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In Japan, a 900 Gigabyte Upload Cap, Downloads Uncapped
Raindeer writes "While the Broadband Bandits of the US are contemplating bandwidth caps between 5 gigabyte and 40 gigabyte per month, the largest telco in Japan has gone ahead and laid down some heavy caps for Japan's broadband addicts. From now on, if you upload more than 30 gigabyte per day, your network connection may be disconnected. Just think of it ... if you're in Japan and want to upload the HD movie you shot of yesterday's wedding, you soon might hit the limit. The downloaders do not face similar problems."
No such thing in Finland. I can upload and download 24/7 without any restrictions, and I've never heard of any ISP enforcing a cap.
To hit the 900GB limit you'd have to upload at (if I did the math right) 364KB/sec nonstop every day for an entire month.
I don't know what the hell you're doing but that's a pretty generous cap, and something a typical family is unlikely to reach... even uploading 30GB HD home movies.
=Smidge=
I probably use about ~40gb a month, which I believe is below COX's limit of 60gb/month. I have a decent torrent ratio so I'm probably uploading 20gb a month as well
~5gb movies streamed from 360
~3gb movies streamed from netflix. I have no idea what the netflix size-per-movie is, but my wife watches about 5 of them per month.
~30gb porn
~10gb tv shows
~2gb checking email, web surfing, youtube, downloading linux distros, etc.
Notice that the limit is 30GB PER DAY, making it 900GB per month UPLOAD limit.
There is no download limit, as mentioned in article and summary.
what HD? they're moving to SD transmitted digitally.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Australia. Debateably not a third-world backwater.
(Almost) All residential DSL/Cable data services in Australia have a cap. If you are daft enough to use the defacto monopoly provider's retail services then you get a small cap, high price, and both in- and outbound data count. Until recently, their cap was 1 or 3 GB with a ridiculous per MB charge for excess...they still sell grandma and grandpa (read sucker) accounts with 200 or 400 megabyte limits. I think haemorrhaging customers to the competition, and being forced to play nice by the ACCC, is starting to change their ways.
Bigpond's offerings
Most everyone else counts only inbound traffic.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
Even with HD content one would have to deliberately break the limit. Let's assume youtube would implement full HD based on H.264 aka MPEG-4 AVC. I don't have any material on my computer but a quick look here tells me that 3 minutes require about 360 MB, so you get about 250 minutes for 30 GB, which is a little more than 4 hours.
But even if someone watches youtube for more than 4 hours in a row it wouldn't matter, because TFA mentions that it only affects upload, so one would have to upload 2.8 movies of average length a day.
BTW: Bluray supports MPEG-2 exactly for the reason that it wastes so much space. Otherwise people would start to wonder why we need 50 GB optical discs for HD videos...
I don't read replies by ACs.
What you say is true, but perhaps a little misleading. Telstra may have outrageously expensive plans with caps so small you daren't send more than one ping request...but the others are fine. I've been on a 36GB quota (throttled to 128K/s if you go over) for the last few years, and I'm not paying the earth... Sure, there are some horrible plans out there, but maybe just don't choose those ones...
resist. unlearn. defy.
I live in Japan, and recently my ISP told me specifically in a letter that they absolutely didn't track what I did and also didn't care - not to mention that there's a 20-year-old Japanese law that specifically bans spying on customers' communications that may actually cover this.
They did request that I try not to get caught doing anything illegal, though. They said the worst that could happen is that they would cancel my contract and I would be forced to go sign up with a different fiber internet provider (there are at least two others in Osaka).
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life