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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."
Agreed, Finland is a great country for file-sharing. And I've heard rumours that the network of HOAS (the Helsinki student housing association), managed by Sonera, is actually that firm's test network, where you can upload and download all the live-long day with the company's (tacit) blessing because all that activity is only going to helping them better calibrate their main network.
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=
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
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