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."

Comments

Re:Bandwidth cap? Not here

[ultranova]

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.

Well, of course: you can get broadband from any ISP you want, no matter who owns the phone line, so there's no monopoly problems like in the US.

There is no need for this for ordinary users

[cliffski]

Thats an insane amount. I can't even vaguely imagine how I would use more than 30 gig a month downloads. And 90% of that is me using the BBC iplayer because I don't own a video player or DVD recorder. Without those, it's probably under 5 gig a month tops, and thats mostly web surfing, the odd youtube vid and multiplayer gaming.
Fuck it, with so many 'triple A' games abandoning the PC, there aren't even any stupidly big demos to download anymore.

Unless you are some kid who thinks he is 'sticking it to the man' by downloading every single hollywood movie in HD (presumably so can watch it whilst snorting about how much it sucks and that the producers business model is flawed) from dodgy torrent sites, I don't see how anyone has any serious need for this.

I'm sure some smug slashdotters will equate this to the 640k quote, but tell me exactly how my need for digital data downloaded to my PC is going to go much higher in the next ten years?

Re:There is no need for this for ordinary users

[hherb]

When all I had were floppy disks, my first 5MB hard disk seemed so huge that I started wondering how I would fill it. Question was answered within weeks. Few years later I spent seveal thousands of dollars for a monstruous 5GB hard disk, assuming that would be the end of all my storage troubles.

Nowadays, in my medical practice, my backup volume is at present 25 GB. It grows by about 1GB per month. That is what I have to transfer every night to an offsite backup facility.

Images I receive from radiology can be several GB a day when they transfer MRI and CT images, and so forth

Plus, once you got the bandwidth, you can start doing some real video conferencing at a frame rate and resolution that actually makes it usable - and you will burn through many GB in no time.

Re:30 gigs up is way more than I could ever send.

[blackjackshellac]

That's pretty well just what I was going to post, my upload bandwidth is a tad under 100KB/s, so the most I can upload in a 24 hour period is 8GB. My download bandwidth comes in at about 500KB/s so with that I could get to 40GB down per day.

After working in a university for 15 years and regularly getting 1-10MB/s and now working in private industry where we employ Infiniband, Gige and 10Gige these limits are horrifyingly slow to me.

Fibre to the home. Now!

Re:Download caps

[devjj]

You say that now, but in a few years when you want to stream HD with actual fidelity - not the compressed to hell crap we have today - you'll change your tune. We are quickly approaching an era of ubiquitous streaming. If network operators institute caps and then continue resisting investments in their networks, a lot of innovation will never happen.

Re:Japan VS. US Infrastructure.

[SilverJets]

I have my doubts that they were laying fiber after WWII.

Re:Slashdot users not so good at math?

[TheRaven64]

So? How many people actually want to use 100Mb/s anything close to 100% of the time? It's there so you can get an ISO image in under a minute, not so you can constantly stream that much data. If you are really uploading more than 30GB/day (and, remember, these caps are for uploading only, not for downloading), then you really should be paying for a commercial Internet connection, not a consumer-grade one.

Re:might be someting else

[LunarCrisis]

Apparently when you make an insightful post, you can post it twice with only minor changes to double the karma intake!

Re:might be someting else

[LunarCrisis]

Apparently when you make an insightful post, you can double the karma intake by posting it twice with only minor changes!