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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."
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.
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.
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...
Youtube in HD.
You lose.
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=
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.
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
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 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.
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 :)
Yeah, but you don't see the dark side of what that regulation gets you - universal healthcare, decent public transportation (compared to most of the US), lots of vacation time. Your wealthy people probably don't get anything like the tax cuts ours do. Practically the third world, that.
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.