast, offer a higher package) so after 500mb of transfer, the upload and download drop to a 56k modem - not 28k
although this goes against the whole benefit of having broadband - I can quite easily see a lawsuit / oftel type thing telling them to stop calling it broadband if they restrict it to narrowband after a certain amount of transfer
I know that some companies have problems with the cost to them of supporting their broadband customers - hence these restrictions - however, I believe it IS possible to get it right, in a way that is fair to consumers yet still profitable to the companies
I have a flat electricity bill, I pay $8/month, I have lots crap running at the same time, all the time, no complaints yet...
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
I have the misfortune of being a Telstra cable user and can provide this insight into the state of broadband in Australia -
You cannot pay your Telstra internet bill on the internet.
Consequently I havent ever paid my bill....maybe if I had, I could ditch the damn service without the $1000 hanging over my head!!
"I'm tired of all this 'Aren't humanity great' bullshit. We're a virus with shoes" - Bill Hicks
Well I blame Telstra to a degree. They have set a precedent for data charging in Australia, and do they charge like wounded bulls. (19c p/1x10^6 B minimum). Optus would have to be paying Telstra *some* money. Sure they may be able to get away to a degree but not completely.
Then there is the whole economy of scale aspect to consider, with people defecting from Hell$tra to Optus (at least where it is available), it would have to be placing some strain on the Optus network, this is where the scale comes into play, it does not make economic sense to purchase extra bandwidth/machines/infrastructure to support the additional users, who would only be adding a marginal profit to their existing base (to be fair companies do deserve to make a profit).
I have a feeling that the scale aspect is part of why I do not have any Optus cable available to me in Adelaide, simply put there would not be enough people to justify the cost. (The other aspect are the whinging fools in snob suburbs who did not want that one extra wire haning off their poles, *grrr*).
The only option I seem to have available to me would be the Internode ADSL (if i can get it in my area), $70AU per month, 3G Download (unlimited upload, PPPoE, allowed to run services), then they start charging for excess MB, (18c I iirc), but would prefer the Optus cost structure, as it would mean that regardless of how much i download, i know that there will be no extra charge.
My other gripe with Telstra is that they wish to charge an extra $10 per phone line rental (ie: every phone [all use telstra's exchange's so all carriers are affected]) after posting a 4 billion dollar (AU) profit. WTF? How can they justify that?
Do the following really mean anything? SCSA MCP CCSA CCNA
--I'm not actually after an answer!
Why not? If we could undercut all major isp's by a significant amount, we would own all the customers! Anyone interested want to set up a site?(sorry my only hosting is optus grrr)
3GB is already a LOT. Once again, the horde at /. making a BIG shit over a small thing. Get a life!
There are plenty of decent deals out there. You just have to be reasonable. Leechers should get their head around the fact that they are *not* profitable customers, and will be treated accordingly.
In Perth, Western Australia, Arachnet offers ADSL at pretty much the same price points, which the bonus that traffic to and from WAIX, a local peering point, is free. (Subject to fair use; don't run a heavy-traffic VPN across to your other office in Sydney over it). PlanetMirror is on a network peered to WAIX, so that's all your ISOs taken care of.
The wholesale situation with exchanges and the local loop has finally reached the point where companies other than Telstra and Optus can offer decent pricing. They just need people to start buying the services they offer.
There are others here in WA too; Westnet, iiNet and probably more. I personally don't have any of these products at home (can't justify a long-term contract) - I'm a satisfied Arachnet dialup customer. At work, we have iiNet's offering and it's very, very nice.
This whole 'capping' deal has been evident in Australia for a long time, so it seems.
Have any of these ISP's ever provided any form of actual report displaying how running an un-capped service could have a detrimental effect on their service and availability? I've not seen one.
As fas as I know, other countries like Canada don't run caps. I think most Broadband ISP's in the US don't, and I know they don't here in the UK.
Ironically, with BT being one of the tightest Telco's going, they don't cap and have no plans to do so. It's also fairly cheap these days, probably cheaper than in Aus. Why are they being so tight?
"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story..."
It's time to wheel out the perennial Slashdot "cheap unlimited broadband is a right, not a privilege" crowd.
Everyone forgets - these companies are in business to make money. To lay out broadband across a country so vast and a with such a low population density is always going to be an expensive task. And because it's relatively expensive (a 3gb ADSL plan on Telstra is more than double most unlimited 56k modem plans), most of the people that have adopted it are the hardcore. Furthermore, because previously Optus have allowed more in downloads per month than Telstra, they've attracted all the big downloading home customers. Which would have only compounded their problems. Optus have probably been making a loss on the provisioning of this service for some time.
So, the Optus gravy train has ground to a halt. It's a shame, but before you go off the hook at them, please bear in mind that these businesses are there to make money. If you don't like the price/policy that goes along with it, don't use what they offer.
-- james
It is short-sighted, but complain when the Next Big Thing actually arrives. We have 2.4 GHz Pentium IV's, and I'm 'chugging' along on my 500 MHz Celeron, and the most processor intensive operation I do (aside from dnetc, but that doesn't count) is run mplayer, which eats 25% CPU.
Great, so you don't do much with your computer. If I merely capture some video from my DV camera and compress for Web playback (i.e., take a home movie and show to my friends), my computer is at 100% CPU utilization, and the compression takes a goddamned long time (it shouldn't). There's plenty of room for speed improvements. And that's to say nothing of gaming. Pretty much any game will max either your CPU or video (pick one). I'm talking consumer applications here; not futzing around at command lines writing code, which I also do, but which requires a computer made in 1985.
I have no idea why you selected 2022 as the year we will need more than 3 GB a month. 3 GB is nothing! I've downloaded that inside of a week before. Hell, a few movie trailers and some game demos will get you there pretty fast, not to mention casual surfing.
While the Internet is an entertainment medium, it differs from traditional devices by the method of transport...
Thanks for the primer on how the Internet works, but you're missing the point. I was discussing it from the consumer perspective, not the business perspective. From the consumer perepective, I don't care how they do what they have to do. If they could give me a bajillion terabyte per second connection for $20 a month, I would be more than happy.
My point was, whether IP networks are an efficient mode of transport for television or whatever, compared to broadcast, it doesn't matter, because that's one of the things it's going to be used for. And they have to get used to it.
Furthermore, just like Cable TV fragmented the television market (the networks are getting smaller and smaller auiences all the time), Internet distribution of viewable media will fragment the market even further, and this changes the economies of scale.
In other words, there will never, ever be 4,000,000 people listening to your online radio station. The only reason that happens at all is because there are so few stations, and people have to listen to something....so they do.
When there are a hundred thousand online stations for you to choose from, you will be able to choose "traditional sumatran folk music", with 15 other people, and the listening communities inside a given genre will be much smaller. In short, there will be different metrics for success.
This also means there will be different metrics for usage patterns, and different metrics for creating business models. The slowdown in the technology industry is, in my opinion, largely due to the fact that technology companies are operating under old economy business models rather than new economy business models (in short, they hemmorrhage way too much money and hire way too many people).
I agree with what someone said in another thread on this topic: these decisions are partly motivated by money, yes, but they are also motivated by a desire to maintain the status quo. These companies want to limit broadcasting, file sharing, etc., as much as they want to limit costs.
And, as a consumer, that's why it irks me. If I thought they would go out of business without a limited pricing structure, I would agree with you. But money is not the only operative concern here.
gameDB
There are 2 major ones. Telstra owned (aussie) and Optus/SXC owned (american/aussie something like 49% aussie 51% american). Check http://www.southerncrosscables.com/ (warning flash enabled).
for getting unlimited 10mb for USD20 a month.. I still wonder how it is possible..
Duopolies, pricefixing, foreigninterests and wanker shareholders first....and then finally put the paying customer last, rip them off, rape and pilage them, stuff them around and put the price up and give them less than they could ever expect....thats the true aussie spirit!
Im gonna disagree even more.
When they finally get IP multicast to work, it's gonna take 128 kbps to distribute to the 4-5 (whatever) billion people of earth.
Which would outsmart a 100,000 watt antenna quite so bigtime.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
I gave up on finding decency on the Internet a long time ago.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
Just a few issues with your argument.
The excessive bandwidth problem that you suggest was already taken care of (to an extent) in the form of multicast.
Multicast would allow that radio station to send one packet (theoretically, but the header would be HUGE with 4,000,000 addresses in it) to reach everyone, or at least fewer packets to reach everyone.
As far as the OC-9645 goes, you forgot to multiply by 3 after. OC lines scale up linearly, so the 51.84 = 3. The line would need to be an OC-28935 for full one-to-one packet-to-recipient ratio.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
death?? you have to live before you die.
most of australia NEVER got decent broadband. the poor fools on the west coast (your truly included) never had the chance to taste what broadband is like. every provider i ever found had severely limited coverage, no alternative OS support, ultra-low bandwidth caps, and wanted to lock you into a 12 month contract.
it's so frustrating to me that in perth, a city of over a million people, it's essentially impossible to get broadband for less than $100 a month. even that figure doesn't take into account excess traffic fees, or the huge up-front costs. nor do they advertise when they start harping on about the wonders of fast connections that those rates are for 256kbps downstream / 64 kbps upstream links.
the australian telco industry is indescribably fucked, and i can't see a way to dig it out of the almighty hole it's in now.
telstra is still part-government owned, and yet this doesn't stop them screwing the little guy. i ask you this: what the hell is the point of maintaining public ownership if it doesn't mean decent and affordable service for all??
it's so bad i'm forced to research community wireless broadband initiatives. they sound pretty cool, except i don't have line of sight to anyone, and i live in an apartment, so i can't install anything on the roof.
things are getting desperate.
> Calculate the bandwith costs to cover four million
> people listening to 128 kbps Internet radio
> instead. To serve this, you'd have to be thinking
> 4,000,000 * 16 * 1024 bytes per second
Dude, haven't you heard of multicast, and multicast-like technologies?
Lets assume 200 million people, each listening to 1 of 10,000 internet radio stations (worldwide). Total transmitted bandwidth is 163,840,000 bytes per second between all radio stations. Total bandwidth coming into the ISP is the same, presuming that their subscribers are listening to all 10,000 radio stations between them - most likely is that in a certain area at max 100 different stations will be listened to, which is a mere 1.6MB/s of bandwidth for the ISP to absorb between its 50,000 customers or more...
And by the time this happens, multicast, or a multicast-like technology (e.g., Venation) will be well established and working in the marketplace.
Did your contract have a download limit in it?
Dude, you don't put all destination IP addresses in the header of a multicast packet.
Learn more about multicast before spouting off about it. People join multicast groups on specially allocated multicast addresses.
And multicast is not the only solution. middleware platforms can also provide effective multicast technology over unicast links, with the first and final hop being normal unicast.
If bytes transferred from ftp.aarnet.edu.au were free I wouldn't mind the new plans one bit.
Tom
I have discovered a wonderful
I'm only going to discuss a few points here, as almost everything here is incredibly well-said.
First off, the reason why I picked 2022 is that you compared looking out the window to today's modern 3D graphics. We're running into hard, physical limits with what we have now, and to get to that true-to-life 3D will require a radical architecture shift (like PlayStation 2's Emotion Engine vs. conventional x86 computing) or maybe those CFNET-manufactured chips, which are 10 years off. Maybe 2022 is a bit late, but I try to be realistic. But I digress.
You made a loose tie-in to bandwith usage: We will need more computing horsepower for graphics and AI and everything else, and we will definitely need more bandwidth than 3 lousy GB per month.
Key word: Will.
Second thing while I have my soapbox:
I don't know what the average Joe does, and you're not an average Joe either--you're posting on slashdot. You can throw out statistics that X number of people own a DV camera and Yahoo has Y million users and casual surfing eats 6 - 20 MB/hour and try and correlate them to till the cows come home, but discussing what the average Joe does is wholly academic, and you can't add up anecodtal evidence of a hundred slashdotters to figure Joe out. He's a mythical bastard like that.
I read somewhere that something like 1% of cable internet users eat 90% of the bandwith used, and Optus cable is doing something about it. And this whole slashdot discussion is largely that 1% complaining.
From the article:
The [Optus] spokesperson said about 75 per cent of OptusNet Cable users would fall within the 3GB download range, but conceded that some customers would eventually pay more under the new system.
75% is a pretty clear majority, and I think Optus, after much research, has figured out Average Joe.
Lastly, you made one very disagreeable point:
These companies want to limit broadcasting, file sharing, etc., as much as they want to limit costs.
Start apache on port 8080 to circumvent your ISP blocking incoming port 80. Serve and broadcast at will. Pay for business class service which raises your upload cap and removes port restrictions. If you have something to say, pay the messenger, just like everybody else.
By the way, @home only blocked incoming port 80 on my segment because of Code Red, et al. Cox.net continues this cap and block as most people are too stupid to run a webserver, and looking at the big picture, I'm actually kind of glad they do this.
If you disagree, reply.
"[T]he single essential element on which all discoveries will be dependent is human freedom." -- Barry Goldwater
I live in canberra which has the fortune of being slowly connected to the Transact network which is FAT fibreoptics. It all sounds great until you look at the prices ISP's are charging their customers ... $25 for 300mb / month (!). I sometimes download that much in 1 day on my 56k modem (I pay $25 for 1.5gigs/month)so the chances of me switching are approximately zero. So all you guys who can get optus stop whinging because there are lots of people out there in a much worse position than you.
Australia is *the* country which could make Wireless useful and ubiquitous. Even UMTS would be a good alternative in that country.
However large Australian corporations tend to be run by greedy little bastards who have no qualms in squeezing their customers for those last few pennies. Perhaps Telstra should be known as Taipan and Optus as Funnel Web.
Customer satisfaction is not a widely recognised concept in Oz.
The story as posted is meaningless.
Why :
3gb is not a measure of bandwidth.
3Gb is not a measure of bandwidth.
3Gb/s is a measure of bandwidth, as is 3Gb/day, 3Gb/month and 3Gb/year. I can not know which of these ( if any ) is meant. The story mentions 28 k(sic)bps so one might guess it means 3Gbps.
Still, the editors can't get English right, so why should we expect more with something complicated like Networking and, ooooo, Units ?
IMHO the idea of adsl etc is that the connection is always open, so it doesn't really matter how fast it is. With 28.8kbps you can download almost 300megs a day and 8.9gigs a month. Isn't that enough?
- Raynet --> .
there's no such thing as a true flat rate, you might pay a flat rate over a certain time but that's only because the average cost of the users amounts to a certain total. If the average goes up you will be charged more. Also if you are responsible for keeping the average high, it means that other users are sponsoring you, alternatively you may be sponsoring others. I've got a 'flat' rate on my electricity, water, heating and internet connection, now all I need is a flat rate on my telephone connection.
Only some parts of Sydney, Brisbane and Melborne ever had cable internet.
As far as warez goes: the main reason I want broadband is so I can download linux ISOs.
The second reason is warez. But people, if the entertainment and software companies arn't forced to provide downloadable versions of their products, they ain't going to do it out of kindness.
I'd pay for fast servers. I already do for some programs (ei DAVE, Virtual PC and EV Nova). The rest of software, movies and music will be legally downloadable if the corperations are forced by consumer soverignty. I'm not advocating free beer. But internet distribution (not just the ordering) is a good thing, and better when it's legal with artists and programmers compenstated.
BTW the only broadband for those aussies not in syd/melb/bris is ADSL. Decent ADSL (3GB peak, 7GB off-peak 512K/128K) is AUS$100 (US$50)
The again relates to why adam smith's free market is a good thing. As it is, their is 2 cable companies in Australia. If one changes terms, there far less incentive for the other to keep there old terms. This is far different with real competition.
Barto
We're about to upgrade our work diginet line.
Currently it's 64k, upgrading to 128k
And how much per month ?
$700
So quit your whining, there's worse of countries than Australia regarding bandwidth/cost.
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
It sounds like the world has turned wrong side. Here in Poland we have only one telco capable of delivering ADSL connections on a massive scale. It's our monopolist and we've got to live with it.
First thing they did when they've introduced ADSL service to the masses was to impose upload and download limits, dependent of the connection speed you opted for. My DSL, which has rates like 256kbps downstream and 64kbps upstream, had 5gb download limit and 1gb upload limit, and then you had to pay for each additional megabyte. You wasn't able to check it you've exceeded or not yet. Higher connections had bigger limits.
Then they decided to allow their customers unlimited access. It turned out that they had only about 2,000 customers afret six months of having this service, while they've expected to have at least 50,000. Pretty impressive figure.
And don't forget, that the basic connection costs about us $70/mo, and it's pretty expensive here. You have also to wait for techies for another month and then deal with impossible level of stupidity and arrogance on tech support hotlines, if anything goes wrong.
So don't bash. It's not that bad if you have a choice.
Plain old sigh.
This is all very off-topic, but I'm bored anyway, so I post as anonymous. From dict,
Optical Carrier 3
(OC-3) A {SONET} rate of 3 * 51.84 = 155.52 {megabits} per second, which matches {STS-3}.
No multiplier by 3 is necessary. One OC unit is 51.84 Mbps, or 6,794,772 Bps. This is what I divided by.
First of all, it would be hard to make it fair and profitable at the same time. Take my current connection at home: I download 20GB/month, and pay $40/month for that capability. However, there are some people who just check email and do very little web browsing, with usage around 300MB/month. If they were paying for thier usage based on the same rate I pay, they would be paying less than $1/month. That would not be profitable for the ISP.
Another reason, is the simple fact that tracking bandwidth usage and billing for that usage can be very expensive in itself. It's not enough to just say "You transfered 8GB last month, so the bill is $80". With per MB billing, the biller would have to break down where exactly each download came from and each upload went to. That isn't cheap. This also brings to mind the fact that denial of services would take on a whole other meaning, someone on a hacked cable connection could suddenly have a $200 bill. And then the real reason against per MB charges, is that the real cost is in laying the lines, not running data over them. It doesn't cost the real ISP much at all to transfer data, why should the end users pay?
I love going down to the elementary school, watching all the kids jump and shout, but they dont know I'm using blanks.
At the moment I have an unlimited 1.5 megabit DSL connection (supposidly ;>) and currently transfer aproximately 2-3 gigabytes per day. A lot of this bandwidth goes to streaming audio (www.somafm.com), playing a couple of hours of online games (UT, Q3, Counterstrike), downloading software (linux stuff) (no warez here, I run 90% open source software).
I am online aproximately ten to thriteen hours per day (I work as a web designer). Thats aproximately 230 megs per hour of work isn't that reasonable? Granted I leave streaming audio on from the time I get up until the time I go to sleep (and sometimes, well a lot while sleeping).
I am living proof that a *normal* person can suck a lot of bandwidth
I read somewhere that something like 1% of cable internet users eat 90% of the bandwith used, and Optus cable is doing something about it. And this whole slashdot discussion is largely that 1% complaining.
I'm not going to argue the numbers. Whether they are what you say, or way off what you say is immaterial; I have no doubt you're exactly right that {small}% of broadband users eat up {large}% of total Internet traffic. Obviously, my girlfriend who is on a modem can't possibly eat up as much bandwidth as I can on my cable modem.
But, though I can agree with that assessment, I think a better restating of your sentence is: "Optus, which controls 100% of the available satellite transmission capacity for the country of Australia, and is an effective monopoly player in most of the country for telecom and Internet access, rolled out an unlimited service plan in order to steal consumers from the few places they did have competition (Telstra, which has to lease satellite space from them). They then realized they could better control costs once they had a captive audience. So Optus is doing something about it; they are restructuring their offerings because they know most people will just stay with their service anyway, since they effectively have no choice."
That's just shitty, IMO.
Start apache on port 8080 to circumvent your ISP blocking incoming port 80.
I'm on RoadRunner cable, which is the only choice for cable modems here in New York City (where I am at least). The user agreement states that they will simply deny you service if they discover you are hosting things. I can and have done it temporarily, but it's not hard from their end to spot heavy outgoing traffic and just turn you off.
Gee, the last time I checked, they were affiliated with the one of the largest providers of content in the world. Were I to host a...say...news site, I'd be a direct competitor of theirs.
So, I ask you, does the language in that user agreement have more to do with the bandwidth they don't want to host, or the fact they don't want competition for their content distribution?
I think it's a very blurry area.
In any case the Optus thing affects consumers, but PTP is an awfully popular consumer app, and it's something that the big companies want to block for more reasons than bandwidth. All of this is why I don't believe for a second it's straight bandwidth costs that are stimulating these sorts of policies.
gameDB
If you you're looking for more info, Simon Wright's site Whirlpool is the best place to start. The discussions there right now are rather...heated.
-----
PGP Key ID 0xCB8FF658
Coming from the US I was agast to find that my ADSL provider here in OZ told me that my limit would be 300 mb. I said "300 mb a day?" and they replied, "no no mate, 300 mb per month" ... whats the fucking point of broad band @#?$#!@ jeezus this country sucks ass for broad band. same goes for coffee!! they charge you each cup! no fucking refills! goddamn it! what is this flat white bullshit! no super big gulp or super size anything!@# they charge you for fucking ketchup at the fucking OPORTO chicken burger joint. They don't even give out napkins!
:)
ok but other than that its pretty cool here
God it must suck so bad to live in .au
'ere in the uk i pay £25/month for 512/128Kb cable access and currently d/l over 3GB per day for my ISP's newsgroup server which even has the binary newsgroups! GO UK!
.... send 3.01 GB junk data to his I.P.
That'll teach him!!!
Internode actually have two pricing plans - one for business (fixed IP etc) which includes 500Mb
per month and home (3GB per month as mentioned) which used PPPoE.
Think the difference in the prices is due to Telstra charging more on data over business lines as other ISPs that I've looked that offer DSL to businesses are similarly priced.
Ah! I know! Let's persuade ISPs to start limiting bandwidth or start charging per MB. If some Linux idiot wanted to download Mandrake's 8.2 ISO set (1.8GB) and the per MB rate was 0.15 cents it would cost the fool nearly $300 dollars! Ya, that will do it! Those ISPs are as greedy as I am and just like the peripheral device makers, they won't turn down the opportunity to increase the amount of money they can swindle out of their customers.... It doesn't matter what the sign-up ads promised - bait'n switch is a tried and true ad method...
Let's see... how do we keep Linux distros out of the stores?....
Just think how much of your purchased bandwidth is being sucked up by ads.
IF ISPs are going to start limiting bandwidth on users, then it is only fair that they eliminate ads from the data stream. They love to compare themselves to phone companies - just imagine the outrage if phone companies started interrupting phone conversations with ad messages, or limiting local phone calls to 1 minute. The anger and outrage would be thick enough to cut with a knife. It's about time that outrage began showing itself toward these ISPs. They are the ones who are overbooking their networks, and then cutting the bandwidth. This is nothing less than classic bait and switch
Does anybody know the difference between GB and Gb? Here's a hint...one is bit and the other is byte. If the article is posted correctly then it would seem that they have capped their users at a total of 384 megabytes of downstream per month, not even enough to download a single Linux ISO. Why is it that I get the impression that they're actually talking about gigabytes instead of gigabits, even though the original poster and the Slashdot editor can't tell the difference?
Maybe they could get a job at NASA converting meters to yards.
If you need more than 3Gb, you should just order more than one 3 GB plan. The 5 Gb and 10 Gb plans are more expensive per gb than the 3 Gb plan. And when the soft-limit kicks in, you still got 2x28k or 3x28k. You will need to use load-balancing to use the bandwidth, but that should be possible. It should work at least for web surfing.
Jan
is for you to pay them them the subscription fee, but keep your connection turned off.
crikey mate! this one is a 'beaut! what we have here is an australian slashtroll, an all too common, yet very venemous, and VERY annoying animal.
Optus was never going to be a viable competitor to Telstra. The Australian broadband industry is being held by the balls at the whim of this one company.
v e.gif) wasn't a soul-less ex-banker, we could have cheap unlimited broadband in Australia. Yet, if you study his strategy and read his speeches through the years, his plan is to get Telstra the brand into every aspect of Australian life. The company whose example he cited in his plans was AOL, and if you look at the directions they have been taking, a clear picture can be seen. Telstra have blamed their introduction of a 3GB cap (upload and download inclusive) on the 'fact' that overseas data is too expensive and due to leechers, those people who buy broadband but don't continue using it like a dialup connection. Interestingly, Telstra own 90% of the fibre and copper wire infrastructure in Australia but have also included local data transfer into the 3GB as well - *except* (And here's the good part) when using Telstra's own web portal www.bigpond.com. You can download as much music and reviews, streaming video, game demos and files, news, and other amazing content as you want without being charged to the quota. Yes ladies and gentlement, they are succeeding where AOL has failed. Telstra's aim is to cordone off the entire Australian Internet population into their own Intranet, like a herd of sheep, and all is going to plan. Now that the artificial bottlenecks have been put in place and we have been charged to buggery out of accessing the global part of the Internet (US8 cents per megabyte if you go over the 3GB), the shackles are popped on and we're *free* to roam around in captivity.
Telstra is a telecommunications company that happens to be the largest company in Australia. It was created by the government as a public utility by from the public purse in the early 1900's. Through the 20th century, the Australian public paid for all of its infrastructure development many times over.
If the CEO of Telstra (Ziggy - http://members.ozemail.com.au/%7Eisherwood/fugiti
The only way for this situation to get better is if the government (who still owns 51% of Telstra), make a decision to split the company into service and infrastructure, then keep the infrastructure publicly owned (just like the road system). Only then are we going to see competition in Australian broadband, and only then will we find freedom.
on companies who impose significant structure changes to the service they provide to end users who are under a long term contract. While I know that a TOS contract usually includes clauses that say the terms can be changed, the service has been signifcantly altered to a point that it is technically a new contract. I hope this comes out in court and is made illegal so that existing contract holders do not get screwed over.
Now, on the flip side, I think that a limit to bandwith that is reasonable is not a bad idea. 3GB seems a tad low (though I rarely exceed that much in amonth), but functional. I would think that a 3 to 5GB per month cap is workable, with speeds reduced to 56K afterwards until the end of the month.
Here is a hint to all you bandwidth sucking warez servers and downloaders. Broadband does not give you license to offer up licensed software and copyrighted materials to the public. In addition, most of you do not know how to set up your damned servers anyway and your connections upload speed is not good enough to justify any large file transfers anyway. Leave it to the pro-warez folks, there are plenty of coroporate sponsored *sic* warez servers out there, more than enough for all if you need to and know where to look. You are the assholes killing of broadband for legitimate uses.
There should be a class action lawsuit against Optus suing for emotional damages arising from the new pricing plans.
;]
... who's with me?
Okay, you all cringed, I know it, but bear this out a moment.
Recently MS has been on a buying splurge, purchasing small 1-5 sat networks and one large multi-sat network. They have also announced interest in working with areo space to design and launch their own sats in hopes of creating a large space based two way sat network that is self switching (meaning that they transfer traffic amoung themselves logically in stead of beaming down to earth in one bounce).
Now, we all know that this is a rather latent connection, poor for gaming or real-time streaming apps, but otherwise it is a massively fast, bandwith redundant system. MS will probably hoist their MSN service on top of the stack (no worse than AOHell), but as you also know you don't have to do anything but connect to their network and then use your own apps to surf and what not. They may even contrive to lock up their network access like AOHell has, but as we have recently seen there are readily available alternatives that cut out most of the smoke and mirrors and let you connect as if it were basically a standard ISP.
The potential for bandwith on this network is staggering according to analysts, with speeds reaching 100MB/s per user. MS intends to hook this sucker into the backbone itself, or rather become a segement on the backbone. There would be corporate to soho to home accounts, but tenative plans show the home accounts with a 100GB month cap and 45MB/s bandwith only costing 49.99 per month... that's sickeningly fast in comparison to any other service available, and at reasonable cost.
This is a global network, all space based, with coverage over 85% of the planet. Hardware would run from 200 one time for a fixed PC to 500 one time for a mobile user (nothing like having a 45MB/s mobile connected laptop!).
Industry rumbles also indicate that AOHell/Turner in concjuction with TRW/Boeing and a french company are considering the same thing, but with 10-50MB/s service and cheaper hardware (though a very proprietary AOHell administered network as we all know them to do).
Raw info from MS puts the finalization date at summer 2004 for US and Euro coverage and 2006 for hitting the 85% mark. That isn't too shabby.
So, flame away MS haters, but give it a moment's thought... 45MB/s speed is flat ass moving and a major move forward. The only alternative is fiber, and for cable/dsl to compete they will be forced to streamline their operations and open up their currently dark fiber for customers... it will drive bandwith prices dramatically down worldwide over time, which is a 'Good Thing'.
Actually, I can see this being a problem with any type of bandwidth counter.
Let's say I don't like you or whatever, and at the beginning of every month/billing period I send 3 GB of UDP packets to your IP address. It will only take me a few hours to transmit this amount of data to you.
Your computer will ignore the packets, but the ISP's counter will log them and, blammo, have fun in 28k land.
I can only imagine the tech support hell I'd have to go through to get satisfaction - if ever.
That would suck, for lack of a better word.
Stupider like a fox! - H.S.
I hear that AOL/TW is looking to spin off their cable company to restructure.
On June 12th, Bell Sympatico here in Canada is implementing a cap as well. 5GB/month @ $44.95 (CAD), and then $7.95 per Gig over the limit (in 100MB increments). The plan seems to be to add tiers later on.
"Basic" service - 128kbs, 1GB limit - $29.95
"Normal" - 1.2Mbs up, 250kbs down, 5GB limit - $44.95
"Ultra" - 3Mbs up, 650kbs down, 10GB limit - $69.95.
Raising quite the uproar here, as the only major alternative is Rogers Cable, which will be doing the same thing shortly.
- In hell, treason is the work of angels.
I hardly use their mobile services (which i have), and don't think that kind of radiation is good for the brain...
so, why don't they increase the charges of their mobile services, or limit the usage of their Optus "YES" time (which is where customers with OptusMobile can talk to anyone else on the same network for free for 20mins during 8pm-12am on weekdays) or even abolish that "YES" time !
should have something like a AU$0.45 for 8min pricing or something similar, to anyone on any network.
Optus just shot themselves in the foot.
and they will lose customers, rather than attract any !
one word
Rasterman...
I think that when you buy a connection that says it is of a certain speed, that you should be able to use it to its maximum limit. Otherwise, they should modify that speed to what they are actually going to allow you to use in a month. They are not doing this because of broadband's so called abusers. They are doing this because they realize that by using those so called abusers as an excuse it will allow them to stagger usage thereby allowing them to increase their user base and tier their prices; thus making them more money while having a descent scapegoat to blame. I do think that the Australia needs a better deal on international broadband but the reality is that once broadband does become cheaper does anyone here really think the ISPs will get rid of tiered pricing schemes or per megabyte download charges? This will lead to the same thing that happened in the US when speedier modems were created. Years of dual pricing and blood letting by the ISPs with the industry all the while claiming it is the cost of the technology upgrades. Do you all know that many US ISPs were created or expanded in the US only after the modem speeds had increased? Another words, the hardware they bought already used the higher speeds and new standards, yet they still tiered their prices even though they had to actually slow down the speed of their RAS modems. I remember some BBSs that did not even have internet connectivity were claiming bandwidth cost when charging their members. Having known a person who owned one, they paid for phone lines not connection speeds. If the reason the cost of this bandwidth is so high is because of connections to sites outside the country, why not set up an intra-continental caching server farm; this would resolve many downloading issue rather well. Finally, I would like to point out that even if the number of people affected by higher rates was only 10% of their users that is still a HUGE number of people, people who specifically bought these connections because of the promise large bandwidth. Even though the idea of charging this 10% who fully use the bandwidth may sound nice, these 10% are the ones that often introduce people into broad band and were the first to use it. They are also the 10% that will move to your competitor for the better deal. They may cost a lot now but they will be the difference between profitability and bankruptcy soon enough. Think about it, as online media service and games such as Everquest become common, the only way these ISPs will be able expand is in growing this 10% who rapidly utilize these services and will attract others to them. Remember these are people who can never use dial-up and are often loyal to an ISP with a fair deal. In fact in looking at it, the ISPs may want to be careful admitting that so few of their users need a lot of bandwidth, as it appears most people using their services do not really need it. Low end ISDN does not cost that much anymore and its speeds while slower are at a fixed charge. In fact ISDN speeds and stability may be better match for these ISPs users. On one last note, I happen to be a person who downloads, beta tests, and works with Linux and other open source products like Open Office. I need a lot of bandwidth to do so. For those of you who think I should be charged more, remember that next time you pay a premium because your ISP uses a Microsoft product, or when you go looking for an open source applications and do not find one and thus have to pay a couple of hundred for a closed source product. Not all of us in that 10% are Warez users or Gamers, some of us save people like you all many hundreds of thousands of dollars. If anyone should have to pay for our bandwidth, it is those of you who readily use our wares and never pay a penny.
I am the last person you would expect to be pro-Telstra - I hate to say it but for once Telstra have done the right thing with their BPA policy - maybe optarse can take a lesson from them?
Since removing the cap on the cable modem speed and introducing their revamped game site GameArena
I have to say that I am glad that I stayed with Telstra. For me it means
a) No MB usage for playing games 24hours a day on GameArena
b) No MB usage for using GameArena file library where one can get all *nix iso's for free
c) No MB usage for email
Now I dont know about you, but I can live with my 3GB cap based on the above.
This is a trip! Consider the scenario we are facing in the coming years.
When the dust settles we will have the following conditions to be true:
We'll all go back to renting video tapes and watching re-runs on TV and the internet will only be useful for making some purchases, some email, and a few other things. But the roadblocks imposed by the Corporatization of the Internet will result in the degredation of the Internet to such a point that it's usefulness will be limited and no one Corporation, or Group, will be able to realize any of it's potential.
The internet will suck.
... that'll put a cap on all those Optus spammers. Once they've spewed their 3GB, let their connection speed drop to 28k8!
Nope..28kbps it is..that wasn't a typo.
AKA 3.6kB/s; so it's slower than dial-up.
Can anyone from European countries comment on how DSL/T1s/Cable Modems are sold over there?
In paticular I'm interested in Holland, but I'd be curious to hear about other countries as well.
With the 3Gb limit, how will we ever be able to keep up with Microsoft's security patches? This could be a national security threat.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Optus caps bandwidth
Dialup speed after three gigs
Aussie geeks are fucked
Calculate the bandwith costs to cover four million people listening to 128 kbps Internet radio instead. To serve this, you'd have to be thinking 4,000,000 * 16 * 1024 bytes per second. Each OC unit (Optical Carrier, as in OC-3) transmits data at 51.84 Mbps, or 6,794,792 bytes per second. Divide out and you're going to need an OC-9645.
Or you could get an ISDN line and multicast your Internet radio program to the entire Internet. The only problem with that is that it seems the average commercial ISP doesn't deal much with multicast users and definitely doesn't promote it like it should, especially with home users. I suppose it'd be a support hassle in their minds, but it'd save a ton of bandwidth.
In the end though, do ISPs really care? You're paying them for bandwidth and they don't really have any incentive to help you conserve it.. especially if you're a large Internet radio broadcaster as their customer. They'd rather sell you some massive pipe when you could have gotten by with a much smaller arrangement and used a more efficient "broadcasting" technology.
I don't understand the units here. How many bits does it take to get 3 gravities of them?
Why do I pay the same amount as somebody who downloads 10 gigs of stuff a month? There are infrastructure costs (as with any other utility), but ultimately my money goes to pay for the hardcore anime fan's habit.
Furthermore, if I want to, say, run a webserver so friends can download movies I made, I can't. Why? Because my broadband provider is trying to lower excessive bandwidth, and doesn't allow any webservers. Which shuts me out, even if I can afford the bandwidth for my website which gets 100 hits a month (which is optimistic for my website).
People Need To Pay For The Bandwidth They Use. I dislike that my bill goes to pay for somebody else's excessive usage. You should pay for bandwidth like you pay for your cellphone. During business hours, it's a cent a meg. Off hours, it's a quarter of a cent. Whatever. I don't want to pay for your bandwidth.
Jack Valenti and the MPAA are to technology as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone
yeah, flonk it monther!
This was IMO bloody insightful stuff. My kingdom for some mod points!
Bully on us
An important piece of the puzzle, however, is how much consumer traffic (which is what we are discussing here, yes?) is transoceanic.
If, as I suspect is the case, US surfers use the vast majority of their bandwidth within the US, there are no meaningful subsidies being extracted from the poor oppressed peoples of Europe.
Far more transoceanic consumer internet traffic is likely to come from Europeans surfing US sites. And they pay for it. Tough luck.
Look the U.S. created and gave the world the internet. It isn't our fault that bandwith and the sweet air of american freedom go hand in hand.
It's not our fault other countries fucked it up.
Nuff said.
Nerds should not be living in such places. Perth is a great town with great scenery, you should be out living in it. If not, then fly to America, live in California and be a geek. Just don't be a geek someplace nice.
Moron, 550Mb (megaBITS) = 68.7625MB (megaBYTES).
Not very damned much, and I doubt it's what you meant.
Seriously, are they going to find a way to exempt
incoming spam, etc?
I get tons a month. Why should i be charged for it or loose bandwidth beacuse of it?
Stop the spam/DOS's first, then perhaps its something to be discuss...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
What would happen if most subscribers cancelled service and refused to pay calcelation fee?
I think that would get thier attention!
I guess only the very rich will be using XBox-Live in Australia then.
Example: I'm downloading a 650 Meg file. The first minute I'm really cranking speed, but after that it kicks down because I've exceeded my burst rate. This would have let me load a web page in no time, but keeps me from sucking bandwidth. This also doesn't nail me in the fourth week of the month for getting a new distro in the first week. Bandwidth is not per month, it's per second. Overall usage really shouldn't matter (who cares what I do at 2 AM? I'm the only loony on!), it's the bitrate. Want it faster, pay more.
When you buy a line, you should own that bitrate at every second for no extra cost. Bursting ought to be something you can buy above that. And the smart provider would include that in the default plan to make their customers really happy. I just can't stand this per month thing...
SIG: HUP
Anyone want to go in on creating a few PC Rooms there? Looks like they'll be very popular there if there's no fat pipes to the net available. :)
BMaximus
3GB/month is 100MB/day, well more than reasonable usage. The only way DSL can be as cheap as it is is because it's highly shared. Some method has to be in place to keep hogs from abusing the system to the detriment of others.
Please go and read how multicast *really* works, then revise your statement :o)
use of multicast will bring down majority of traffic hogs, news , movies etc. And will give power to hands of joes to distribute information they want at no virtually no cost. It may be pirated content, or just their own programming.
Most likely it will start out to be pirated content, then it will get oversaturated, and people will look towards alternative stations for truly creative content.
Time to migrate to IPv6, so those providers will stop dropping like flies. Make a mandate for companies to convert to IPv6 and start gradually fining those who don't comply. In the end they will be dead, because they are inflexible, those who will master IPv6 will bring power to the people.
ha!! I'll wager the new M$ system will not support any Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD or other *nix servers.
I'll wager that the protocols supported will be patented just so they can be different. By analogy: An oval wheel on a properly designed axis will rotate and with enuf design you might be able to balence the sukker too.
The idea being that if you can replace all round wheels with patented oval ones then the masses will flock to your new invention and the round wheels will die off before anyone notices that the oval ones were a stupid idea to begin with - at which point you re-introduce the round wheel idea (call it innovative) and you have preserved the monopoly.
you dumb aussies, you're fucked! FUCKED i tell ya!
better get on board a good ship and go to a real country...like Zimbabwe!
Most of the world's fiber is "black". It has never been turned on. There is no shortage of backbone bandwidth. Just a shortage in desire to provide a useful service.
If it's more economical to use a 56k dial-up modem than a crippled broadband connection, then hook me up to the phone line, because ironically, it will actually be cheaper and faster.
This will happen where ever the telecoms are privately owned. Don't tell me you didn't see it coming.
that last year Optus lost $400 000 000... what do you expect? If they have to survive, they have to post a profit. They need to cut costs.
There is a bigger picture here that is being missed. THe whole reason we in Oz have such crap comms. is due to an appalling lack of infrastructure, due to Telstra's monopoly of the market. In a nutshell, they will only allow what is good for their shareholders, and as such the infrastructure sucks. Although I live in the middle of a city of 1 Million people, Adelaide, I can't access ADSL nor broadband, due to the distance to my exchange and the demographic of the suberb I live in. My modem connection gets 9600 or 12000bps max, and they can't fix it.
So I would propose an infrastrcuture based on spread spectrum radios set up by groups of like minded individuals with crap access, or a grudge with crappy broadband/ADSL. The cost of these units is similiar to ADSL modems and no license is required. They plug straight into your network card. They run at 10 Mb/s. They have a range of 30 miles. With a star topology and only requiring one decent connection to the real internet at the hub it should be quite easy to set up P2P networks that supply most of a users need.
Any takers?
Australia has a low population density with heavy surburban sprawl. Australia is definately not well suited to wireless infrastructure.
Australia seems to have the worst information technology condition, or siutation of any develped country Ive ever heard of. They have an oddly restrictive plicy from the national govt and that's coupled with this infrastructural problem.
Presumably this is because of the cable operators themselves. Local Ozzie traffic is "free" in that there is not a per bit fee. International is not. Considering that (for most countries, Korea one of the exceptions) the bulk of traffic usually originates in the U.S. I would think that a large number of broadband users d/l'ing items from international sites could seriously affect the bottom line of various ISPs.
It's understandable they are taking this approach, although I would like more information about why. I'm assuming it's because of the above, but providers like Optus have partial ownership of some of the cables. This, I would think, means that Optus does not have this restriction, but perhaps they are taking this tack for other reasons?
Anyone with more recent information about the Australian cable operator and ISP scene?
Linux is UNIX.
Can't they make the change more slowly?
Currently I am allowed to download 19.5GB for my $75/Month. (roughly $0.003/MB)
On the new plan, 3GB/Month for $80 is about $0.026/MB
That's about an ***EIGHT-fold*** increase in one change!
I would disagree that there are no alternatives to optus. If you check broadbandChoice ( an EXCELLENT guide to broadband in Oz ) I think you'll find that XIS is a reasonable alternative. And personally, i prefer this tactic to Optus' previous system of banning you for life if you violated a constantly changing limit.
4,000,000 listeners off a single 100,000 watt antenna? where do you live anyways? I haven't heard of any single radio station that can claim 4 million listeners, the weekly top 40 which is run on thousands of stations is still in the tens of millions of listeners.
Besides which, radio does have a saturation point. Every large object can reflect or absorb that radio signal, so that there are shadows, or possibly echos. Not to mention static that can interupt the signal.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Quantity is not the only consideration - distance also impacts on the overall Internet load. I can tell you that, living in Australia, downloading a file from Melbourne Uni mirror is not only faster than downloading it from the States, but it is also less load on the global telecom system.
.au to .us to .uk to .something before it gets to .za! How many hops until the price goes up?
Why should a 1Mb file from the Brisbane Courier, aka local, newpaper cost the same as a 1Mb file from Cape Town? Try pinging www.mg.co.za from Aus and you may see the route go from
-AD
Some of my friends recommended www.netspace.com.au for their ADSL packages, worth a look, but pricing smells abit like "i resell some line down from telstra" but its quite attractive for the bandwidth caps check it out and see how ...
What's the big deal here???
I'm using Netspace as an ADSL provider, 512kbps, extremely reliable, available everywhere DSL is and 10gb/month traffic... 3gb peak (same as telstra/optus) and 7gb off peak (midnight-7am weekdays + all weekend). For a home user this is stupidly more than enough. And it comes at only AU$5/month more than telstra's equivalent (512k, 3gb/month).
For now, 10gb is enough for anyone... When the 'Next Big Thing' comes along, we'll deal with the 'Next Big Data Pipe'.
... and then there were none
It's true that if everyone used lots of electricity the price would go up, however the same is true for everything, it's just nice to not have to worry about the price of electricity and water since it's a flat fee...
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
What seems to be getting overlooked here, amidst cries against per MB/GB billing, is the fact that ISPs & Telcos don't pay for the data transfered, but the bandwidth.
For example, my colo charges me around $300 per Mbit, on a 95th percentile basis. This makes sense - think about it, once the lines and routers are in place, it doesn't cost to transfer data over them. Sure, there are overheads, maintainence work etc, but it's akin to making roads for fuel-less cars. It costs to get setup, but then the physical running costs are minimal. There is no direct costs associated with the level of utilisation of the pipes..
If they get their models right, they can split up the cost of their connections over the users and make a profit. It shouldn't matter if the customers use the bandwidth that they are paying for, becuase their costs should be covered.
What certainly should not be allowed, is advertising saying that usage is unlimited, when in fact is not. This is obvious infringment of the trade descriptions act, surely?