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UK ISP Imposes Download Limits
Richard_at_work writes "The BBC news site is reporting that NTL have announced it will be imposing 1GB download limits per day for its users. As you can guess, reactions have not been mild :) One thing to note, NTL has said that they will only be persuing persistent offenders, so i guess they understand you cant track your usage to the byte! Also with NTL, they appear to ban the usage of VPNs, citing that their service is for resedential use only. Does this mean I can't email work now?"
They're going to lose a few customers now who take for granted the fact they can leech at 1Mbit 24/7 and are now throwing the toys out the pram - maybe they'll implement a similar pricing structure to DSL - thank God we're not in Australia w/ BigPond cos their prices are scary!
IMO, this is a blow for the British telecommuters out there. All I know is if Earthlink had the same policy I wouldn't be able to work.
I thought technology was supposed to make our lives easier?
We hav had download limits here in .au for ages... all our broadband providers limit usage.. I am on a 4GB ADSL Plan.. gives me 4GB/month!
1GB per day would be *very* nice indeed.
How much do you pay for your precious 4 gigs, and for that matter do you use it on p0rn?
Many countries have been living with monthly download caps for a while now. For example, Videotron (the largest cable ISP in Quebec, Canada) limits its users to 10gigabytes/month, which is 1/3 the amount NTL allows. 1GB per day is MORE than enough for anyone, even hardcore warez downloaders (30gb/month!) If someone has to download more than 1GB worth of software/music/etc it is easily possible to schedule your downloads. Even with 15 hours of streamed audio at 128Kbps, someone would only do about ~850megabytes. Stop putting your panties in such a fit for something other people have suffered through and accepted to live with already.
Now the best they could do is to sue for false advertising on "unlimited access". But once the cable company takes it out of the ads... everybody is screwd.
unless you are a frigen warez kiddie this is not a problem for people who get on the computer surf for a while and upload a few files/download a few files.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Just a matter of time until all ISP's start imposing monthly bandwidth limits. Something needs to be done to stop this.
I know when a new release of any (insert free OS here) comes out on 3 or 4 CD images I want to download them all at the same time because I'm forking out $60+ US to be able to get all 4 of them in a few hours. Not to mention stream a little porn, web radio, or download just about everything I can from file planet.
Putting a limit on downloading to stop software piracy is the same as duck taping a cracked dam back together. The only thing I can see this benifiting is for the company to fuck over the consumer who has purchased a service. If they can't provide 3 meg/s to every person on the system at the same time with "always on" than maybe they need to re-think their business model.
Quite frankly I'm happy that Radio, DSL, and Cable are now offered in my area, makes things like this virtually impossible because of the tight competition for such a still narrow market.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
My first ever isp was demon, then I went to btinternet for there free evening calls.. over the past 5years ive been all over the isp scene.. and watched as there TOS fluidlicy changed whenever you started to feel you where getting a good deal.
The only ISP that Ive never experienced this with is demon.
moo
Come on, this type of reporting is getting out of hand. It clearly states that this is for residential use only. If you are using it for business why not pay more for it. Youll get better quality for one, since you will be on nodes with other business customers. Minus the occasional code red and nimda probes.
I originally had residential cable service, I then outgrew what it offered and realized the cable company was just using it to 'push' content, not a true internet connection. So I simply found a company that offered the service I wanted, I ended up on a business class DSL line with all the features I need, and none of the side stepping you get from residential accounts.
Basically, my point is that you just look like a moron if you only accept whats presented to you and dont look for options to better fit your circumstances.
One Bum policy for NTL, one giant boost for ADSL
It's not going to make me popular, but I'm with NLT on this one. I don't think it's fair for bandwidth hogs to expect 100% capacity 100% of the time. I doubt it's even possible. NTL are merely saying that there comes a point when you're taking the piss.
What pisses me off is the "No VPN" rule. Unless I'm doing something stoopid like tunneling NetBIOS there is no additional overhead.
I think it's perfectly fair to ask customers to limit the NUMBER of IP packet that send and receive. But I think it's totally unfair to restrict what I fill those packets with.
I can't imagine really what home user would use a gigabyte per day downstream for... but then again, perhaps there are some who use that much. These users need to wake up to the fact that bandwidth costs money, it is by no means free. When an ISP finds that the bandwidth of their routers, backbone, or outbound links falls short of the demand, they have two choices:
- Increase the capacity of their network and pass the cost on to the customers in the form of higher subscription fees.
- Cap bandwidth usage per subscriber so that the total demand for capacity falls within the capabilities of the infrastructure.
Charging for bandwidth is fair, but I would like to see more flexible subscriber plans. Usually ISPs offer only a few limited home subscriptions with very low caps and limits, and business subscriptions that cost 10 times as much. Usually there is nothing in between. Also... not being allowed to run VPNs or NAT networks stinks. I'm glad my ISP has taken a flexible approach: basically they say "We sell you the connection; as long as you do not resell it, do whatever you want". Webservers, commercial activity, NAT networks, everything is allowed.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
So, does this mean that people can sue companies that advertise using pop-ups for using their limited bandwidth without permission?
Denver Isuzu Suzuki
We were forced to deal with these clowns in halls at uni because no other ISP dialup numbers would go through the phone system they installed. A really sweet deal from their point of view, and probably for the uni as well, but it sucked for everyone who had to use it.
NTL are the only ISP I know of that had their own hate site in the form of NTHell. Which they then bought out, employed it's creator and turned it into a customer services forum thing.
Cute, huh?
"If being a geek means being passionate about something, then I pity those who aren't geeks." - Pike65
If I didn't routinely download large amounts of files, ie upgrades to linux distros, game demos, movie trailers...I wouldn't need broadband. 1GB may sound like a lot, but these days, when we have 400mb demos such as the divine divinity demo, it's really not that much at all...
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
NTL is a merger of some many local cable companies, and half their departments don't even talk to each other (a friend works there so I've heard how disorganised they are).
This is so much so that someone else I know has managed to get away without having to pay for her cable internet for a while (don't know if it is still going on though). All because they initially bodged the installation and it worked periodically (where they gave her a month free because of this issue), but then it worked fine... so she phoned up each month to complain, and they gave another free month... add to that the account wasn't capped at all, instead of being the usual 512kbps downstream!!!
So you have to wonder why they're in so much debt (at least they have a good infrastructure though).
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
Secondly, there is no way a person could legally download more than 1 gig in a day.
That is simply not true. A RedHat Linux iso set is something like 3 gigs.
Australia specialises on these things.. standard for ADSL is 3GB/MONTH .. many places are changing to 6GB/month, but still.. 30GB/month would be nice.
:P How much of that 30GB+ is legal? 1GB? 2GB?
Of course, most ISPs don't charge for traffic between midnight and 6am, so their network gets slagged then, but it's not during a peak usage time for most people. And after you hit the limit, most ISPs will rate limit your DSL connection to 56/64/72k for the rest of the 30 day rolling window.
Sorry, but if you're doing more than 30GB of month at home, you're really lucky your ISP isn't just getting so pissed off that they report your downloads to the police
Richard at work said: Does this mean I can't email work now?...
:)
yet he uses a pipex DSL account at home.
so quite how it affects him is interesting
What's his secret agenda?
Good. The only people who oppose this type of thing are the media leeches. I would much rather have a monthly/daily limitation on my usage, for the tradeoff of more consistant throughput and perhaps a cheaper price.
1GB per day? Bring it on! Optus gives most people 3GB per month in Australia...
Plus we're only able to log 1GB/day or less of your traffic.
So don't use VPN's and don't use more than a gig/day of traffic.
Thank you.
NTL World Total Information Awareness Division
Internet ( P ) Pronunciation Key (ntr-nt)
n.
An interconnected system of networks that connects computers around the world via the TCP/IP protocol.
By definition it connects to computers "around the world"
If you are selling "internet" then you should be able to access whatever is pubically availiable over the "internet". Even if this means my work has publically made a VPN endpoint for me, I should be able to access it.
By restricting my access, you are no longer selling "internet" What you are selling is, well, not "Internet" I'm sorry, I just cannot come up with a term for what they are trying to sell, what word could one use to describe a network restricted to only certain type of activity to certain portions of the "internet". Maybe the word i'm looking for is "Shitter-net?"
So when they claim they are selling "internet" when in fact they are selling "shitter-net" wouldn't they be guilty of misrepresentaion of product or services?
-An american POV.
Here in the World's bottom (New Zealand) my download limit is 1GB per MONTH. It's a serious pain... I can get 8Mbit with ADSL as I live just 300 metres from the local exchange, which means I can use up my entire month's bandwidth in literally a few minutes. Not funny.
Never, ever lose a file again. Ever.
Anything preventing you guys in the UK from slinging ethernet out your window or setting up wireless access points and running the whole neighborhood (or country) from 1 E1 leased from MCI? With a big enough citywide WAN, you could probably mirror most of the big-and-interesting content (Red hat ISOs, etc) inside the WAN and rarely if ever have to go to the internet.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Yawn. #define istroll(x) x > 600000
here in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, Bell's Sympatico DSL service has a download cap of 10gb/month. And my roommates I (4 of us) are always under, even though we download our fair share.
In practical terms, what does it mean for us? We just don't download many movies.. anything else is fair game. It hasn't severly restricted our access, nor will it for the vast majority of users.
I couldn't imagine what we'd do to download 30gb in a month. It really isn't that restrictive at all.
If you need to be downloading more than 1GB per day, you can afford to upgrade to a business service. It's that simple.
I am online all day, download a build of Mozilla daily, often large games, even play games online like Unreal and Americas Army. And my laptop only logs a few gigs a month. Not to mention I watch streaming video on occasion (including all of MacWorld).
This only effects those who are downloading movies and excessive music.
Jesus Tapdancing Christ! And here I thought Broadband in the UK was just as bad as Australia! Even after this 'restriction' your average mp3 downloading warez kid will not be impeded in any significant way. I'd be happy with 1GB a day, I'm sure the rest of Australia would agree with me.
I'm an NTL customer who occationally used my work's VPN to check my e-mail. I'll be setting up a public webmail from work to get round the no VPN ruling, but I'll still be using it for work so breaking the spirit of the new contract. What will be the next step to separate work users from home users? No work related phone calls to home phone lines?
Omnis amans amens
I mean either you sell a flat-rate without limits or you don't. It's that easy. Everything else is misleading advertising.
What if I download two isofilename.ISO images in one day? I often do that because Linux allows the freedom to download whatever you want for free. I can try out new operating systemsThats far more than 1 GB of data b/c most CD-R discs hold 650 MB or so.
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
how they plan on filtering out the traffic from the guy down the street that has the Slammer Worm and Nimda from counting against my quota.
Until those lousy cable providers are more proactive against snuffing that stuff out, the limits should be high enough to account for that...
1Gb per day will provide unlimited surfing. They're not advertising unlimited downloading and they do appear to be being nice about it.
Show me someone who can surf the web and take in 1Gb of information inside 2.5 hours.
Down here in New Zealand if you want full speed DSL it will cost you NZ$99 (~US$50) for 1Gb per MONTH. For 128k DSL its around NZ$60 (~US$30) all up per month. Some people dont know how lucky they are :(
You're forgetting the simple facts:
1) Service is advertised as "Unlimited" and "Always On"
2) Service is sold as "Unlimited" for a fixed rate.
Now granted, in the TOS there is probably a statement to the effect that NTL is authorized to change the terms of the service agreement at any time.
Of course, and I highly suspect it, I may be talking out of my ass. -oqti
Secondly, there is no way a person could legally download more than 1 gig in a day.
:)
You obviously aren't running Debian unstable and getting daily updates of Gnome, KDE, Mozilla, and OpenOffice.
On the other hand, the reality is that ISPs don't budget for everyone to have their connections maxxed out all the time. The only expect people to use a small fraction of the allotted bandwidth. Doing so allows them to offer generally high speeds, for a relatively low price.
Around here, a T1 connection (1.44 Mb/s) will cost you around $1000CDN per month. Why do these people seem to think that they should be able to get the same service for $29.95/month? Don't they understand WHY T1's cost so much more?
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
We had no choice when napster came out, the p2p apps will use up all the bandwidth available slowing everything else to zilch. You can't provide enough bandwidth to satisfy them (obviously this is more important for a resnet than an ISP Though)
In some ways, this system is better than others such as banning p2p apps alltogether. 1 gig is a _LOT_ of bandwidth per day, if you think about it, especally if they only go after you when you abuse it multiple days in a row (we do this as well)
We are considering a system for the future using a rolling quota. Users get 1 gig a day which can store up if its not used (up to 3 gig worth) and "spent" however the user wants. If they go into negitive balance, they get throttled down to modem speeds until its positive again.
Its hard to be the "bad guy" and police bandwidth, but bandwidth costs money and somebody has to do something to keep costs down.
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act" - George Orwell
Remember BT anytime used to have the advert use the internet anytime whenever you want, well now its bt anytime 150 hours per month. :-(
I hear tell limits for bt openworld adsl are in teh piple line too.
Come on, a gig a day isn't bad - my 512k connection averages something like 200mb a day, and I consider myself a heavy user.
They're not trying to limit NAT or servers you run, they just won't support you if you do it. If you're up to running a LAN, I doubt you need tech support anyway.
Plus, there are still quite a few alternatives out there. ADSL is reasonably widely available in the UK. My 512k adsl is uncapped, static IP, good speed(except for the odd problem every three months or so) and 25gbp a month.
Poor frikkin babies. I get 5GB/month aggregate bandwidth on my residential broadband access. They get 1GB/DAY. Quit whining!
------- "From bored to fanboy in 3.8 asian girls" ----------
I've been staying on top of this right over the weekend (and had a /. story about it rejected 36 hours ago, grrrrr), so for those new to it, some links:
Massive thread on nthellworld.com, a offical ntl gripe site.
Complaint site
Basically, ntl are somewhat losing their nerve. I've exchanged emails with the MD of their home products range who claims to have only found out about this key strategic business decision on Saturday morning; he's either lying or incompetent, I suggest. The biggest gripe amongst the sane posters (barring all the "I pay for 24/7 and I'm going to damn well get it" breast-beating") is that the 128bps, 600kbps and 1024kps services all have the same download limit, making you wonder why you pay for the higher speed service.
It should also be pointed out that, unlike many other ISP's schemes, NTL offer no FTP mirror service with "free" bandwidth and recently started dropping alt.binaries groups from their newsspool, which is in any event so slow as to be unusable. So for big alt.binaries downloads or Linux ISOs, for example, customers are forced to external sites, pushing up ntl's bandwidth.
The biggest fear is that this is the thin end of the wedge. In the last two weeks, ntl have dropped a few warez newsgroups and introduced a fairly generous cap that won't inconvenience too many people. That's all well and good, but many think it won't stop there; once you get the caps in place and the groups erased, you can squeeze them down and down. ntl is desperately short of cash, newly emerged from Chapter 11 protection, and this would appear to be a beancounter-led efficiency drive that is turning into a PR nightmare.
I was part of a similar revolt over a no-servers line in the AUP a few years back (more info) and ntl backed down and clarified their position with a set of clear-cut and sensible rules. Let's hope that happens again.
You win again, gravity!
If you like listening to online radio all day long, a constant 56k stream can quickly add up to your 1gb limit.
I'm sure you can imagine what happens when I do publishing work. Uploading and downloading a single page of a yearbook to be printed is a number of megs.
SIG: HUP
hmm.. doing the math, thats (1024*1024)/24/60/60 - 12.13k/sec (if its continuous). if you assume a working day is 8 hours (yeah rite), then, your looking at 36.39k/sec for the working day continuous. i think thats probably ample enough dont you? at 12.13k/sec - your looking at as 128k line, at 36.39k/sec - your looking at less than 512k line.
i am on 2.5Mbit line, and, even when bombarding with 300k/sec downloads - i barely reach 1Gb per day, i get close - but, it isn't really that un-realistic is it?
>Secondly, there is no way a person could legally download more than 1 gig in a day
Legally? if I want to test a new linux distro, or freebsd or whatever like that, is not legal ? all of these are more than 1/2 gigs...
then... why VPN will not be allowed? I think that's not legal from the isp.
VPN doesn't mean "I'm linking to my workplace" , bit could also be "I'm vpn'ing my friend to test, to experience vpn, just to have a vpn 4 fun".
I was there.
Service is now sold as "max of 1 GB/day" for a fixed rate.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The VPN thing is a bit confusing. If you're going to limit someones usage, what do you care what they are using it for. Unless you are planning to offer a VPN service on the system and charge extra (with some value-add), this is just silly.
As to the overall limit, I don't see a real issue. If 1/2 of the people screaming about this because "they need to download linux distros" really were, Microsoft wouldn't have 1/2 the legal problems that they do.
These users need to wake up to the fact that bandwidth costs money, it is by no means free.
They know that, they pay > $40 a month for it with caps
Stanley Fienbaum is a troll. And a darn good one. Dont bother replying, just mod him down if you have points.
* The cap is exactly the same for all 3 tiers of service (128kbps, 600kbps and 1Mbit).
* The prices for these services are £14.99, £24.99 and £34.99 respectivly.
* This is coming from the same ISP that recently did away with most of the binary newsgroups because it was easier than investing in some new hardware to cope with the demand.
NTL's network can't cope with the demand, and that's a fact. Rather than update their network, servers and infrastructure, they find it more cost effective to charge their mostly loyal users the same price for an inferior service. I'm sorry, but that just doesn't wash with me. Broadband is being sent back to the stone-age.
slainfu
"I can't be a terrorist if you're sucking my bum."
1 gigabyte per day doesn't sound very bad at all. Even for anime addicts, that's far more than you're going to download (or upload!) in a day. This sounds like a very good deal, as long as they don't use it as a starting point and then push even further down from here.
A constant 56k stream for 24 hours continuously would only add up to a little over half a gigabyte.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
You have a point, but my sid install (full GNOME 2.2, kdelibs, mozilla AND mozilla-snapshot, and openoffice) averages maybe 20mb of updates per day. Debian uses bandwidth, but not gig/day type bandwidth.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
From a business perspective, this seems like a smart move. If 10% of the customers are using 90% of the resources (adjust the numbers to your liking), then either reaming that 10% with unbelievable fees or disconnecting them all together is a great way to increase profits. Now, from there, I could guess that the 10% mentioned are the users who run p2p software, and since 99% of the users running p2p software are violating copyright on a fairly regular basis, they can't really complain too loudly.
;)]), but I would bet the majority of broadband users don't know that uncopyrighted content exists on the internet (after all, due to copyright industry lobbying, no new content has come under public domain within the majority of internet users's lifetimes).
;) ) their customers as a group -- they wouldn't have a source of income. Maybe there are 'heavy' and 'light' p2p users, or perhaps 'sharers' and 'leeches'?
Here's what puzzles me: why do most broadband users pay for broadband service, which typically costs more than twice as much as regular POTS service, if not to pirate content on p2p networks? I know there are gamers out there that love the decreased latency, but what percentage of broadband users do they represent? I'm occasionally part of that demographic, but I only know a few other people that fit into that category. Some people like downloading and sharing uncopyrighted content (again, I'm one of those people [project gutenberg is awesome
So, really, I'm at a loss as to why people get broadband. Could it be that people really want web pages to load a split second faster enough to pay more than double price for internet access? If not, then what's going on? Clearly ISPs wouldn't disconnect or overcharge (too much
p2p is broadband''s killer app. Are broadband ISPs killing the killer app?
Maybe it's just that I'm under the weather and my brain's been in a low gear the past few days, but this doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
Two things:
Firstly, ntl support NAT setups. 1Gb a day for me isn't bad. 1Gb a day between me and my three housemates, with a bit of streaming audio, a bit of movie trailer watching, a bit of game playing, a little bit of Xbox Live (3Mb/min, I am told, that one), keeping four installs of Windows, two of Mandrake and two of Debian up to date... now that looks rather more intrusive. Even keeping a single copy of Win2k in patches can consume gigabytes a month!
I pay for a 1Mb cable modem connection that can saturate my 1Gb limit in under three hours. That doesn't sound like the "unlimited internet" I was sold.
Secondly, this is almost certainly the thin end of the wedge, as many other people with capacity limited broadband around the world have discovered. 1Gb/day now, 750Mb tomorrow, 250Mb next week. After all, no matter how many users you kick off, 80% of bandwidth will always be used by 20% of the users because of the shape of the bell curve. And those 20% of users are always in a minority, and that 80% of bandwidth sure is expensive.
You win again, gravity!
In Austria we had 1GB per month, and still have with one provider. An other provder has 4GB limit per month, and some others 8GB ... 1*30 is 30GB a month okay ... so well. And I am not talking about the prices. Depending on service and quality up to 100 Euro a month.
... well very different. All ADSL have 12Mbit down 1Mbit up, prices around 3000 to 3500 Yen (23 to 29 Euro) and I haven't seen any limits yet. Furthermore there is Hikari Fibre with 100Mbit and well costs installation 28000 Yen (ca 215 euro) and per month about 5600 yen (43 euro). But you can't have it everywhere yet. But huge areas in Tokyo are already prepeared for it.
Anyway I am living in Japan right now and this is
lg from Japan,
Gul
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
I pay about £30 a month (~45$) for a 512/256 unlimited connection. From that I'm able to run about half a dozen websites, apt-get from debian unstable regularly, usual downloading/browsing & the wife playing TSO almost 24/7 and I still only use up about 15GB/month. Heck, I'd happily pay more if it meant better service.
Even at 50:1 contention (theoretical, the actual is closer to 15:1 apparently), I rarely get less than 100% of the required bandwidth when I need it, and when I don't I don't care much - that's what contended means.
Unfortunately there are too many warez monkeys around that think maxing out a 1mb connection 24/7 is their right and think contention shouldn't apply to them (you should here the screams of indignation when *gasp* they only get 95% of their potential bandwidth! 'but I paid £30 a month for this service!' (um, no, you paid £30 for a contended service and should be damned grateful you ever get anything like the speeds you have at the moment).
The sooner the ISPs start banding their prices (eg. £20/mo for the casual browser, £30/mo for about 10gb/mo, £35 for 20gb/mo, £40 for 30gb/mo etc.) then the sooner people will start realizing that bandwidth costs money.
When I was a lad we had to use 300 baud, and sleep in cardboard box on tip.
This is nothing.
Norwegian telco Telenor has implemented a 1GB/month limit on their ADSL offering! And they offer various ways to pay for more, of course.
Luckily there's enough competition in the marketplace, and only the most clueless or brand-loyal seem to go for the Telenor ADSL "deal".
While some greedy scumbags are leeching their warez and pr0n through their residential connection, others have to survive on 3GB per month.
And no, not even with a caching proxy will you get very far on this limit.
What's the problem? These people need to learn what bandwidth is worth before they click Reload on a webpage ten times just for the hell of it.
First, the internet became big and we had the first big gold rush--mom & pop ISPs popping up all over the place. Then the big guys got involved and ran the mom & pop ISPs out of business with broadband. Broadband was full of promises: "high bandwidth! always available, always on!"
Once the mom & pops were dead, the "promise" of broadband was quickly squelched. First to go was the promise of "always available, always on!" For DSL users this meant forced use of PPPoE, a non-standard pushed by Redback Networks. Gone was DHCP. Per-packet charging suddenly had a foot in the door.
Next came the peer-to-peer and online gaming craze. The big corps had no problem shutting down home servers and blocking various standard internet port access. It's not like their subscribers had someplace else they could run to!
So here we are--no unlimited bandwidth, various standard internet ports either shut down or "filtered" (how many of you are aware your outward web browsing is transparently proxied?), and you can't do much of anything with the connection YOU are paying for.
Nice racket, eh?
This time the limit is set to 1GB , next time , they may change it to , say , 500M. You'll get used to it , I guess.
KOS-MOS
Case 1:
Assuming that they're capping it at 1 gigabyte,
1 gigabyte = 1,000,000,000 Bytes (I know it's a touch more, but for simplicity...)
(1,000,000,000 Bytes) / (86400 seconds) = 11,574 = 12KB/s
Case 2:
Assuming that they're capping it at 1 gigabit,
1 gigabit = 100,000,000 Bytes
(100,000,000 Bytes) / (86400 seconds) = 1,157 = 1KB/s
So basically you're better off w/ a 56K w/ no download cap. US$40/mo (Assuming similar rates) is not worth a faster ping.
Sounds like a euphemism to kill P2P, but basically anybody who really uses their home computer(s) is bullseyed. Ebay merchants, small business owners, students. IMHO, NTL may have just signed their own death warrant.
~A'Ëq'i4d)^'$ÊSÈòB
...provided that the pop-up was generated legitamately by the website you visited. Don't like it? Don't go back.
Gater style pop-ups are another matter...
wow, i used to have 1.5GB download limit per MONTH but then i upgraded to the more expensive package (i pay 150$ a month now) and i have a 3GB limit. I am in kuwait... 1GB a day.. wow...
----
12" ibook, G3 700, 640MB RAM, 20GB HD
Oh how I'd love to have a 1GB/day limit... All I have here is 3GB/month (Netvisão ISP, Portugal).
I purchased "Internet Access".
That to me means access to the Internet on whatever port or protocol I wish.
Technically it is now illegal for ntl: to advertise themselves as an ISP.
Gentoo Portage Directory -- 157 megabytes.
FreeBSD 5.0 ISO - 650 MB.
Remote Internet Backup -- 2GB.
An ISP that doesn't cap usage -- Priceless.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
The provision of so-called 'residential' services by broadband providers really disturbs me.
Typically in any area (thinking Europe, UK, Australia - true for US too?) there are only one or two high-speed providers to choose from. They offer two tiers of service: one is with a fixed IP, costing $lots per month and where one is charged by the incoming MB; the other is a residential service with a temporary IP -- that is often forcibly expired, killing connections etc. once or twice a day -- with an affordable cost and a relatively high cap before per-byte charging comes in.
These residential services though don't offer the Internet per se, but some sort of diluted version. No fixed IP means no reliable servers. No home-served content for you! I haven't yet seen a mainstream provider that offers IPv6 addresses; if lack of IPv4 addresses were the only motivation for this IP cycling game, then surely they'd offer a stable IPv6 address. The access agreements further compound the situation, with restrictions such as this 'no VPN', or no web serving, or only one computer on the connection, or no multiple accounts, or so on.
The dynamic IP stuff also means that one is pretty much forced to use an SMTP relay for outgoing mail, as so many sites blacklist known dynamic IP blocks out of hand. T-online here in Germany is about to start charging for their SMTP relay service!
The whole point of course is to extract the maximum amount of money out of the market. These service restrictions aren't there to cover otherwise present costs or the like, they're there to provide a differential betweeen their services, so that the providers can extract more money out of anyone who might possibly want to use the 'net for anything serious.
In the same way that major Telcos dragged their feet with ISDN and the like in the UK and in Australia, pricing it per minute _and_ per byte, and thereby siginificantly delaying the adoption of the 'net by businesses at large, the current practices are also limiting the adoption of the Internet as a tool for anything other than passive content consumption.
If there were a level marketplace for internet services, then the situation probably wouldn't last. But of course this isn't the case when there are $10^8 barriers to entry against an entrenched monopoly or duopoly.
Offer a cheaper service, but with a data limit, and offer a more expensive service with no data limit.
For example
512 kb + 10 gb/month for £10
512 kb + 25 gb/month for £20
512 kb + no limit for £30
1Mb + no limit for £40.
I've always had 3GB/month. They claimed that whenever there are no limits, speed suffers. That's cable though, not ADSL. The big advantage here is that they made it from the beginning, obviously when people have rights it will be hard to take them away, regardless of the motives.
The banning of VPN's seems to be tied to both bandwidth use, and ensuring that people only use the home service for non-commercial reasons.
I live in the US, but how does this appy to non profit employees like me? I work for a Laboratory under a University that does Not For Profit R&D work. Would I be restricted or is there a way around it for me?
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
FreeSWAN with some patches allows you to wrap the ESP packets inside UDP packets.
Then all you have to do is get around the initial udp/500 IKE stuff.
I assume you could edit the ports that pluto listens on on both ends.
If ISPs blocked udp/500 and protocol 50 and 51, that would stop IPsec based VPNs.
Of course, there's always CIPE, and SSH tunnel, etc.
Get your own free personal location tracker
I Posted this on my site yesterday along with an explanation of exactly why this is unreasonable (but then the BBC are never good at keeping up to date with tech news) and have since then received an email from NTl: Dear Sir, I will be sending an update out within a day or so. I am sorry for the manner and way this has happened. I learnt of it on Saturday morning and have been managing it since. Our problems is that there are a few users, under 1% of our total, that are setting up such heavy usage patterns that it is affecting the quality of our other 550,000 customers. You may not notice it, but it is coming through in different localities. You need not worry. There is no daily cap to speak of, our goal is to manage the customers who are using the service for consistant and prolonged periods of time especially around peak hours. This can mean that a few have set up mini-data centres from which large-scale file sharing is taking place. Further clarity will follow, but we truly value your custom and hope that your fears of restricted service fall away -- our typical customer uses 20X less capacity than the recommended usage level (and even that level will not mean you are disconnected or service stopped). Many Thanks, Aizad Hussain PS. I have also copied this email to Bill Goodland, our internet director who can address some of your specific points.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Buy a radio.
Perhaps pop a music CD into your computer.
Honestly, even if it is only half a gig per day I would honestly hate to think that my neighborhood was saturating a T3 to listen to the frigging radio.
I have no sympathy for streaming audio, sorry. Pr0n, yes. Downloading MP3z/ripped movies, sure - just as long as you download it once and burn it to CD so you can play it as often as you like without soaking up more bandwidth.
Simple, ya?
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
If you combine all the trickles of bandwidth you take for granted on an always-on connection it becomes apparent rather quickly that it's not very hard to exceed 1GB/day.
Right now I'm listening to Digitally Imported at 128kbps. Over a 24 hour period that will eat almost a gig and a half (granted, to be kind to their servers I turn it off when I'm AFK, but I'll still be listening to DI or SomaFM 8-10 hours a day most week days, and potentially much more if I'm on some sort of coding binge). Add in IRC (maybe on multiple networks if you're a junkie or have special interests that have their own IRC networks, ie. GamesNET or Freenode), IM (which can be three or four different sessions if you have friends on all the major networks, thank god for gaim/trillian), a SSH session or two that you leave open for convenience, and fetchmail checking your remote mail server every 10-20 minutes or so and you could be using most of your daily bandwidth allotment on things you're not even actively doing, but that just kind of get taken for granted in the background.
If you're a gamer, Half-Life (which has the stingiest netcode I know of in a game that's still heavily played) will typically use almost 200MB over a 24 hour period. I know some people who almost play it that much, too. Other, newer games easily use 2-3x that much, especially if you tip them off to the fact that you have a broadband connection.
Anyway, it's true that bandwidth isn't free, and I don't even think NTL is doing anything particularly wrong by imposing a cap. I kind of wish Comcast would do it, then maybe all these people who keep their connections pegged at the max all day with file sharing traffic (like my roommates before I asked them to stop) would calm down and I could have a decent connection outside of 3am-8am. My likely small additional usage would be worth a reasonable overage charge to me under these circumstances.
I do think all their subscribers should be given the opportunity to bail from any current contracts without penalty, though, since they signed up for "unlimited usage".
Game... blouses.
I happen to have had to be one of those 'clowns' at times, in Colleges here in Australia. The students (well, a very vocal few) bitched about limited internet access regularly. The fact of the matter is that only a year or two ago, bandwidth costs for the colleges (and the universities) were up around the $120 per gigabyte (about $75 US - it is still even more than that from the commerical providers). Imagine someone downloading an ISO of a pirate game - it's almost cheaper for the college to go and buy them the goddamn game than to pay for the download!
It aint free for anyone, kiddo. Not your ISP, and not you. So stop complaining.
I've never understood why ISP's, especially in the U.S., don't follow a pricing model akin to U.S. cable television? I.e., sell a "Basic Broadband" package for one level of bandwidth usage, an "Enhanced Package" for another, etc. You get the point. If the customer goes over their monthly bandwidth limit, send them email and bill them per kilobyte for the excess.
Selling unlimited access to all comers for the same price just encourages people to imagine that an ISP is a public utility and that access to bandwidth is a right.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
You're requesting the ads - why? To continue the movie analogy, there's nothing stopping you from showing up 4 minutes 36 into the movie, and saving your employer that much.
Your computer is sending out a request "Hey - let me see this animated gif", the server is simply satisfying that request. There are enough tools out there to prevent 99% of this, so it can only be assumed that you want to see all of that "content".
Last post!
So how much bandwidth does 24/7 gaming use?
I sure can spot the difference between a lan game, adsl game and a 56k modem game.
Does that mean that you have to stop gaming after 4 hours?
My doctor has just told me I need at leas 8 hours of sleep a night. This is totally unfair. What use is existance if you can only use it for two-thirds of the time.
;-j
This is not what I paid for, and I will be writing to my MP. Just because Good is an omnipitent entity it does not give him the right to impose such limits on me.
Do you mind, your karma has just run over my dogma.
http://www.stopwar.org.uk/
But look at it this way.
A lot of broadband customers in the UK are uni students in shared accommodation. I live in a house with 6 people - we have Telewest's 1Mbit service.
Between the 4 of us that regularly use the connection we average over 50Gig/week, which is around 2Gig/day. Obviously it varies, but the point is that the 1Gig/day limit that NTL has imposed applies to everyone, regardless of the number of computers sharing the connection.
Now I don't know about NTL's policy, but certainly Telewest specifically allow multiple users to share the same connection.
The reason I recently switched from Sympatico Canada- (10Gb limit) to Primus (no limit) was because I listen or watch broadcast media. My trouble is that I often forget to turn the darn thing off. At one time one could watch BBC at 300Kb/s - at that speed it does not take long to get a large unexpected charge.
Semper ubi sub ubi
One GByte is insane. I would have to really try hard to use up that much in one day legally. One can only download so many Linux distributions per day.
My own connection has an unofficial limit of 5GBytes/month. Per month people! Not per day.
According to ipacsum, I average between 1 and 2GB per month here.
There is a quote about using up your time in 2.5 hours. How often have you ever sustained a 110KB/s download for 2.5 hours every day?
Yes I have downloaded game demos and linux dists but I have never exceeded 5GB in a month. I am a bit of a light user since I don't video conference, listen to net radio, or pirate.
kinda reminds me of someting ;)
If you are downloading and uploading Office docs, then that 4Gb wont last very long..
When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
4,294,967,296 bytes in 4 gigs divided by 2,592,000 seconds in a month is 1,657 bytes per second or 13,256 bits per second.
If you actually use a 56k around the clock, you get three TIMES more bandwidth than 4GB/mon at high speed. They are getting HORNED, dudes, if they are paying anything more than a third LESS than 56k speeds.
Bel, the mostly sane.. "Of course I can't see anything! I'm standing on the shoulders of idiots." -- Me
I use Bell's Sympatico DSL service ($45 CAD per month) and the limit is 5GB (up/down)load PER MONTH.
I can't imagine running up 1GB per day.
The US Army: promoting democracy through unquestioned obedience
On not being able to save the movie trailers. :^)
I also like to view the larger files. If you
are viewing Quicktime trailers on Windows, what
I do is use ACDSee to view the contents of my
C:\WINDOWS\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5\
since Windows Explorer won't show you the files
in those directories. Then I click the option
at the top to sort the directories files by file
size or file type. You should easily be able to
spot the files this way. Use the Copy or Move
option to put them where you want them. This
way you don't have to pay for a version that
will save files.
In the feedback article it says they are only looking at the monthly report that averages under 1 GB per day. This means you would have to dl more than 1 GB per day for the whole month to violate the limit. I really can't see anyone complaining over that. It is perfectly reasonable.
-You may license this sig for only $6.99.
I see a lot of people griping saying that nobody could be legally using 1gb a day but thats simply not true.
Take anime fansubs for instance. Some people might find it questionable but most agree that distributing unliscened anime to be legal.
You could easily eat up 1gb a day if you downloaded a few episodes of whatever had been released that day.
Of course that costs the isp a lot of money if it's done during the day so I can certainly understand the reasoning. They can't help the fact that telecos still charge huge amounts of money for bandwith. The real criminal here is that bandwith is just expensive and will continue to be so untill the infastructure is improved.
Why not charge people by their usage + some basic overhead.
It would be tough for anyone to complain if they were charged $20/mo plus a dollar a gigabyte downloaded (or whatever is the bandwidth cost for your provider plus some fair markup).
I understand how the broadband companies don't want to raise prices on 90% of the users for the extra cost that 10% of their users incur.
So charge by use. I don't think anyone would argue "No, I shouldn't have to pay more just because I use more." There may be a few people out there that think bandwidth is free and unlimited, but.. well they're dumb.
Imagine paying $40/mo for gas. No matter how much you use. If you drive 4000 miles a month or 40. It doesn't make much sense does it? Bandwidth has cost per gigabyte just like gas has cost per gallon. It's not like 'pirating' software, where there's no additional cost incurred. When you use bandwidth, you are causing a cost to your ISP. You should be responsible for that.
That said, they shouldn't be bothering me with WHAT I do with the bandwidth I pay for.. that stuff bugs the crap out of me..
the reg posted this storry yesterday so i got an opertunety to mail the guy who started that flame page...
here [belgium] every isp works with limitations
well 2 dont 1 sucks and one seems to be great but their new and i doubt it will last.
we get 10GB month or roling 30 day's
i can make that amount of traffic with ease in a few hours (actualy it's harder not to make that amount of traffic)
and guess what it doesnt have to be illegal stuff
it's all nice in the grey and white zone.
basicaly it's the only thing about capitalism I hate. i realy would like to see a goverment owned isp. I pay taxes, that would be something I would actualy like to pay taxes for. no bomming a country that is claimed to treaten the """"free"""" world with weapons that any factory in the food cosmetics or chemestry sector can make SO much more efective.
free constantly upgraded hella fast unmonitored internet for all
popups are effectivly requested and downloaded by you're browser and you allow you're browser to retrieve/execute them. Any decent browser alows you to turn them off. In other words you are explicitly allowing you're browser to let them pop-up.
red.
Seriously, yes, the bandwidth costs more, but there's nothing stopping anyone from going back to 56K if they think thats a better deal now is there?
If you're going to complain "but 56K is too slow!" ... well, thats what you're paying the extra for.
smash.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Comcast in November last year finally allowed VPN access on their lower tier cable service ("silver"). Apparently they got tired of people asking about VPN and then going to DSL for the same price when the answer was no.
~corporate tool, but employed~
They shouldn't! You didn't ask for
that and you are paying for the service...
That's the whole reason behind banning VPNs, etc. They just want to be able to charge you extra for a "business" account. They figure plenty of telecommuters work for large companies who have already afforded sophisticated IT, so they'll have plenty of money to pony up to support their telecommuters. It's not uncommon to see static IP or "business" accounts sell for 2-3 times as much as standard. This really sucks for freelancers and contractors, because it comes right out of their own pockets, not The Corporation's. But if it's any comfort, Earthlink in the US sells static IP accounts for $10-20 more than standard, so they're not as bad as most.
OMG, that is crap, That is just peple dereaming. they want more moeny so they are going to say that bandwith cost money, WHat cost money is the connection, but that is a flat rate, You get a nice T1 it is going to cost you the same weather you plug it in to a server and give free porn away, or if you stick it up your butt and get the nice tingle from it. Why they want to say bandwith cost money is because they want to have more people on there servis than they can support. There is only a large inital cost for ISP's, after they get the equpment payed for then the cost is minimal.
This is the same old same old BS, people trying to get people to pay for someting that is not even there! 1gig a day is no where near alot!
If people would put there foot down we would not have problems like that.
lets get this right.
I have a network, I pay for a switch some cables, lets say that cost me $150, to get a good switch and good cables and i only connect 2 computers togeather, Now i transfure some data, OMG i have to bill my self $1 because i just transmited a gig of data to my self! AHHHH..
Wate what next!! You buy your router, wate bettet yet you lease your hub/router. !! and you get to get charge if you use it more than 1 gig!! ahh!
this is just crazy and outrages me, it is beond being stupid.
yes there are hiddn cost, but that is what the montly bill is supusta pay for, (hidd cost, the electricity it takes to power the cables and what not ) but come on if that is a problem maybe they should think about makking/getting more power effisent stuff.
Quote from his diary
I'm just thinking how he'd react to "I'm sorry sir, I'm afraid you will have to stop using VPN". I sure wouldn't want to be the one making that call.
I use Eclipse Internet for ADSL here in the U.K.
Around GBP 25/month buys me a connection to the second fastest ADSL provider in the country.
There is no fixed term contract (I pay month by month), no traffic restrictions, no closed ports and very little downtime. Static IP addresses are standard and more are easy to obtain. In addition, all the usual webspace, mail and news stuff are included in the standard price.
I share the 512kb/s uplink with the three people I live with and two of our neighbours via a 802.11b. Between us we have a number of servers running so pretty much max out our bandwidth all of the time.
I suggest that anyone considering a switch from NTL consider them.
I don't use P2P software and I rarely play games, yet I have a broadband connection because it's actually a better deal than POTS. Why? Because I would have to pay $25/month for the actually phone line (I only use cellphone right now), and then another $20/month for services from a decent local ISP. Right now I'm paying $45/month for about 1.8mbps connection through cable modem.
Yes, I want webpages to load faster because I actually do research and I don't want to waste time for pages to load. I also need to download PDF documents often and I don't have time to wait 5 minutes every time I want to just skim through a document. I also download the occasional movie trailer or software download and that help.
p2p isn't broadband's killer app, it's the app that's killing broadband for people who actually have legitimate uses for it.
I joined up with NTL in south-east England about 4 months ago. Installation was free and it included a cable modem; the service supplyed was an 'always on, no limits' 600 MBit line.
Having knowledge of getting 'other' broadband services working in Linux, it was a real surprise to find, in this case, the whole thing a breeze.
We have the have the main oppostion, BT broadband, (always-on, 512 MBit) at work and let me say it seriously sucks. It advertises 'no dial-up', and yet, open explorer and the windows dial-up box says:
No need to dial...
Dialling...
Is having my bandwidth being limited to 1Gb a day a big hassle for me? No, because even with 'we hate NTL' sites they've been a good company to me and I don't sit on Kazaa and d/l movies all day.
If they have a problem with serious persistant offenders who cause me problems because of excessive net traffic, then I back them if they start to be removed.
Having said all of that, someone at the company must have known what most people round here with braodband would do: download pr0n constantly!
A friend of mine told me that the current system in Portugal of broadband internet, by cable, was beyng looked at with much atention by other countries, which seems true reading this article.
Here is how it works here.
We have two cable ISP's.
- Netcabo gives, per month, a limit of 10 Gigs National and 1 Gig International. Limit means what you get for your monthly fee. After that limit, you pay 2 $ each 100 Megs you download more.~
And they also don't allow VPN.
-Cabovisão gives, per month, a limit of 3 Gigs, be it national or international.
I'm in .au and we have reasonable download limits.
I pay AUD$88 a month for a 512/128 connection with 6GB of onpeak bandwidth, unlimited offpeak bandwidth, rate limiting after I hit my quota for the month (64kbps) and free traffic from the WAIX peering point (every other major ISP in the perth area).
The rate limiting also only applies to onpeak traffic. Offpeak and WAIX traffic are always full speed. I could leech 130 gigs from WAIX if I wanted to and not pay an extra cent.
Of course I shopped around and found the best deal rather than submitting to the man and whining about it.
Any of the latest distros will put you over 1 gb. I don't hit a 1gb limit often, but when I do a limit would be frustration central.
It would seem to me that even if a list really was originally opt-in, it wouldn't be any more if the list is being sold by spammers.
Give him a call. Your call will be toll-free to you if you're in the U.S. (and possibly Canada) but will cost him money to receive, even if he hangs up on you.
Adam Weiss
Market Share Group
(877) 603-1400 x606
Did you hear the joke about toilet paper in the Soviet Union? No? that's because there was none. All anyone ever needed was 640k of RAM, I just don't understand this gigabyte talk. YOu should all be happy with 300 baud modema under Ma Bell. Get over it, yeah!
Sarcasim asside, there are many other legitimate uses of that kind of bandwith that have nothing to do with Warez, crap music and all that other jazz. A reasonably active free software package can easily suck up this kind of bandwith. No, that's not a business. You might also want to share uncompressed music with your friends. Hey, you might even want to share movies with your family. Oh, my goodness, "always on high speed internet" is looking like a lie.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
My electricity supply is "always on", that doesn't mean I should be charged the same if I leave all my appliances on all day as someone who doesn't.
If people using more than a gig a day are in a minority then it is they who should have to request special pricing from an ISP. There's no reason a majority of people who fit in some 'normal usage' bracket should subsidise extreme users by default.
To me it makes sense for an ISP to offer a broad range of pricing options to consumers but if an ISP wants to go down the "one size fits all" route then it makes sense for the size and cost to fit the majority of users.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Well it was only a matter of time. But (pardon the pun) ISP's are dreaming up every excuse they can to blame users for their inadequacies and incompentence. AFAIC if you advertise X download/upload speeds and then later renig blaming "the hogs" it is the same as the old tactic of bait and switch. Plan and simple. For those of you morons and non-thinking types, do not bother replying, instead go suck an egg. This is just another excuse for ISP's to deny their responsibility to provide the service you signed up for. EOL.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
Cripplenet
Mate, if you are in Australia, like I am, you'll have to put up with download limits for any pipe thicker than a 56Kbps Dial-up. The typical "Broadband" plan for households have a limit between 1 and 3 GB (depending on the plan) per month (yes you heard right, PER MONTH). Any extra download is charged at an unbelievable 15 cents/MB. The whole thing just sucks - all the ISPs are in collusion (it's an open cartel), there is no competition, and consumers have no choice. The Average UK bradband user is "UltraWideBand" by comparison.
All I know is if Earthlink had the same policy I wouldn't be able to work.
I call bullshit. You cannot possibly download more than 1GB of work-related material per day. I'm waiting to be convinced otherwise.
Also, stop using your non-business account to conduct business. Your company should pay for your business line.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
ET as ISP with 640/320 kbps (~70/35 KBps real) ADSL with fixIP, no limits no caps :), shared between 7 houses via 100 Mbps CAT5, ~$10 per month for everyone :].
:P
Stats for last 27 days:
Down: ~45 GB (~29% utilization)
Up: ~30 GB (~38% utilization)
Eat your heart out those who live in the crappy places of this rock
Australian DSL -> 4 GB/month -> 1.2 KB/sec
56K dialup -> approx. 50 Kb/sec -> 6.25 KB/sec
I would assume that DSL bursts better. (You'd think it would be obvious, but after seeing the above stat, I'm not going to assume anything.)
Incidentally:
NTL -> 1 GB/day -> 12 KB/sec
So NTL is only twice as good as dialup.
I see it all the time in articles like this thrown around that we should "quit whining" because "bandwidth costs money".
My question is this. How much does bandwitdh really cost?
Not for you, but for AT&T, or some big conglomerate? It seems like it wouldn't cost more than pennies a gig, but maybe I'm ignorant as to the costs of laying cable, etc.
I understand that as a capitalist corporation they are allowed to mark it up to make money, but how much are they making. Does anyone have some facts or good links?
These same thoughts always struck me when I dialed long distance for like a nickel a minute. Perhaps I'm deranged, but it just doesnt seem like it costs the phone company a dollar for me to make a 20 minute call from New York to Boston.
I'm a leech and it's ok...
I leech all night
and I leech all day.
I get up in the morning
and I upload to the net...
I download in the evening
and I keep every file I get.
I'm a leech and it's ok...
I leech all night
and I leech all day.
I use up all the bandwidth
my ISP can serve.
I open several windows
and I download with such verve.
I'm a leech and it's ok...
I leech all night
and I leech all day.
It's pretty hard to actually get a judgment for something like that. In general, they only have to follow the terms they explicitly promised to you in the contract. If changing any service was illegal, it'd be illegal to even do things like raise rates.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
It's not bad enough they give me 128/up while giving me 384/down, now they want to tell me I cannot use more than "X" amount of bytes. They won't be happy until the internet becomes 384/down 0/up. What happened to "unlimited Internet"? These arbitrary limits will hurt p2p's and the free software movement, perhaps this is the Goal? The only reason a company would forbid vpn's, it hurts their ability to monitor what you are doing, which the government is requiring of them.
Was that Tony Blair that stole a college guy's thesis and represented it as "truth" when speaking about Sodom Hussien?, Governments have zero credibility anymore, as their leaders are lying to their people, to protect a handful of people(and themeself) from people becomming free.
I'm in australia, on probably the best broadband plan that is available at the moment (thanks datafast you guys rock) i get 8gb peak 8gb offpeak (which is midnight to 7am) - (plus free p2p in the same state and free downloads from thier file mirror, which contains all the debian stuff you'd ever want).
This costs me $85AU/month.
In relation to most of the other broadband plans in australia (esp. telstra bigpond and optus cable - the two biggest TELCOs in AU) this is very very good.
So to all those people who are complaining about thier 30 odd GB per month (by the way i share my 16gb with 3 other flatmates) should just shut up, and also never move to australia.
Cause if you can't make do with 30GB a month then i'm confused on what you do all day, to find the time to get all the warez, or whatever you d/l to use up one GB per day.
Do you people have jobs OR uni to go to? I mean if you don't and you can find time to use up your 30gb quota, how the fsck can you afford broadband in the future.
It is apparent to me that you have more time on your hands than is healthy.....
GO AND DO SOMETHING ELSE (like exercise) once you use up you 1GB, and get overyourselves.
geez.
con.
Well at least they haven't limited the uplNO CARRIER
If they wanted to cap bandwidth, they should have. Instead, they simply monitor it, and if you go over the limit, you're automatically bumped up to the next billing level.
So, if you're even a moderately heavy user, you're paranoid all the time about whether you've hit the limit - especially if you've gotten your first warning.
The warnings, too, can be misleading. Do you get your warning immediately, or do they send it in the mail 20 days into your next period, where you're likely already over your bandwidth limit for the second month in a row?
Why are ISPs allowed to be all mushy in their accounting? If they can't afford to give all their customers 1Mb/sec 24/7, then the answer is simple: don't give it to them. Considering the limits that pass for "unlimited" these days, I'm sure they wouldn't even have to drop the magic word from their advertising.
Would anyone here feel bad about bread stores going out of business because they gave away too much free bread? No? Then why do we have all this sympathy for ISPs who give away product for free and *gasp* their profits go down?
In Bangkok, Thailand, I'm paying just over $60 U.S. per month for 3GB up+down. First offense, and they cancel my account -- and this is the cheapest broadband ISP in town. That means 100MB per day, so I've got to go about a week with no internet to compensate for downloading just one CD image.
1 GB per day! That would be heaven.
Quotas and caps are not the answer. What they really need is a flexible and *reasonable* billing system based upon fair usage. The problem is that the pricing is based upon overselling available resources. At any rate, the market is self correcting, it will adjust. In the end, users will flock to the system which makes the most of them happy.
This problem reminds me of the late '80s when the phone companies wanted to charge modem users extra since they couldn't multiplex as many modem signals across the same line as they were using all available bandwidth (miniscule though it was at the time).
-- Good judgement comes with experience. -- Experience comes with bad judgement.
To me in 99% of cases I cannot find any justification for home users to download 30GB! a month, let alone 10GB a month, unless they're doing illegal activity/trading.. Don't you agree.
A scenerio.
Bob likes to watch porn. And now he has a download limit of 1Gig per day. That is 1000Mb per day. or 1000/24 =~ 41Mb/hour. Or 41000/60 =~ 694Kb/minut, =~11.57Kb/s which is about 92Kbps quality porn for 24 hours a day to download.
I say ... Bob is fine.
"I just use it to download Red Hat ISO's" is a explanation often heard when ISP's try to get their residential customers to stop abusing their service. Second only to "I only use it to get free, open distributed MP3's"
:
These people seem to download Red hat ISO's 4-6 times a week. Why not just come out and admit that 90% of the time you are downloading copyrighted material ?
The biggest bandwith hogs are
Pirate Software
Pirate Music
Pirate Video
If Red Hat ISO's didn't exist, it'd be OS service patches, or redownloading the virus definitions every 20 minutes being used to justify massive data bills.
No pure residential user in this world can justify 30 gb of data / month. And if you are using it for CVS or streaming video, bite the damn bullet and purchase a Business plan, and claim it on tax. You are ruining it for the true residential customers.
They don't allow vpns so they can correct spelling errors (resedential) on the flyat the packet level, in an effort to make their customers seem halfway intelligent.
- Run a weather model on my machine 4 times/day, initialized off of the NCEP Eta model (which it also uses for boundary conditions). I use the lower-resolution grids and omit every other model output time, and it's still ~700MB/day (over 20GB/month).
- Download archived Level II Nexrad data for examination (usually to perform ad hoc, informal case studies). Data amounts for a single day of interest for a single radar typically run between 300-500MB compressed.
- Download model output data for examination. Using the Eta model as an example, a single "tile" (covering only a few states in the U.S., for example) for a single time is around 1.5MB (which might not sound like much, but it adds up really fast when trying to look around at various parts of the model domain for various times).
- View and download for processing a wide variety of constantly updating real-time weather data (bandwidth usage varies widely based on current conditions).
- Run Gentoo.
All of this is in addition to the standard things that other people do, such as download ISOs/large programs, view movie files, browse the web, etc. I can't even tell you how glad I am that I no longer live in the dorms at my university, as they currently limit students to 500MB/day (after this is used up they throttle your connection so it slows to a crawl). How the students there can get anything cool done is beyond me, and this goes for people of other interests as well--bandwidth can be important in many other areas than just meteorology or the sciences as a whole!That being said, it's unrealistic for us to believe that we have some kind of God-given right to infinite bandwidth. Bandwidth is limited, and perhaps a reasonable, and let me stress reasonable surcharge for excess bandwidth usage would be a good thing, in that it would force us to use our bandwidth more judiciously. It seems as though Napster, Gnutella, etc., while they initially fueled the explosion of broadband, are now its worst enemy as they tend to be very wasteful of resources, though they certainly have legitimate uses. Oh, the irony...
I do need "high bandwidth" but that doesn't mean I need to be using it continuously.
I like to be able to listen to the occasional internet radio broadcast while still using my link for browsing etc (not possible over a modem).
I like to get something quickly when I download it.
It's nice when friends come over that they can just hook into my wireless network and use my connection without causing significant congestion on the link.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
The bottom line is if your service is xG/time then SELL IT AS SUCH!!!!. The issue is broadband ISP's are trying to sell the "perception" of 24/7 but only delivering a limited product.
Cut the crap and sell what you can deliver....
I agree. Now rwo things.
"It's not overhyped, it's bullshit that we have to put up w/this. Unlimited means exactly that. If you don't like it, tough fucking shit, get out of the business."
First of all the majority on this site are not lawyers, and it shows. What the law says the definition of "unlimited" is, not our "This is what I wish it was" is what all the "discussion" should be about. Second let's be honest here. The one's you see making all the noise, are in the "minority". If they leave then will any broadband company go out of business? Sounds more like "feel good" wishful thinking. Now as you pointed out if any of these complainers can bring their "vision" to the broadband world with a "viable"[1] business plan (more power to them if they can) then great. I have my doubts, because just as most aren't lawyers, most also aren't businessmen.
[1] Note when reading "/.", and people's disdain for bad business models (the cynic would say those are the one's keeping the complainers from getting what "they" want). One can wonder if a good business model can be found, or will the vision simple be found as unrealistic out there, as in here?
Unlimited nationally, with 1Gb (default, you can get more) limit international. After that, you pay by the MB. Otherwise, I guess we are getting pretty good service...
Here in Australia we pay Telstra $111.45 for 3 gigs a month! That said we can VPN all we like.
In this world turning grey, strikes a chord when I say, there is black, there is white, there is wrong,there is right
The VPN clause has been in AUP for some months now. Not news.
Neither is someone posting a badly rehashed version of another sites news with no editor research.
I'm paying about $40 CDN a month. Getting 160 kb/sec down, 56 kb/sec up where I live. There's theoretically a 5GB/2GB cap but they've never implemented it yet. Personally my thoughts on this are they should implement a reasonable charge per GB like any normal long distance phone service. I like downloading anime which is depending on the material free so admittedly I sometimes use a lot of bandwidth but on the months where I use very little I feel ripped off. Just my thoughts. ^^
Ntop is sort of a souped up TOP for TCP/IP connections. Keeps logs of outgoing/incomimg traffic and what kinds, as well as other information. Presents it in a browser format if desired. Highly recommended.
this is about NTL trying to avoid giving people easy access to copyrighted content, this is why they removed certain alt.bin groups from thier news servers last week sometime, I figure this cap is to stop people who have such content spewing it out again over kazaa/gnucleus/overnet
These users need to wake up to the fact that bandwidth costs money, it is by no means free.
I don't believe it needs to be that expensive. I think they are charging waaaaaaay more than is decent or required to run and maintain the system - and by them i don't just mean this ISP but all the backbones and large upstream providers. Of course I can be convinced otherwise by proof (not opinion)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
So when one of these dude's get slammer or code red how much is it going to cost them? And do they have to pay?
Local cable modem service here in Charleston, SC is through Comcast. No experience with any download caps yet, here, but lookie what's ahead:
l in k=1
http://online.comcast.net/products/service.asp?
Yeah! Comcast PRO! Nearly $100/month. Right.
Trev
Almost every DSL provider, at least in this state, will do DSL in regional areas the same as metro areas for an AUD$10 a month surcharge.
[If you're not a warez kiddie] Then you don't need broadband.
Xbox Live will never work over dial-up.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I could work around the 1 GByte per day restriction. When I download a Linux distro, I can just download one CD iso a day. If I am not downloading a Linux Distro, 1 GByte/day is a huge amount of bandwidth.
But I would have a hard time with no VPN. I use VPN a lot to work from home.
Religion is the main cause of atheism.
whining about only getting 3-4 gigs per month of download are, IMO, getting completely ripped off. First of all, just because YOU might only need that much bandwidth, doesn't mean there aren't plenty of legitimate reasons to want/need more. Second of all, if I'm paying $50/month for broadband, I'd better get AT LEAST 2.5 times the monthly bandwidth a $20/month dialup account would give me. So, we'll assume 5k/s on dialup which gives us:
5k/s * 3600 seconds/hour * 24 hours/day * 30 days/month = 12.96 gigs/month
12.96 gigs/month * 2.5 = 32.4 gigs/month.
That's the absolute bare minimum I would accept for that price. I dunno what broadband/dialup prices are like in other countries, but if they're similar to those here in America, I wouldn't be giving those crooks a dime. Hell, _I'm_ pissed when I hear stories of 10mbit connections in Asia for ~$25/month and I'm pretty happy with what I've got.
It's real simple, if you want to download 1GB per day regularly then PAY FOR IT!
Geeze, why some people get all flustered when a cap is introduced on a low cost service is beyond me. Quit freeloading of other customers and pay for what you use.
An ISP in Australia has just released some unlimited data ADSL plans.
i al _dsl_prices
http://www.ozforces.com/pnews.php?page=resident
If you under-utilise the service you've bought then that's your problem.
Right...I have unlimited 10Mb dowloads (optonline), how the hell can I *not* under-utilize it? Even day-to-day, I still get 8Mb; 1MB/s*3600s/h*24h/d = 86,400MBytes, 86.4 gigs a *day*. I download maybe 2GB on a good day...
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
It is true that 99% of the time, I would be satisfied with the speed of dialup.
That said, I have a cable modem (a "lite" implementation which is 2-3x the speed of dialup) because:
1) It's nice having a little more speed on that 1% of the time that I could use it;
2) I'm connected a *lot* of the time of the day. I would not be able to tolerate having my phone line tied up that long, so I would require a second phone line. A second line alone is almost as much as the $25 I pay for cable access, and I'd still have to add the cost for a decent dialup ISP.
So, I get faster service for less money. Seems pretty simple to me!
Look at the tomato! Isn't it sad? He can't dance! Poor tomato!
In belgium, with the ISP Skynet, we're limited to 10G/month. When we go over that we're paying a few euros/G.
Though i dont especially mind, because if my ISP provide me a good connection, even if everybody is running kazaa (or whatever p2p app), he desserve some bucks, i find it frustating that you only got 10G/month.
Changing subject, HOW CAN I MAKE BACKUPS? i mean, i have around 200G at disposal since 1 or 2 years. With CdRom, it's impossible, and with Dvd, it's only four times less impossible.
People told me to use tapes, other hard disks (which seems the less worse solution for me), what do you use?
Bl4H
-- search the web
If everyone here knew how much that bandwidth cost, it would probably make you ill. At wholesale prices, 4GB/month of transit is about $0.50. Yes, well under a dollar. And that is straight to the backbone without any over-subscription (and you are almost certainly being over-subscribed).
My point being that someone somewhere is getting robbed on pricing. And the wholesale rates I'm using aren't even for tier-1 providers, who pay a whole lot less. Given the rates charged for broadband, one has to wonder what kind of ghastly overhead these ISPs have such that they can only afford to give you a couple nickels worth of transit. Something doesn't add up.
Right...I have unlimited 10Mb dowloads (optonline), how the hell can I *not* under-utilize it?
Pay for a lower price limited option?
First there is the fact that a T1 is way more flexable than a DSL circut and takes way more equipment. A T1 is 24 DS-0 circuts, or in essence digital phone lines. You can actually buy split T1s for half data, half voice. There is a good deal more equipment involved with a T! line than with a DSL circut.
Second, T1s come with an SLA. If the line is down, the phone company must give you service credits. It's often very high, like a day or even a week of credit for an hour of downtime. DSL and CM have no specific gaurenttes. Gaurentees cost money.
Third, T1s aren't really the most efficient or cheap method for getting data to you. The line needs to be clean for it to work. CM works over normal cable and DSL over any old analogue phone line. They have to ahve clean cable to get you a T1 line.
Finally, the price is a little artifically high since there's no competiton for the local loop (actual line) part. The telco is the onle game in town.
My ISP has been limiting monthly transfer to 15gb. Thats only 500mb/day :/
Wish I was living in the UK! :)
I find it amazing how Slashdot's community change their tune on fundamental issues so easily.
Lets do a little review:
(i) In Australia/Outer Mongolia/wherever I have a capped service...
Well I'm sorry to hear this. Was it sold to you as such? Well NTL used to have an advert about daring you to wear out your modem... so much for limited use. This is the point. I *know* bandwidth ain't free, but its their fault for offering what they can't deliver. Tough, they should be held to it. End of story; we have a contract. If you disagree, then please sign up for my unlimited bandwidth ISP covering the globe for a dollar each. And switch off your machine until I connect you to that service. I reserve the right to alter the T&C to enslave your entire family should I see fit.
(ii) "No-one can use 1Gig bandwidth legitimately". Erm OK, so you don't ever look at open sources then? Any of you? And you don't download *nix software. Fair enough. Looks like its buying CDs from M$ is the only way you lot operate.
A point to make to all of you scanning this; they've changed their tune twice since changing the T&C, have so far failed to notify their own staff and the MD only found out about it on Saturday morning. This is a knee jerk mess up. The T&C already covered abusers. This is just a way of alienating their core (and normally economically viable) customer base just because they had a weekend off and nothing to do but update their applications and OS.
Those god damn liberals don't do anything. They're letting Rogers do us in the ass, and Shitpatico is capping us at 5 gigs per MONTH. Better yet, the University of Waterloo caps its students in residents to 500 megs PER WEEK!!!!!!! Not 500 megs/day, but per week.. so you damn brits, shut up.
- CANUCK # 69
My cable ISP used to have a bandwidth limit of 4GB upload/4GB download per month. Now it's 7GB of total monthly bandwidth. That's with the $40/month package I have. Once you exceed the limit, the connection speed is reduced to 64K/sec. I'm quite used to being connected at 64K after downloading three 650MB Linux ISOs. It's unreal how fast 7GB of bandwidth gets used up.
So how does that marry up with the "you cannot use VPN stuff?"
I've got a rather personal question. If you're interested in hearing/answering it, email me at J-A-Y-E-D-@-J-A-Y-E-D-.-C-O-M
NICE-TO-MEET-YOU.
Restaurants and ISPs are both businesses, and their goal is to make money. If they don't make money, they won't be in business, and you won't have any service at all.
Restaurants are well within their right to charge certain customers more to eat at their all-you-can-eat buffets. If they notice that a regular customer regularly eats an obscene quantity of food when they walk through the door, most restaurants will start charging that customer more to eat there. I have several friends who fit that category.
Also, ISPs are well within their right to charge customers more money who regularly consume large amounts of bandwith. In fact, I prefer they do when necessary, otherwise everybody ends up heavily subsidising a very small group of people.
In short, I think NTL is taking the wrong approach. Instead of imposing download limits, they should charge those people who have higher bandwidth needs/wants an appropriate amount of money for their network usage. As for banning VPN, that is pure gobbletygook. The article didn't cover that, and I'm curious what rationale they are using.
If you go to a restaurant with "unlimited" drinks, it means that you may fill your glass an unspecified large number of times, but not that you may pipe it to at tanker parked outside.
I am sure that you can get away with a peak load higher, but do you really want to be like those compulsive people who fill their pockets with "free" mustard packets, disposable utensils, salt and peppar, and truck loads of paper towels?
... I don't!
:-) = I am happy
:^) = I am happy with my big nose
C:\> = I am happy with my OS
Red Hat and Mandrake distros come on 3x 640MB ISOs now to burn on CD. You wouldn't even be able to download more than 1/3 of the distro per day to burn!
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
For example, when I first got my cell phone, Tellus (BC Tel, then) was offering "unlimited evenings and weekends". This was back in the days of the analog phone where an extende battery pack gave you 2 hours talk time/12 hours standby. They didn't take into account the possibility of geeks like me building a 5 pound external jell-cell power supply with a power cord. I managed to get 8 hours talk time/ 3 day standby. I used the thing like a ground line. I didn't even bother to buy a cordless at home -- why should I??? Just forward to the cell phone!.
I averaged over 1000/month minutes evenings and weekends.
Needless to say, it wasn't long before they decided to 'limit' people to 1000 minutes evening and weekends. For most people, this isn't much of a limit because battery issues kicked in long before then... but it caused people like me to actually pay some attention to some attention to when we could use the ground line. (when my contract finally ran out).
In truth, the 1GB/day limits aren't really that bad. Think about it... 200 tracks/day is over 600 minutes (10 hours!) of new music per day. and they're promising that they're only going to apply these limits to chronic heavy users -- In other words, they're not going to nail me just because I downloaded all 5 RedHat disks today.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
I doubt this is a hard limit.. just something in their T&C's that they can point to if someone is doing 120kb/sec 24/7 365 days a year. Ie, a way for them to throttle users if they appear to be doing more harm than good to the network.
BT Internet have had such a clause for a while now on ADSL.
I find this amusing - 1gig per day is an enormous
amount of traffic. An ISP has a right to
choose its customers.
Compound this by the unfaireness that all african
ISPs have to pay for each byte coming to or
from the EU and US, whereas the EU and US
seem to have the "right" to connect to africa
for free.
-paul
The other 99% of the people using way too much bandwidth are violating copyrights left right and center. Or, in other words, for totally illegitimate reasons; mostly warez, MP3s and porn, with the very occasional ripped Babylon 5 episode.
I'd have to admit that I'm not innocent of doing this, but amazingly, I can still stay within the monthly 4 GB limit my provider sets while still getting a goodly amount of warez, mp3s and porn; I just don't go *crazy* with it is all. It's called "moderation," something I've long since learned to exercise with other utilities like the telephone and electricity.
And why pay $40 a month for broadband when you don't use a billion megs of bandwidth a month? Because broadband is the way the Internet was meant to be experienced. Web pages *don't* take 3 minutes to download. You *don't* need to go through the ritual of dialing up every time you need to check your e-mail, you just check your e-mail. You *don't* need to suffer through hideous lag while using SSH. In my own opinion, the lack of irritation alone is worth $40, and I would rather be given an anal probe by aliens than go back to dialup.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
Errm, because one is dishing out html/gif/php etc files and the other is potentially downloading ISO's, MP3's Wav's, emails with attachments and a million and one other things, mostly of a larger file size than a web server.
You can't work on the assumption that all people are doing is browsing the web.
BEcasue you have it worse, we can't complain? How's that work?
Hep, people are living on the streets. Be grateful your landlord gives you somewhere to stay, evein if it is a hellhole...
Im on the NTL service, and yeah, im angry.
When I signed up for the service, it was advertised to me as an always on, no download limit service. I specifically asked if there were any caps on the service and was told only upload and download speed caps.
Now they have snuck these limits into their terms and conditions, along with the VPN restriction, which makes my cable almost bloody useless for what I arranged it for.
NTL are a shoddy company anyway, frequent outages, duff cable tv boxes (3 replacements in 1 yr period), and very poor customer service. Check out http://www.ntlhell.co.uk for further details.
They have just lost one more customer now anyway. This is the straw that has broken the camels back.
What a bunch of pricks. I am just coming to the end of my contract with NTL and its not come soon enough. The nightmare started with the installation, which involved the engineer (prize prick) drop kicking the NTL box accross my floor. Then wondering why it was not working. He tried 3 other units, using the same method.....walk into room......drop unit from cheast height.....kick unit accross 15ft of floor into wall. Since then the 512kb connection fails regulary, along with the cable TV, channels freeze, sound and picture get out of sinc and somtimes there is no picture at all. So you call NTL customer services, wait at least 30 minutes to get thru to somone hows even prepare to listen to you and what do they suggest?..."try restarting your NTL cable box by switching it off at the wall" What a bunch of twats. That is why NTL suck satans cock. A note is attached now to my account number to refund any money as of the end of november until the problem is fixed, still waiting for someone to come round. Might have to flip out when they do, with hippos, pirates and guitars.
I've been with them for 5 years. Never been uphappy with the services they offer until now. I've even praised them up on here before. Apart from them closing down all their shops, reducing staffing numbers on the call desks, digging up the roads in my town for 3 years and forcing me to pay them three separate bills each month they are not bad.
The thing that makes me annoyed is that I first found out about them closing down alt.binaries through a friend. I knew they were on about upgrading their servers at some stage, I knew that they were thinking about charging extra for Usenet access - I filled in an online poll telling them I would consider paying extra. I would of paid if they had given me the option. I will now have to pay for another Usenet service which will only make bandwidth issues worse for them.
I found out about the 1Gb limit from Slashdot. Why have I not had a letter, a phone call, a god-damn-simple-email from them explaining this?
Now I'm one of these people that is connected to a P2P server 24/7. I'm not a leech, I don't download flat out at 600k all the time (impossible on most P2P networks). I am an average user. I get a 1 to 2 films each week and I like to evaluate some new software once or twice a month.
I pay a substantial part of my wages (7% of my gross income) to NTL for ALL my communication and entertainment needs. NTL is in the business of providing me with my needs - they don't do much else. What am I going to do now? Can they afford for me, as an average user, to switch to another provider? Another provider who would be cheaper and offer a higher upload speed as all ADSL providers seem to be doing at the moment. I am not getting the service I was getting last week, I am not getting the service I was getting when Usenet was functioning properly... and I'm still paying the same for it. I sorry but there are some simple sums for me to do as well now, even if I'm unlikely to go over the 1Gb per day limit. You get what you pay for, as the saying goes - or not in the case of NTL.
God damit, they even advertise on billboards about offering rich streaming media. More like poor steaming shit now.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
The whole campaign to sell us broadband in the UK at the moment revolves around what you can do with it..such as downloading huge files, streaming media, video conferencing.. in other words things that take large amounts of bandwidth. To then turn round and say well you can do all this but only up to a point is really a bit of a kick in the teeth.
I could quite easily use this amount of bandwidth legally, isn't that how this technology is being sold to us.
I want to be able to stream internet radio to my system downstairs whilst my kids watch streaming movies upstairs in their bedroom, whilst also downloading some files and the company that sold me this technology is saying I can but they'll kick me off if I do it too much.
I hear all this "The future is the connected home" hype, and it sounds good but if companies impose limits, what is the point.
since when was downloading more than one gigabyte a day considered usual practice? A moderately sized Corp. would not download that much including employees web browsing.
and since when did you think you were allowed to use VPNs if the contract specifically said you were not allowed to?
come to think of it, how is this even news?
Since when was it an offence to utilize a service you paid for?
Uh-huh. So NTL would be after you if you did that consistently, they say.
Despite your service being contended deliberately to stop you from affecting the usage of others.
They're a pretty poor ISP.
Because
/.) if they don't get it. And that's all if e) ever takes effect. Also keep in mind that customers are now used to paying $35 a month (at most) for broadband.
a) when ISP's first started selling broadband, they never figured that anyone not running a server could possibly use more than a gig a month.
b) Before broadband, they were tracking hours spent on the net. Broadband makes that unnecessary, thus not much point to bill for it.
c) Customers aren't even interested until it costs less than $50 a month. They would much prefer to pay $25 a month for totally unlimited service, and will complain endlessly if they don't get that.
d) At the super low price of $4 a gig, the upper tier would probably give the customer about 16 gigs a month for about $80. See point c). Also keep in mind that the bandwidth hogs typically use five to ten times that much bandwidth on average. They want more and will complain endlessly (see
e) Oops! $ISP has no way to bill bandwidth in a retail sort of way! They'd better make one!
f) Double oops! $ISP2 will immediately get 20% of $ISP's customers if they start doing e). And they're both fighting for dominant market share. The shareholders would never allow it.
When it comes to broadband, ISPs are stuck between a rock and a hard place that's been placed in a steel box two sizes too small. If you want to know why so many broadband providers recently went out of business and why so many will continue to do so, that's why.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
Okay, which idiot branded the parent post a troll?
Would improve usenet service a lot.
NTL have done a good thing. Usenet is a very poor medium for publishing large files, but it is an excellent medium for discussion groups.
If you want to publish large files, stick it on a web site. Don't make ordinary usenet servers carry the burden.
This was done by telenor (the biggest norwegian telecompany) for about 6 months ago.
telenor is like Microsoft, many people dosent know there is no other, so those people stay. But the rest of us fledd.
the worst thing is theire addwertising.
"faster internett for less money"
sure their initail cost is 100NOK less (0ld price about 500NOK and new price abot 400NOK) but after one GB you had to pay 100NOK for additional trafic.
@
In Portugal we get a 1Gb limit PER MONTH!
Here in China I pay about US$15 per month for a 1 Meg ADSL connection. All you can eat.
If I pay an extra $3 per month I get a 2Meg connection.
The telecommunications companies of the world only charge you for it because they can make money for the extra traffic.
Its the same as oil (OPEC), you just limit the supply and you can charge pretty much what you want. There will always be a demand.
Australia and New Zealand get screwed, but they only have their communist governments to blame. The telecom company in Australia is so screwed it is more expensive to call within the country than it is to call the US, UK, Singapore or Canada.
There was a lot of talk about the industry moving this way a while back. Is it ever going to happen? Sounds eminently fair to me. The result would be far smaller bills for light users, making it easier for people to get started, and that heavy users might think a bit more about how much of this stuff they actually need. If people want to run a worldwide video distribution operation from their bedrooms, that's fine by me, but I don't really see why I should subsidise it...
Virtually serving coffee
No VPN policies are an area where we can lobby our local governments to pressure the Broadband providers. In many areas (s.a. the Washington DC area), Telecommuting is being pushed by local governments as a way to relieve traffic congestion. Anti-VPN policies by broadband ISPs, especially Cable companies, would defeat this purpose. But local governments do have leverage, as they often grant the local monopolies to the Cable companies.
In short, organize your local buddies, get familiar with your local government people, lobby them, attend council meetings, etc.
At first (as a 1Mb NTL customer) I was really rufious, but actually sitting down reading the comments and thinkning about it, it really isn't as bad as it seems. The official line is if you consistently break over 1Gb a day for 3 days or more, you will get a warning. You will not simply get cut off mid download! Now unless your the local warez kiddie running a warez ring on your house your gonna have trouble. I spend hours downloading useless crap, but when I think about the amount of time I spend, during a working week, its so little, get in from work at 6pm, download a little bit, maybe leave something over night. Once every two months download Oracle setup (2Gb) or maybe a new RH release every quarter. This is a crack down on people running a six machine share over a single IP, student types and business' not willing to pay for business rentals. Jeez, at least we haven't got to put up with 4Gb a month, now that is hard!
"I kill you! You no good 56'ing!"
Hmm...well, this is only US$34.99 a month, the next cheapest is probably 56k...I'll just underutilize :)
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
My home network is connected through NTL. All my machines use Linux. This has been like this for 3 years (dial-up, moving to broadband in a couple of weeks, plenty or reports that it works fine with Linux). The firewall/NAT machine is Mandrake if you want to try. SomoothWall works as well.
Don't blame on NTL what is clearly due to your lack of knowledge of Linux.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The Register reports that NTL has stated "Our objective is only to limit very frequent or persistent heavy network use that can impact other customers. Therefore we will ONLY contact customers who exceed the daily data limit for three or more days in any consecutive 14-day period.
So that's all right then
Nick
You can't work on the assumption that all people are doing is browsing the web.
I think many providers have set up their business models implicitly making this very assumption. When it proves to be wrong, rather than change their assumptions, they try to change the world to meet them.
"Residential users are only going to surf the web" What? They're using VPN? Ban it! What? They're downloading movies? Cap their bandwith! What they're running servers? Ban them! Obviously,they can't give out terrabytes of bandwith for $40 dollars a month, the economics don't work out, but they really should have figured this out before advertising their service as unlimited. I don't think anyone would be upset if they bought a 30 gig/month service and only got 30 gigs/month.
Most of the time, I'm sitting at a line provided by the university. It has a 650MB up/650MB down hard limit per month. Your router port is blocked when you exceed it. I can live with that pretty well. 1GB per day is way beyond what an average private user will ever need as long as (s)he isn't using the so-called "value added" services that don't work anyways in most cases or leech ripped stuff off the net. Heck, you can even squeeze a Debian testing reinstall in 200MB which leaves you with a good month worth of bandwith for all the pr0n you might possibly want.
Always remember: 'wget -m' is not typical web access!
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
It's been clarified a little in this article on The Register. Apparently, NTL "will ONLY contact customers who exceed the daily data limit for three or more days in any consecutive 14-day period". I was concerned that merely downloading a 3xCD image distro of Linux would get me cut-off, but that's not the case. Unless I do that day after day, but that's not going to happen.
Anyhow, it's all a bit academic now, seeing as I've had to move out of an NTL serviced area. I'm waiting to see if BT consider me worthy^H^H^H^H^Hwithin range of an ADSL service.
These users need to wake up to the fact that bandwidth costs money, it is by no means free.
And I *AM* paying for it.
Vote for global prefs bug
---
you know: "free" as in "jail dinner"
the computer is online
i am not at it
what a waste of ressources
Where people already have a contract -- and especially for customers who have already paid, the company really can't retroactively change the contract. They can, however "contact costomers about their heavy use". Customers who voluntarily decide to limit their usage will become a pleasant side effect of this new, uhm, approach.
I note that in their question and answer page, they don't seem to say anything directly about (say) cutting off people who continue to take advantage of their "unlimited" contract.
New customers, on the other hand, could be bound by this new protocol.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
I am at Champaign, IL. Service from my ISP is limited to 250 MB per 24 hour. At each hour, they calculate the past 24 hour of activity, and if that is over the limit, depending on the amount it is over by, it will place you into class A, B, or C, which have max transfer rate limits. At C, most internet connections fail.
This is a problem when I run p2p apps, so I end up downloading more than uploading to prevent going over the limit (the 250MB limit adds uploads + downloads -- even "uploads" that occur when my pc is turned off.)
why should /. stop putting in NYTimes articles? That newspaper is the most intellectual one that i've read, with actual decent *analysis, not just the usual parroting bullshit.
just wondering,
-mantis
And this is not Zimbabwe or Bosnia. We are members of Nato, we have Vaclav Havel, Eva Herzigova and Czech beer.
And, you know, in Soviet Russia...
--- Frantisek Fuka (Yes, that's my real name and you have no idea how it's pronounced)
By having restrictions, AND by paying a subscription charge, what's the point? Sure, Slashdot loads that little bit faster but, if that's the case, I'd rather use dialup with no capping (and not cut-off time) and use that.
Luckily (and touch wood) BlueYonder hasn't decided to to this - unless I'm mistaken :| *gulp*
Fight Crime - Shoot Back!
If you are in the US and getting sick of the crap your DSL or cable ISP is forcing down your throat you may want to contact Speakeasy and see if they offer DSL in your area.
They don't block any ports.
They allow servers.
Static IPs are cheap.
No restrictions on the number of devices you have connected.
Public wireless is encouraged rather than banned.
No bandwidth restrictions.
Forward and reverse DNS availible.
Routed service availible.
No "type of use" restrictions. You can be a residential user or a business and you will be charged the same for the same services.
They may not be as cheap as the monopoly telco or cable company but not having to deal with someone who would rather you not use the service you pay for is worth it.
Happy Fun Ball is for external use only.
In my experience the NTL installation guys are pretty free with new cable modems. When I last moved house they took away my old one and gave me an identical new one for no reason at all. The downside of that was that I had to reregister its mac addresss with them again, before I could use it for anything other than pings everywhere and tcp connections to their subscription website.
So, is it possible to power an NTL cable moden on 240v AC via the ethernet socket? Does it still work now? Do they need to send someone round to fit a new one?
[Obviously I've never done anything like that myself, and my second NTL modem was unasked for when I moved!]
Time to change your homepage location to: http://www.jwgh.org/ark/tbhy.jpg, I think.
Netcabo here is 20 Gig National trafic and 1 Gig International trafic; the only real problem is all surf trafic comes from international sites (99,99%)
Does BT at least use vaseline when they administer that ass raping?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?