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."
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.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
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!
Salut,
Jacques
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.
I have my doubts that they were laying fiber after WWII.
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.