Slashdot Mirror
Broadband Providers' Hidden Bandwidth Limits
An anonymous reader sends us to the Boston Globe for a story that will come as a surprise to few here: broadband suppliers will cut you off if you download too many bits. It tells the stories of several Comcast users who were warned — without specifics — that they were using "too much" bandwidth, then had their accounts summarily cancelled. Looking into the future: "...even if only a tiny fraction of customers are downloading enough to trigger the policy, that will probably change as more entertainment moves to the Internet."
Lemee see. Downloading the max a line will allow is OK. They understood the contract as "unlimited".
Seems to me that they're way overselling their lines. SBC DSL doesnt care how much you use, nor should they. (We had them for 2 years and kept 60% up and down utilized on average).
These cable bastards need to be raked over the coals for this. Or at leat, lose a bunch of profits.
perhaps this should be a marketing point for DSL providers. "DSL: the bandwidth you pay for is really yours."
My upload with Cablevision's Optimum online is currently capped. I think it's due to my torrents, even though I had a global limit of 40 Kilobytes per sec. I download at 10 Mbits but upload is 140 Kbits.
I've had this happen with them before, and it seems like there is no way out except to call, and you only get 3 strikes before you're out I've heard.
It's very frustrating, I pay for a fast internet connection and should be allowed to use it within reason. I purposefully capped my torrent uploads at 40KBytes, that's not too much, I shouldn't be capped.
-"Those who fought today will die tommorow."-
I hear this from Shaw and Cox users all the time, they're getting shitograms from the ISP over their heavy bandwidth usage. Well, Verizon's never bitched at me and I have full uplink running almost 24/7. This was true even when I had a residential line.
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
ISP's have been limiting dl/ul for like....forever.
Since when does this make it onto slashdot???
Now.....TRUE unlimited speeds/bw....that would be a story.
I'd sign up.....five days ago.
Comcast says that only .01 percent of its 11.5 million residential high-speed Internet customers fall into this category.
ONLY 1,150 customers are at risk of being cut off?
Comcast has an interesting definition of "common carrier". I wonder if the courts will agree with it...
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Ok. You buy a 1 year subscription to a 3Mbps-down/256Kbps-up line. You are told, along with adverts claiming it is an unlimited line.
They disconnect you for unspeakable limits. That is called FRAUD. No ifs ands or buts.
If they cant maintain profitability on selling those lines for whatever they do, too bad. Not my problem. if they can only sell 512Kbps sync and keep it truthful and honest, all the better.
If the telcos DSL circuits can do it, why not the "Pig"?
For any reason...
That's how this works. That's the only way this works. They can advertise whatever they want, but as long as their contracts have that little clause in them, it really doesn't matter WHAT they advertise.
This and the net neutrality fight tell us something - the ISPs are not prepared for a large surge in bandwidth. Despite having about 10 years notice and charging up the ying-yang in many places, they're still not ready to provide the necessary speed to even those areas of the country they currently cover. When ISPs tell customers "5 Mb/s", they really mean "5 Mb/s, once in a blue moon, otherwise 512 kb/s normally and maybe a 2-3 Mb/s burst at times". 250 GB a month is only about 756 kbps. When customers realize this, there's gonna be a problem.
250 GB/month is not going to sound excessive when we start rolling out movie downloads in HD (that's 12 movies), or Steam-like solutions take off, or people start using things like Skype. Nowadays, your game console, your HD-DVD player, and your DVR/cable box want Internet access to get patches or content, and these massive numbers are getting more and more reasonable. This shouldn't be a sign to Comcast that users should download less, it should be a sign that they need to upgrade their networks drastically and fast.
"...even if only a tiny fraction of customers are downloading enough to trigger the policy, that will probably change as more entertainment moves to the Internet."
If you're downloading gigabytes of movies and music from a service that the RIAA or MPAA approves of then suddenly bandwidth caps will cease to be an issue.
I doubt that anyone will ever get a takedown notice from their ISP for excessive iTunes usage.
Three Squirrels
Yes, it's strange. It's as if they were told they had unlimited internet access.
It seems like they are simply trying to eliminate customers who are unprofitable, or not very profitable. They have to invest much less money if they get rid of the people who actually USE their service, rather than just downloading the occasional e-mail or web page. You can offer unlimited bandwidth if no one uses it. This is very much like the cell carriers dropping support for users of older phone technologies because those users don't purchase extra services.
Yes, because I'm sure they'll take the money they get from content providers and pour it into upgrading their network. You know, so that they can handle enough bandwidth that they don't have to charge the content providers anymore.
Oh, wait. That would cut off a source of income. Without net neutrality, they'd have a distinct profit motive to never upgrade.
Some attitudes replaced or by cgi optimizes
And why shouldn't they? Most ISP's advertise their service as "unlimited" yet they aren't. So why shouldnt the customer be pissed off?
Nobody can say the customer should download "reasonable" ammount of bytes, because that leaves too much open as to who believes how much "reasonable" really is.
The bext thing the ISPs should do is outline exactly how much the customer can download before offering the service or explicitly outlining how much they allow.
The magical number is: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Brighthouse just finished laying the fiber outside my house, 100/100 for $135 a month, no caps no limits
The CSB (CocksuckingBastards) at TWC(TimeWarnerCable) with Roadrunner "Quarantined" our modem because of bandwidth usage. Needless to say I was outraged and am still strongly considering a switch to ADSL. Oh, and they've still ignored my request for a copy of their TOS EULA and Fair Use policies. Their service sucks, it goes down randomly, and I've had more intelligent conversations with a rock than with their support centers.
In the end, the only thing that matters is how much fun you had.
Download midget porn, it takes half the time (and bandwidth)!
Ya, I've been saving that line for a long time....
Another reason why Triple Play sales pitches are HORRIBLE.
Cable line has been "exceeded". They then hijack your other 2 services for leverage.
It's free, until you use it.
you've been cox-blocked
but I do have a problem with how they handle it. I mean, they don't specify a limit, it's basically a nebulous figure, and that they aren't clear at all about this in their marketing. I mean, if they don't mean to say that always-connected is for always maxed, then they shouldn't use weasel words in the fine print. The claimed interpretation of "unlimited" is that the connection is basically always on, as opposed to dial-up of old where you were allowed a certain number of hours. Of course, they know that unlimited also gives an impression of not having a bit limit either, but they never do anything to prevent that impression except in said fine print.
I got my Internet access cut off by a local DSL provider a little while back because of a sudden bandwidth spike. They had noticed that my account had suddenly gone to the top of their bandwidth-usage chart and stayed there. They informed me that the account had been suspended because of a "probable virus infection". At first I thought that they were just having problems with (legitimate) torrent use, but I did have a Win2K box up at that point to run some software my wife needed for work. Lo and behold, despite patches and security, the box had been owned. I told them I had taken the 2K box off-line (booted it back into Linux and the other box was a Mac) and they immediately reactivated the account.
While perhaps the ISP's have "invisible" quota, the people being affected by this are downloading truly pathological amounts: enough to fill modern hard drivers SEVERAL times over in a month.
On a 6 Mbps/s connections, if you did nothing but download all the time, you'd be downloading a little less than 2 Tb a month, roughly 4 for 5 hard drives worth (at today's hard drive sizes). That a over 200 double-layer (9G) DVD, 450 regular DVD's, 3,000 audio CD, hundred for thousands of DVD's. You could download every Linux distribution ever made with room to spare.
The people getting these notices and having their connections shut off have been approaching a MINIMUM of 1/3 this capacity (given a casual survey of those who got letter on DSL Reports and other forums), and note that these people got a at least 1 warning informing them of this.
This is truly staggering, even for the heavy downloaders here - even the warezers - you monthly download is probably WELL under that. (Even if you have no life at all you still need to time watch/play your downloads).
Even if the ISP said there were an "all-you-can-eat", there people are well beyond that. Even the big downloads might bring an elephant to the buffer and still not get thrown out (suspended), but these people are brining herds of elephants in, and then when their elephants are full, having them throw up over the buffet and repeating.
'I download a lot of Linux ISOs...'
:)
From the ISP's POV, not at all the same as a lot of movies. Not all content moves across the 'net in a similar manner.
Those ISOs are relatively light-weight in terms of xfer overhead. You can pull them down all day and not get any attention, but if you start anything that even barely reeks of streaming or multi-media, you'll trigger a flag that puts you in line for being throttled back.
Try it and see
I'm glad to see this finally on Slashdot. I've been pushing for Comcast to provide full disclosure since I was terminated. I didn't have DSL in my area until last Monday so now I'm not dealing with 28.8 speeds. While this may be legal, I'm hoping Comcast will come clean. I really appreciate Carolyn from the Boston Globe for publishing the story. There are many other articles coming from various consumer advocate groups in the next couple months so stay tuned.
Since Comcast disconnected me in january, I've found dozens of people who have been disconnected across the country. What's amusing is Comcast is untilling to disclose what "Acceptable Use" is. They only point to their AUP/TOS on their web site and tell you to read it and follow it. Cox Communications and other reputable providers will tell you what Acceptable is in real numbers (50 Gigs a month, 80 Gigs and so on). Comcast will ONLY tell you an example of what Abuse is.
They say an abuser downloads 256,000 photos or 30,000 sounds or 13 million (that's right, million) emails a month. So on my blog I posted what Comcast is saying in english. Abusers of their system are downloasing around 200-250 Gigs a month which is 100 times more than their "average" user. So the average user is only downloading about 1 - 2 Gigs a month. Hardly using the service in my book. Not really streaming video, purchasing movies from Amazon.com Unbox or anything. If you purchase 2 HD-DVD videos from Amazon and download them then you are already violating AUP/TOS with Comcast. Tonight I've updated my blog to include stories of other's who are providing videos for download online.
I've posted my story on the web at my blog. I'm hoping to get the word out and have people look at fiber networks such as Utopia. Their fiber infrastructure provides choices. If a company (such as Comcast) is abusing customers, they can choose another. Of course having a 1 gig pipe to the house is also faster than anything Cable can provide. Must be why Verizon is rolling out FiOS.
Anyway, Major Kudos to Carolyn at the Boston Globe!
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
You would have to be one rich SOB to legally utilize as much bandwidth as I do.
I mean...I don't do that sort of thing. Why are you looking at me like that?
I find it ironic reading stories like these where an unlimited account is told his account is in fact limited. My own broadband account is supposedly limited to 30GB a month, at which point I'd effectively be capped to 56k speeds. At the time I started the account broadband had only just been introduced and uptake was slow, the ISP said the limit most likely wouldn't be enforced for a few months. It's now over 3 years later and I've not once been capped, despite going over the 30GB limit numerous times, quite possbly 11 months per year (to give you an idea, I've downloaded nearly 2GB today). This includes P2P, various media streams, and everything else from HTTP and FTP to games etc.
/. who work for ISPs, any chance of a confirmation/denial on my theory?
The thing is, I do 90% of this downloading between 11pm and 7am, using timed download managers and just starting P2P software before I go to bed. It seems logical (to me at least) that the ISP is internally using come kind of tariff system to downplay the effect of my broadband usage at off-peak times when I'm basically not affecting contention ratios or anything else. If such a system were being used in this case it could also explain why the ISP is unable/unwilling to provide a hard limit on bandwidth. There must be dozens of people on
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
Here in Australia, all broadband is limited by a quota. The same is true of much of the rest of the world, outside the US.
A big reason for this (as it was explained to me) is that apparently the US (or US networks) charges other countries for data transmitted from the US (though that didn't stop local AU providers from charging us equally for Australian content, or even content cached locally by the ISP). I'd be interested to hear someone confirm or deny this theory.
As for limiting a cable user's volume, remember that unlike other transmission methods, their bandwidth is shared with other cable users on the local loop, so they *can't* all get full line capacity. If one user tries to max out the cable continually, it's hardly fair on his neighbours.
I certainly agree that the cable bastards could be much more upfront about these implied limits in their contracts however.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Yeah, until a few homegrown ISPs come along and offer unrestricted access and properly upgrade their networks to keep up with demand. Sure, such a company's profit margin may be smaller, but they'd make up for it in the hordes of customers switching.
This honestly has nothing to do with net neutrality. I personally pay $65.00 per month per for premium cable-modem internet from Comcast (internet access is important to me). It's quite a stretch say that they are unable to turn a profit and need to resort to blackmailing content providers in order to upgrade their service.
-Grym
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
These cable bastards need to be raked over the coals for this
Cable, unlike DSL, is a shared medium. In other words, if some selfish jerk wants to trade torrents 24/7 and max the bandwidth then that can very well impact every other user on that line.
If their advertisement of "unlimited bandwidth" is several hundred of gigs each month then that is effectively "unlimited."
In my opinion, it is completely reasonable to threaten to terminate service to people who are, in effect, diminishing the service of others.
You work for time warner? Cause I have had issue with them and both times I've been told it was listed on the CD that came with the internet, I had to click yes to install the software. I should have read it.
I then replied that I didn't install the software because I don't want your stuff on my computer. And the other time, I simply reply, your installer loaded the software and clicked on everything. Did he agree to something On your behalf?
both times, the issues were taken care of with the asumption that I knew better now. But you sound a lot like the guy who asumed I clicked on something.
Now verizon, they specificly told me one thing to take their service out and then told me another afterwards. I specificly asked them on the service's uptime because I was going to run a server on it. I specificly asked them if there was a problem with that and they said no and asured me they had good uptime. I also have this on recording. Now when I got my pachage to install the service, there was a letter with my DSL contract in it. It says in the contract that I'm not allowed to run any server of any kind on the conection. I called and asked about it, They said it was the standard agreement and wouldn't do anything about the server because we had spoken directly about it. Of course i recorded this too.
So, I am waiting for someone to say something this time and I will just take them to taks for it. Although, My service with verizon has been better then with Time Warner and the uptime has been better (for my area). No complsints so far (from me or them).
Given the relatively limited bandwidth going in and out of Australia, and that 99% of the world's websites are at the wrong end of that, there is arguably some justification for this. Still inconvenient though.
</devilsadvocate>
Those ISOs are relatively light-weight in terms of xfer overhead. You can pull them down all day and not get any attention, but if you start anything that even barely reeks of streaming or multi-media, you'll trigger a flag that puts you in line for being throttled back.
I call shenanigans. I've worked for an ISP on more than one occasion and the method you speak of consists of analyzing every single byte of every single user in real time and that's simply not going to happen.
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
At first I thought that they were just having problems with (legitimate) torrent use, but I did have a Win2K box up at that point to run some software my wife needed for work. Lo and behold, despite patches and security, the box had been owned. I told them I had taken the 2K box off-line (booted it back into Linux and the other box was a Mac) and they immediately reactivated the account.
:-)
After which your DSL provider's technical support people informed you that your Linux box is not supported.
Reading some of these anecdotes reminds of my dial-up days. I live in a small resort-ish community where, prior to SBC and Adelphia/Comcast's arrival, there was a single locally-owned mom and pop ISP. During my years with them, I never experienced a rate increase from the $18 per month I was paying, or a single busy number, delay in connecting, authentication, drop or any other sort of problem. I was able to download/upload All I Could Eat from usenet (the Supernews usenet feed was provided for free) and regularly did so.
Now I'm subscribed to SBC DSL with whom I regularly encounter problems of all sorts. The first year or so, my connection ran at about 90% of advertised. Then it dropped to 60%. Their NNTP feed as next to useless (even for text-based groups), so I incurred the additional cost of ten bucks per month for a premimum usenet service, which soon got throttled on my end. I eventually upgraded to an Uber-Premium DSL account with fixed IPs and and double the bandwidth (for twice the price, of course), and then watched the process repeat itself.
The irony is that my habits have long since changed and I have little need or interest in downloading anything other than an occasional ISO over HTTP. For that I'm paying what I consider an exorbitant sum. The commercials on TV make me wonder whether I'm missing out on some great fun, but the reality is that from a consumer perspective, we all hate our providers and we resent the added costs and decreasing level of service. Even more, I think we resent their resentment of us.
I used to run an ISP, back in the day. When I became aware that some hosting services providers were capping bandwidth and charging per unit of served data, I started to do a few calculations.
.1831 GBps, or 10.986 GB/min, or 659.16 GB/hr, or 15819.84 GB/day, or 474,595.2 GB/mo.
.0003 USD per megabyte of data, no? Three hundreths of a cent for a megabyte. When I realized these figures, it just didn't seem...honorable...to charge users for the piddling little amounts of traffic generated by their servers.
.01% of their subscriber base. The estimates tell us that the abuser consumes 200 GB/mo, the average user 2 GB/mo. So, of their stated 11.5 million customers, about (and I'm not actually a statistician, so forgive me, here) 1150 are consuming a total of 230,000 GB/mo, while only paying for a bit less than half of that, or 99665.9 GB/mo. Meanwhile, Comcast is collecting 26 USD/mo from the other 11,498,850 customers, who are paying for a grand total of 996,559,334.1 GB/mo.
/bin/sh load of money, which of course is actually the case. According to what I see on Yahoo! Finance, in the trailing twelve months, Comcast, as a company, made a profit of 2.24 billion USD on revenue of 24.97 billion USD. Are they honestly claiming that they can't make their network perform? Boo fscking hoo. Not all of Comcast is an ISP, but they soon will be. Better string that fiber a bit faster, boys...
Hmm, let's see. A typical T1 line delivers data at the rate of 1536 Kbps (don't bother about the extra 8Kbps, OK?). So, that's 1536000 / 8 / 1024 ^ -2, or a whopping
That's over 474 Tera-frickin-bytes with a capital B every month. On a single T1.
Now, back in the day (mid 90's), a top-tier provider T1 Internet access port cost, what--say, 1500 USD/mo including the local loop? For the math-inclined but time-challenged, that's about
I think the cost structures of a company like Comcast might offer them some economies of scale, but hey, let's be generous here and give them the benefit of the doubt. Let's say Comcast has to get all of it's backbone bandwidth from T1's, and they have to pay another provider for it. Let's say that the average Comcast Internet customer pays about 52 USD/mo for the dubious privilege (which is about what they actually charge here in New Jersey, the last time I looked). We'll take that 52 bucks and give up half in administrative overhead. So, our 26 USD/mo buys us 86.666 GB of data each and every month.
Now, Comcast would have us believe that their average user consumes according to the estimates here, about 1% of the data that so-called abusers consume. Comcast admits that these abusers make up approximately
So, Comcast's revenues from all of this total 299,000,000 USD/mo when, if those "abusers" were paying for their rightful share, Comcast would be making (and here, let's make the abusers pay triple to cover it all) 299,059,800 USD/mo. Is Comcast really going to whine over a loss of revenue of 59,800 USD/mo over a 300 million dollar a month revenue stream? It would appear so!
Now, what was I saying about the cost of backbone bandwidth? Ah, yes...Comcast, having to provide a total of 996,789,334.1 GB of bandwidth a month, needs to install 2100 T1 lines to cover it all. Let's go nuts here and suggest that Comcast actually needs double that to really cover it. So, Comcast pays out 4200*1500, or 6,300,000 USD/mo to cover their backbone (though, of course, not all the traffic actually leaves Comcast's network).
Ergo, in our hypothetical situation here, Comcast is making 292,700,000 USD/mo from their Internet services, while their users are leaving the backbone network at 50% utilization.
And they're complaining about 1150 users losing them 60 grand a month?
Anyone who knows even the slightest little bit about how the Internet works and is paid for can see how patently ridiculous all of this is. Yes, the numbers I'm using here are widly skewed, but mostly in favor of Comcast. Even if you double the costs and halved the revenue here, Comcast would still be making an fscking
Shit, your defence has a 400 billion budget? Thats insane! Actually, it's more like $500 billion for 2007. In comparison to previous empires, though, this is remarkably low. Consider that it is only roughly 4% of the GDP, and the two biggest spending areas are benefits/compensation for soldiers and R&D. Imagine if 4% of your economy could guarantee the ability to absolutely destroy any nation that opposed you. I would call it a remarkably good deal. Of course it's only this low because the US spent so much on R&D and infrastructure during WWII and continued it through the Cold War.
Of course I'm not saying it is a small amount of money, but it is relatively small when compared to the economy and military capabilities. Of course we all know that, in a perfect world, a military should not be necessary and $500B/year could be used to make significant advances in technology, science, and infrastructure, but that's more of a political and ideological discussion.
Personally I don't think it's wise to cease developing a military when other nations are making dramatic leaps and bounds in theirs unless the effects of the military spending is severely impacting an economy.
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
It makes *perfect* sense to have one or more plans which are not, infact, unlimited. But when you do, you should have the guts to openly say so, and state up-front what exactly the limits are.
It's fine to sell "2Mbps broadband, will be throttled to 64Kbps if you use more than 100GB/month", and then enforce that.
It's NOT fine to sell "2Mbps broadband, unlimited flat-rate", and then subsequently warn and disconnect users for using "too much" bandwith.
It's ok to have limits. Just be honest about it. Saying one thing in the comersials and another thing to customers who use a lot of bandwith is fraud, plain and simple. If you claim to be selling an unlimited plan -- you better actually *do* that.
I also live in the UK and haven't had any problems with downloading ~500GB/mo for over 4/5 years, and I've had my cable connection for as long as it's been available. Our ISP played about with limits for a while, but then they dropped them again less than 6 months later, in that time, I never heard anything from them. BTW - if you're in the UK and you're on 2mbps, unlucky. 20mbps is what I have at home and it's only £40/mo. Suggest you start looking for a better ISP!
Isn't that statement a little dishonest? GDP is a measurement of good&services produced by a country. Saying 4% of that was spent on defense isn't accurate; the federal government doesn't have the entire GDP available to spend, they only have the federal budget available to spend. And I don't believe the federal budget is included in GDP calculations.
A better comparison would be percentage of federal budget spent on defense compare to previous empires' percentage of budget spent on defense.
Or you could say for $500 billion spent on defense which created $X of good&services and that comes out to be Z% of the GDP. I would be interested in knowing values for X & Z.
I think I know what you are trying to doing "X% of the economy is put towards defense" but your math doesn't jive... there isn't $13 trillion in circulation, dollars get "re-used"(I forgot the proper term for it).
If the govt becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law, it invites man to become his own law, it invites anarchy
well I work at an ISP atm (tho a small one and in a country most of you don't know exists). there is a lot of hardware out there that shapes traffic. currently we're using Allot Netinforcers. They are funny in the way that they can input rules like 1. max 20 P2P session per IP. 2. high priority download from speedtesters around the world. (so the customer always thinks he has uber speed) 3. have different rules for ip ranges. (buisnesses that pay more get more) 4. down throttle P2P upload. (what ISP really has any wishes that other people can download "mostly illegal stuff" from their net) 5. high prio on HTTP Streaming. and it all works in real time.
Well, I am not one for arguing for big business, but it's their network. They don't want to impose hard limits but reserve the right to maintain quality of service. We have all been pissed off sitting there trying to check a quick email only to get the "thinking" status from the browser followed by a timeout error. So, as TFA says:
You look at it and see there's some two to three people in the neighborhood or a college dorm . . . and what they're doing is impairing the customer experience for the rest of the people off that node," Davis said. "Then it's a business decision: Do you alienate a small percentage of customers to make your other customers happy?"
If you have 25 customers pissed off because their $50/month broadband service is constantly slow, and 1 or 2 other people are constantly downloaded 300GB worth of data per month, what would you do? The problem, I am sure is that the situation was not handled with tact and reason. It was probably handled by some schmo customer rep who was like, "naaa, you just download too much, we just can't have that." If a nice polite person got on the phone and explained it just as the guy in the article, then people might be a little more understanding, and if not, tell them to go buy their own T3 line.
Isn't that statement a little dishonest? GDP is a measurement of good&services produced by a country.
Although that would generally be accepted as a correct definition, it is important to note that the GDP implies slightly more. It is a very good measure of the size of an economy. GDP = consumption + investment + (government spending) + (exports - imports) (thanks, wikipedia). You did acknowledge that I was talking about this ratio being "X% of the economy put towards defense", but the math does still jive because, like all other aspects of the economy, military spending gets re-used. Nearly the entire military budget ends up being spent in stores, real estate, health care, R&D, and even being re-taxed by the government.
A better comparison would be percentage of federal budget spent on defense compare to previous empires' percentage of budget spent on defense.
If you could do that accurately, you would be a better man than me, but I don't think it is possible to make that comparison in an accurate way because of the vast differences between our economy and that of say, Rome. Most nations today have central governments that provide goods and services that would not have been expected from the Roman government: health care, organizational dues, foreign aid, tuition assistance and education, and transportation safety and security agencies just to name a few. Most of these did not exist in previous empires, but most of the ones that did were generally paid for by wealthy people, philanthropists, rulers, etc. so military spending should have been a larger proportion of the budget simply because there were less items alongside it in the budgets. As we both know, this isn't the only significant change we've seen lately.
Before the industrial revolution, the wealth of a nation was generally determined by sufficient food and valuable trading items, such as gold or spices. As the world industrialized, pure production capability become the real standard. Currency no longer needed to be backed by precious metals because the economy would continue producing valuable goods from its raw resources. Of course, as we've globalized and begun to move into a new era, it matters less whether the resources are yours to begin with or where the products are produced, as long as the wealth created by the production trickles back down into your society. This has changed not only the way economies function, but our motives and end-state when it comes to international hostilities.
Rome conquered lands to plunder resources, capture slaves, and expand their borders. They did have some astonishing advancements, but they primarily maintained their empire with force. America, on the other hand, does not directly acquire conquered lands or plunder resources/people. Instead, it attempts to establish governments that will not only be more favorable to America, but also become trading partners. History has taught us that the best way to seal peace between countries is to ensure the improvement of the economy and standard of living of your opponent after a victory. Because of this, most of America's former adversaries are now allies, trading partners, and economic competitors. One could probably argue that the benefits of trading with Germany and Japan made WWII a profitable venture.
Since a military can, and is, used to expand, improve, or shape the global economy in a manner favorable to the nation investing in it, I would say that comparing military expenses to the GDP is fair. Not to mention the fact that a strong military prevents or deters the thing that has destroyed countless economies throughout history: [losing] war.
Of course none of this is meant in a political way. Wars can be just or unjust, just like anything else. I'm just trying to say that America's economy obviously is not struggling because of its military budget and it gets re
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
However, the ISP is _really_ screwed by their upstream. If they want to sell generic ISP service to anyone in the UK, then they pretty much have only one choice - pay BT for a 'central pipe' - this is a virtual pipe that goes from the linecard at your local exchange, to the ISPs NOC.
For this 622mbit/s pipe, the ISP is charged the very scary number of 150K pounds per quarter.
This is about 70 megabytes/second, once all the layers (ATM, IP encapsulation, maximum pipe loading) is taken into account.
Per month, this comes out to almost exactly 200000 gigabytes.
That is - assuming traffic patterns were ideal, it costs well over 50p per gigabyte to get that traffic back to the ISP. Letting users max out 8mbit lines will cost you over 3000 pounds per month in bandwidth bills alone _PER USER_.
Assuming half revenue they get goes to bandwidth providers, half on staff, and half in 'profit' - that's around 3000/6 - 500 'regular users' paying the bills for one heavy user, before you start seeing _any_ possible profit.
Of course, most users will not do this.
But, even 30 gigabytes per month means that the ISP is certainly subsidising you, unless you're paying well above the normal market rates, or are in an area dense enough that it pays the ISP to install equipment in each exchange.