Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Will Cable Unplug the File Swappers?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the plug-this dept.

netringer writes "The cable companies are planning to give the RIAA's case a hand and limit P2P file swapping. Yahoo has the Business Week story that cable companies are considering going away from the flat rate pricing model for cable Internet access. They plan to set a lower bandwidth cap for the flat rate and the raise the rates for bandwidth hogs who exceed the cap."

2 of 794 comments (clear)

  1. Sympatico and Rogers by fatwreckfan · · Score: 5, Informative

    Here in Canada, Sympatico's ADSL is already capped at 5GB up and 5GB down per month. Roger's cable will be following suit soon, but still no official word. Any info that's available now can be found in the Residential Broadband User's Assocation forum at http://www.rbua.org/board.

    On top of the transfer caps both have increased the price of their service by $5/month, and apparently Rogers will be changing from a 3Mbps service to a 1.5Mbps service.

    I thought technology was supposed to move forward.

    1. Re:Sympatico and Rogers by Electrum · · Score: 5, Informative

      BTW, if any sympatico users with debian boxes running ipmasq are worried about keeping Sympatico honest about their usage, apt-get install ipac.

      Better yet, install MRTG. The mrtg-ip-acct program will read the IP accounting statistics directly from your iptables firewall. There is no need for the depracated ipchains compatibility module. Simply create a config file for it, such as /etc/mrtg.cfg:

      WorkDir: /var/www/mrtg/
      WriteExpires: Yes

      Title[eth0]: Traffic Analysis for tourian
      PageTop[eth0]: Traffic Analysis for tourian
      Target[eth0]: `/usr/bin/mrtg-ip-acct eth0`
      MaxBytes[eth0]: 12000000

      You will need to have it run every five minutes, using cron, so add an entry to your crontab:

      */5 * * * * root /usr/bin/mrtg /etc/mrtg.cfg

      Because the default page generated is named .html, for some reason, certain browsers (Internet Explorer) want to cache it no matter what you do. So the easiest thing to do is to wrap it in a PHP script, such as index.php:

      My cable modem provider limits us to one gigabyte per day. After numerous arguments with my roommate, including how exactly to read and interpret these graphs, and because they do not cover a day exactly (we are supposedly counted from midnight to midnight), I wrote a simple PHP script to modify the MRTG output with nice, easily readable usage statistics:

      http://david.maridia.com/mrtg/

      The numbers at the top of the page are always live, since MRTG graphs are not. Note that the page has a latency of at least one second, because it takes two counter readings, one second apart, to generate the current usage rate. This is not always totally accurate, but should be close enough. Reloading the page a couple of times may give better results. The source to the script is available here:

      http://david.maridia.com/mrtg/index.phps