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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."
Note to all future submitters and to the editors.
From now on, please add *lt;SARCASM> tags for the sarcasm-impaired.
Thank you.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Catching the subtleties isn't really your thing, huh?
Personally, if I have to live with the connectivity options in the US for actually being able to see genitals in my porn, I'll consider it a fair trade.
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.
Yeah, really. I mean, my peak usage last year was 54 gb one month ... usually I'm around 25-30. I'm on Comcast and since they won't tell me anything about how much I can download without being stigmatized as a "bandwidth hog" I try to keep it under fifty. If I had 900 Gb down / 30 Gb up I'd say it was a good deal.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
To provide service to the broadband neglected in the US -- like, for example, allowing the public power districts that already have wires running to the homes do it.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
900G a month should be enough for everyone.
The next step is figuring out how to upload that much each day.
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?
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
I have a 10megabit down, 1.5megabit up at home. This means it would take me 44 hours to upload 30 gigabytes with my 1.5mb/s upload speed.
Perhaps until the backbone in Japan is updated to uncap upload speeds, the right answer would be to throttle bit rates for anyone who has uploaded more than 20 gigabytes in a particular month? You could almost do it by just slowly ramping down rather than cutting people off--and it's a lot less antisocial than just pulling the customer's plug.
Hell, I have an effective 20gigabyte/month upload cap because that's the maximum capacity of my bandwidth; yet until I heard about Japan's bandwidth I wasn't complaining.
As a footnote, the quote of the day at the bottom of my page reads: "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes. -- Dr. Warren Jackson, Director, UTCS"
Seems appropriate somehow...
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=
640k should be enough for 1.87 seconds.
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.
There was a time there when the Mars lander had faster network speeds than I had in my house in a populous region of the USA. Nobody was willing to bring cable or DSL to our town, but the damn lander had a 256K connection.
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.
The submitter is making fun of the US.... is that so hard to understand? Back in the day when broadband was introduced in the country I live, it was 256kbps/64kbps down no caps.... Compared to other countries (with and without caps) that was pretty much just above dialup. I mean, I had ISDN before that which could do 128kbps/128kbps. The difference? Flatrate... ISDN was per minute for ADSL, I paid one fix price per month. A 900GB cap would do nothing to me because the always-on aspect to me is the most important part of broadband to me.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
That clearly shows how bad their Internet infrastructure is compared to the US, where we have *unlimited* accounts!
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Whatching? Is that some fiendish portmanteau of whacking and watching? You Japanese porn fans are weird in so very many ways...
It must be this guy.
what HD? they're moving to SD transmitted digitally.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
In my country (Uruguay), the residential upload capacity varies between 128kbps and 256kbps, that means we have an upload limit between 0.9GB daily and 1.8GB if we consider that only two thirds of the supposed kbps are really available.
And what about wedding night movies?
Ezekiel 23:20
What exactly is so interesting about watching the news in HD? Will it make Fox more "fair and balanced?" I could see them trying that though as a marketing ploy. "Watch Fox news in HD, where our views and stories 50% more clear!"
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
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
I regularly upload more than 900 GB in a month on a residential connection and I live in the United States. I thought Japan was supposed to be some kind of broadband utopia? I must say, I am disappointed.
I have my doubts that they were laying fiber after WWII.
Right, which small law firm is that which produces 5TB of new or changed data *a month*? I am responsible for backup and storage at a large life sciences department at a UK university, and we don't produce 5TB of data from our microscopes a month. These produce data at a much higher rate than a small law firm could reasonably manage.
You need to invest in some better backup technology me thinks. Something that backs up files rather than filesystems.
Could the ISPs be telling the content providers to go jump in the lake?
If you don't like what I write don't be a CS and mod it down. Refute it.
Yea I can't spell. So what is your point?
He specifically mentioned video depositions. But who'd keep them online anyway? I'd burn a duplicate set of DVDs and have someone like Iron Mountain take them away for safekeeping.
I can't figure out what this CAP acronym is... anyone have any ideas?
CAP is a recursive acronym for "CAP Acronym? Please!". Hope that has enlightened you :)
And I agree completely with every one of the points you just made, but none of this has anything to do with HD - except in so far as HD can be used for more effective mind-numbing propaganda. But that's as bad as blaming the gun instead of the guy who pulled the trigger.
The HD switchover has nothing to do with the Internet, unless you are really worried that HD will kill the free press online. Sorry, but you are making some very bizarre connections here.
I ask you again - how does the HD switchover, in any way whatsoever, limit people's ability to broadcast on the internet? They can broadcast at SD quality today. They will be able to broadcast at SD quality tomorrow, which will work just fine on future equipment. People will broadcast in whatever quality they can afford, and the quality of the content, not the picture, will decide whether anybody tunes in.
Oh, and by the way, nobody is being forced to upgrade their SD hardware to HD. That's why they are selling the converter boxes - so that nobody has to buy a new TV or VCR.
Mir tut es leid, Menschen daß Einfältigfehlersuchenbaumfolgendenaffen sind.
Before? :)
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
I moved from Australia to Sweden last year.
Me: "What's my bandwidth cap?"
Swedish ISP Tech Support Guy: "What's a 'bandwidth cap'?"
Me: :)
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
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've produced 16 people for deposition in one month. All were plaintiffs in a Reduction In Force / Older Worker's Benefit Protection Act suit. Just last month (June) I had four depositions lasting longer than 8 hours. (FWIW I have a Masters in Endocrine Physiology (Masters only program) and I do understand lab data output though I was working on a PDP 11 when I took that Master's Degree).
IF what we were considering here was a reasonable path to off-site backups/disaster planning/remote access at high bandwidth - I could easily see how only 3-6 attorneys engaged in moderate litigation could generate 5T/mo.
What do bandwidth caps portend for small business - you don't have to be an attorney to create media - consider advertising firms, contractors, real estate - all could easily top the cap without being able to plan ahead. Market forces drive the demand. If you just created the Tesla vehicle and gas went to $20.00/gal - you had better have the bandwidth and data to feed your potential customers what they want.
If you run the math on the 100/100 Mbit (Japanese) connections in question, these caps are equal to only 3% of a user's upload 24/7. In Comcast's area, that would be 324 MB a day for 6/1 service, or 9.7 GB a month.
These caps are much, much worse for the service offered than Comcast's rumored 250 GB cap or the actual 400+ GB cap they currently use to remove excessive users from their network today.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
Well, according to data from 2007, tokyo's population density was of 4700 person per square km, vs 2050 for new york. Los Angele, the closest USA city on the list stands at about 2700. Nowhere close. Plus, if you go by population density of the country (since federal governments have a hand in pushing these things along), the US have an insignificant population density, while in Japan you'd have to cater to less total surface. Big difference.
So what's the excuse again? That we simply suck when it comes to doing things the right way?
I don't know what your excuse is, but the reason is due to crappy regulation that's resulted in monopolies that aren't serving the public interest. When the infrastructure provider is necessarily the same as the service provider, you have a problem (since the infrastructure is inherently a monopoly; nobody's fond of lots of streets being dug up to put in new capacity). There used to be exactly the same problem in the UK; the regulator here was very close to BT (who had the market sewn up just as thoroughly as Ma Bell ever did in the US). But the government/regulator (I forget which) decided to force BT to allow competition for the service part, and that's prompted both reduced prices and greatly improved levels of service. The former monopoly is still a big player, sure, but they're a competitive big player now, and I believe that having a free market in ISP services is what you need too.
If not, ask for yourselves (and your politicians) why the FCC hates capitalism and the free market, and goes instead for crypto-communist corporatism. Yeah, I know that's logically inconsistent, of course, but language like that is usually a good way to slant the argument the way you want.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
LOLCAP is in j00r t00bs, eatin up your bandwidthz.
I hope this new cap does not pose any problems for me. I have 60mbit down / 20mbit up.. I live near Tokyo, Japan. The entire country has fibre up the ass here for the most part (I've heard about 80%) and this stems from a totally different corporate culture here. It is starting to change and become more weestern (god help them), but generally in Japan the company you work for takes care of you a lot more and for a lot longer, and as a CEO you would stay with the same company for probably the rest of your career a lot more often. Because of this, the long-term success of a company is treated as being much more important than the short term profit / how the stocks perform this quarter. As such, Japanese companies are more willing to invest HUGE sums of money up front in R&D and infrastructure that wont make them any money for years and sometimes decades (Look at Tokyo's public transit/subway/monorail system, I've heard that it wont cover the debts it made to be built for another decade or two still, and they're still building new subway lines). This difference in corporate thinking is what has put the Japanese at the forefront in terms of technology applied to everyday living. Going back home to the US feels like walking into a technologically primative country, and not because the Japanese have any great marvels of technology, they simply spend more money on finding applicable ways to have technology contribute to everyday life.
Having a known cap is better than having an unknown cap. Having a cap measured in the hundreds of megabytes per month is utter bullshit regardless of whether you know the number or not. Hell, I'll often download five gigs in a day when screwing around with a linux distro or something. With an automated system-wide backup service (Mozy) and a camera that takes 14MB shots at 6.5FPS I'll often saturate my upload for a day or two at a time getting things synced up (even a reasonably respectable 1Mbit upload by US standards takes a LONG time to push 5-6GB).
Point being that I simply couldn't function with a 10GB monthly cap, let alone 1GB. While I may be a fairly heavy bandwidth user, I'm really not doing anything unreasonable. Obviously my five bucks a month online backup service would be useless if it cost me fifty bucks in overage fees.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
A legit home user would have a tough time reaching 900GB - speed is ultimately irrelevant as long as it's fast enough to actually reach the limit. It's all about volume, and what would you be uploading, and to who, that would amount to over 900GB in a month on a domestic connection?
Torrents...that's what does it for me.
Now, you may say something about this not being "legit", but the only thing I torrent is TV shows that my recording failed on, and truly free stuff (Linux distros, etc.). If you are nice to the swarm and seed back for a while, you can get some massive upload amounts.
I'm still only about 300GB/month upload (see here for calculation), but I'm sure that number is still larger than you thought you'd see from a "legit" user.
What about my streaming HD security cameras that are running all day?
If you give people the bandwidth they will find a way to use it. Hell, a professional photographer backing up his daily photo shoots could hit 30Gigs without much problem. Or cinematographers collaborating over the internet. Not everyone just surfs message boards and downloads an ISO once a month so that they can consider themselves a 'power user'.
I say open up the hardware and the software will follow.
Time Warner's highest level tier for their experiment with usage-based pricing is 40 GB/month. This is less than the capacity of a single Blu-Ray disc. Sony must be doing a happy dance.
it could be much worse, imagine, a connection with a top speed of 512kbs, where your international cap is 3GB and your local cap is 10GB and once you hit that, you got to wait till next month. well, this is the reality I have to deal with in South Africa thanks to Telkom, so, is 30GB a day really that bad? :P
PS: I solved my problem, went to a varsity, tunnel out, uncapped fast internet for the win.
At least he was able to tell you in English or Swedish that he didn't understand what you said. I had to call tech support when I bought this laptop, and asked if they can send me the missing software. he said "I'm shoory I doesn't know wut your aRe shaying.". It took two weeks to get someone who could understand English.
Even veals have more autonomy!
How many people have substantially more than 3 Mbps of upstream bandwidth to play with at home? I'm on my service provider's fastest available connection, and upstream bandwidth maxes out at 1 Mbps.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.