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Typical Home Bandwidth Usage?
Broadband writes "With a growing number of internet service providers imposing hard bandwidth caps, I too will soon find myself with a limit. In typical Slashdot fashion I use the Internet for everything from movie streaming to online backup and just realized I have no idea how much data traverses my pipes on a monthly basis. While I have wised up and installed a bandwidth monitoring solution, it'll be some time until I have a normalized average. So my question is: What is the average monthly data usage in your household? How many people share the connection and is there anything you've found essential yet bandwidth intensive that you couldn't live without? (E.g. VOIP, movie downloads, streaming audio, etc.)"
For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say "I'm going to sleep." And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me; I would try to put away the book which, I imagined, was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had been thinking all the time, while I was asleep, of what I had just been reading, but my thoughts had run into a channel of their own, until I myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between FranÃois I and Charles V. This impression would persist for some moments after I was awake; it did not disturb my mind, but it lay like scales upon my eyes and prevented them from registering the fact that the candle was no longer burning. Then it would begin to seem unintelligible, as the thoughts of a former existence must be to a reincarnate spirit; the subject of my book would separate itself from me, leaving me free to choose whether I would form part of it or no; and at the same time my sight would return and I would be astonished to find myself in a state of darkness, pleasant and restful enough for the eyes, and even more, perhaps, for my mind, to which it appeared incomprehensible, without a cause, a matter dark indeed.
I don't get my connectivity through a major provider. I get dsl through sonic.net. They are a AT&T reseller, but with huge advantages. They have not once ever mentioned bandwidth limits. I have static IPs, and I am allowed to run servers (mail, web, etc). Of course, I pay more than the average joe-user. About $70/month, but I feel it's worth it.
I've never measured my usage, but your question has me curious. I'll install a meter and get back to you in a month. LOL
-- Will program for bandwidth
Camfrog and Skype Video at full FPS is quite bandwidth-intensive, Camfrog 100x more than Skype since I can load 100 webcams as a registered Pro user.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
When my ISP added caps, they started by giving statements of the last three months of each person's usage, and did that for a few months before adding the cap. It made life quite nice.
Turns out, I rarely go over 20GB in a month. I was basically two persons: one 14 year old girl watching youtube, facebook, and uploading hundreds of photographs; while I run a programming business downloading software and uploading text files.
Don't know if that helps.
I already have a cap (Yes I'm Australian, don't start the whole "OMG WE'RE SICK OF AUSTRALIANS IN SLASHDOT" BS. We're the best friends you'll have now since we've been on caps for years and can tell you how best to stay within them). It's a relatively large one compared to others, domestically at 150GB. I use it all up mainly on torrents for things like movies, games and the odd program and Linux iso.
It's not hard to monitor usage especially if most of it comes through downloads and not through browsing. Browsing can be a killer. Especially these days when a lot of sites have embedded video ads. Those, plus 5-10MB animated .gif's that you don't expect can really eat into your bandwidth. Best solution is Firefox with Adblocker and NoScript. Will save you a lot of headache when you check your usage and wonder "Where did all these GB's come from!".
I donÂt have any limit but i upload/download around 2 TB /month, I have a no limit 100/100 Mbit connection that is shared by 2 peoples.
I have static IP and I am allowed to run servers.
I pay 99 swedish kronor for the connection, that is like 15,10 USD
Tomato firmware is so nice; it's just under Bandwidth: Monthly.
/.'s, since I'm a) living overseas, b) haven't been torrenting very much lately, and c) wasn't home for the first half of that first month. :D We're sustaining a family of four on this, with a 1400kbps streaming video connection to Taipei that comes on, say, every night for two to three hours. The connection sets us back about 35 USD for 10 Mb/s down, 1 Mb/s up.
Over the last three months, my mean average is 84GB down, 16GB up; this makes for a total of 100GB damage to my ISP.
I'm probably in the lower range of
Use about 20-25 gigs a month on just surfing/gaming thats before any mentionable sized downloads like big patches for online goes, or torrents
This especially sucks as my tightwad ISP gives us a 30 gig cap on a 10mb line unless i'd care to shell out 100 bucks more a month (my current bill is only 50) to get a 60 gig cap.
If you have a 250GB limit. I typically hit 80GB/month when doing lots of downloading and watching TV streams. You really have to push hard to hit 250GB even if you're a binary newsgroup junky.
I manage to keep my bandwidth usage under 20GB a month despite downloading videos, streaming radio, using Skype, and downloading various Linux distros every week.
I run DD-WRT on my router to make sure I'm sticking with the limit, and generally try not to exceed 300MB a day, giving myself extra space for the occasional large download.
bandwidth-intensive and essential stuff: none except occasional heavy youtube usage (example), but I'm impatient, so I have a fast connection. Also planning on using Freenet at some point in the future (on principle, because I dislike the current trends in wiretapping legislation).
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Acording to DU meter My average monthly use is 502.68GB that is for both up and down.
I'm in the UK and i love BE internet for being the only truly unlimited service. Caps in the UK have been around for a while and it is truly rare to find an actually unlimited service.
Seriously. I can suck up as many plain-text pages as my heart desires. South Africa FTW.
http://www.tudumo.com - todo list with tags
I've had a limit with Cox Communications since as long as I can remember, at 10 GB up and 40 GB down per month. I've passed it multiple times, and nothing really happens.
Perhaps this new wave of limits will be enforced?
I always put a conscious effort to monitor my usage but
According to our (South African) monopolistic overlords (telkom) 3 Gigabytes is more than enough... so basically you can max out on the first day of the month... from then on you can "top up" $10 per gig... heck an you guys bitch about 250 gig limits
Bandwidth is not usage, it is a rate.
Last month 180GB down, 60GB up. Mostly on torrents and streaming video, with a little bit of VOIP and VPN to work.
lucky bastards. I live in the Northwest Territories, Canada, and my only viable options are cable (10 GB/month), and satellite (5 GB/month).
It's like wages: required usage = (disposable amount) + 1
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
Between 20-30 GB/month for $50.
If your ISP has accounts with caps, then the chances are they'll have a page where people can go check the usage on their accounts. Log in to your ISP's 'Customer Portal' if they have one, and you can probably find out.
I've got an uncapped account and my provider has this - they've got historical data going back to May 2006.
The "cap" for my New Zealand flat is 10GB ($55), of which I use about 4GB/month, most of which is Debian updates. If we go over that, it's $3/GB (note: prices in NZD). However, I do spend most of my day at the local university, and don't need to pay [an additional amount on top of my standard fees] for Internet access there.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
Bandwidth or total data transfer ?
They are not the same.
Somebody with 24 Mbps ADSL has more bandwidth than somebody with 8 Mbps ADSL, but they both might have a transfer cap of 40 GB per month. Oh, that's right, language changes, get used to it. Fuck science, definite terms are so 20th century.
What's the best way to monitor traffic, for a joe average type like me? I could install some sort of Windows app, but they tend to be buggy, lose data, not deal with hibernation, etc. Ideally, it should go somewhere on the router, but the router is a Netgear RP614 with few features, and anyway I used to hate SNMP data when I was doing HP Openview monitoring years ago. Is it "yet another taskbar icon" for me?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
50GB Down & 5GB Up (average)
100GB Down & 4GB Up (this month)
Skype has replaced my phone
Joost & legal sites have replaced my Cable TV
Streaming music all day long
Games - online shooters
Web Browsing/RSS feeds
My ISP charges by the amount of traffic for my measly 2 Mbps ADSL. 50GB traffic is free for $100/- per month.
But no port limitations, nothing. Just the raw stuff. I have run my home servers (for test runs), used my Mac as FTP server (when i was downloading stuff into my laptop before i discovered rapidshare).
My ISP does allow me to boost up the speeds to 8Mbps for short periods (2 hours max free of cost). I just that when iam downloading latest Torchwood episodes.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
>> With a growing number of internet service providers imposing hard bandwidth caps,
Uhh, isn't it just comcast (at least in the USA)? why do you say "growing number"?
Actually I've been waiting for a slashdot article that says how comcast is gonna stop bandwidth caps in order to stem the tide of customers leaving, but I guess either most people don't know or care, or maybe just don't have any alternative broadband providers.
Perhaps what needs to happen is for a comcast customer to initiate a class action suit because they reached their limit and got cut off, even though there's no such clause explicitly in their contract.
Here in BC we've always had caps. I think they've doubled more recently from 30 to 60gb.
With lots of web usage and many large files I haven't had a problem. If you are on cable and are uploading at max speed 24/7 you'll pass your limit, but otherwise most homes should be fine with the smallest of caps.
People complaining about comcast's 250gb limit must be doing it out of principle because that is an extreme amount to use for non business.
I would actually say that mine(adsl with telus) doesn't offer enough bandwidth to realistically reach the cap. One big download seems to clog the pipes these days.
[20:36] wwwdot/.dotorg
I tend to be around 1TB/month, mostly thanks to my router not being able to do more than 40Mb/s. Most of that is made up of torrent uploads though, so I could probably lower it quite a bit if I wanted to. This is in a 1 person household.
The average household really won't use much bandwidth. I was surprised by this, when my parents got broadband a couple of years ago - even with 4 persons at home (not including me), they used only some 250 MB (download) per month. In fact, they often used more upload than download, because of sending photo's to an online photo printing service.
They do use e-mail and the web really quite a lot (hours a day), also my younger brothers play (online) games all the time, both browser-based and otherwise.
This was a couple of years ago when youtube didn't exist yet; I'd assume the bandwidth usage would be a bit higher now. But unless you start downloading movies (they rent DVD's instead) and lots of music, you don't use a whole lot apparently.
I used to share an apartment with 2 other students; we averaged about 1 GB/day, including lots of messing about with Linux distro's and the like, but obviously not just that.
So I don't know, I'd rather have the 250 GB/month cap than some undefined FUP. It's hardly like 250 GB is a completely unreasonable limit. You will never unconsciously download that much, except perhaps if you're trying to keep up with alt.binaries.* on a daily basis or something.
(The problem is of course that once there is a strictly defined limit, given the usual lack of competition they will keep lowering it unless you are willing to pay more)
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
The data rate of voip is quite low. It should not be the largest percentage of your usage. You're talking about less than 30MB per hour usage. Usually the killers are big downloads and video streaming. Internet radio running 24/7 at 128kbps will amount to about 10G so turning it off when not using it could provide some solace.
!
Cox cable, Use about 45 gigs a month on 3 pc's for 55$. cap at 90 month I think, never been warned about it so I don't worry.
Hi all. My first post on Slashdot even though I've been reading it since the late 90s. Finally got around to signing up. I'm Australian and as most Slashdotters know, Australian ISPs all impose caps.
Personally, I'm on a 25 GB per month cap (after which my speed is slowed, but I am not charged more). My monthly usage generally ends up at around 18-22 GB, without me needing to monitor my usage or worry about it. My connection supports 2 people who are both heavy browsers. Plenty of youtube, streaming radio etc. Perhaps a TV show from a torrent every second day. Skype on the weekends to call my family overseas.
Basically, unless you are a MAJOR torrent leecher, you will find that you won't have any problems whatsoever staying under 250 GB (Comcast). I have one tenth of that cap, download movies/TV shows every other day, surf heavily, run a home FTP server, but I have no issues staying under 25 GB. Keep in mind that my uploads are not capped (not sure if Comcast's 250 GB includes uploads or not).
A poster above mentioned the issue of people launching attacks on your connection that flood you with unrequested packets. Yes this would be counted against your usage. But I've never heard of it being an issue...certainly hasn't happened to me in my 8+ years of using capped broadband. In the very unlikely circumstance that it did happen, call the ISP and they will be able to see the attack in their logs, and here, they would be reasonable and not charge you for it.
Now onto the subject of why I think caps, provided they are clearly stated, are generally a good thing!
Contrary to some people's knee-jerk reaction however, the reason Australia has caps is not because it's a technology backwater. Far from it actually - DSL speeds here are generally faster than in most parts of the US (although I admit, FiOS rocks, where it's available).
Australian bandwidth caps basically exist because:
a) most English speaking content comes from the US (i.e. most traffic is international, vs mostly domestic in the US); and
b) we are an island a long way from anywhere. Those undersea cables don't pay for themselves. Peering and transit costs here a an order of magnitude higher than in the US. ISPs thus have to impose monthly download caps to stop a few high volume users sending them bankrupt.
But on the plus side, because we pay for what we use, there are a number of advantages. My ISP, like most in Australia:
- Is far less contended than most US ISPs. Download speeds are always meet my connected speed. I have an 8/1 Mbps connection, and I get that speed, all the time (~850 kb/s downstream and slightly over 100 kb/s up). Whereas some US ISPs, when I've used them, seem sluggish in peak hours.
- Never fiddles with my traffic. No bittorrent deprioritising, no deep packet inspection, no random throttling or any of that nonsense. In the US though, well you know all about the shenanigans some of your ISPs have been up to.
- Allows me to run anything whatsoever on my connection. Whereas most US DSL providers I have read the AUP for have 20 clauses about how you cant run servers etc.
The other thing to note is that because we get charged for what we use, ISPs can allow us faster speeds here, without worrying that we will completely trash their network by leeching 24/7. In the US, your DSL connections mostly seem to be 3 or 6 Mbps, with maybe 768kbps up. In Australia, DSL is generally from 8, up to 24 Mbps down (ADSL2+), and if you have Annex M support on your modem/ISP, you can get up to 2.5 Mbps upload. Personally, I'd rather faster speeds with a cap, than slow speeds but unlimited downloads and annoying packet tampering.
The final thing to note is that virtually all ISPs here have massive download mirrors which aren't counted against your quota. For instance, my ISP has full Sourceforge, MajorGeeks etc. mirrors that contain most large things I would ever want to download anyway.
So yeah - don't fear your (very generous!) download caps over there. It's good news for you. Get the 0.1% of people off the network that abuse the hell out of it, and speeds will be faster for the rest of you.
So what are some easy ways to measure total transfers, under OS X?
Most half-decent routers and firewalls keep rudimentary port statistics. According to my router I'm using about 30GB per month on my ADSL2+ line, and my family does little or no movie/music downloads. But I do run remote desktop sessions and remote backup (rsync) on the link and I get ISO's occasionally.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
Either implicite or explicit, there's always a cap on any ressource. Now it depends on the cap :)
Like everybody, I also don't like caps. When I started using cable back in Paris in late 90's, my stupid provider imposed very low limits, like max 500mb upload / month. And at the same time, they had no problem advertising their service as "Unlimited Internet access" on every wall in the street.
300gb seems to be high enough. In July I downloaded a lot of via Bittorrent (HD stuff), and total trafic for that month was 74.70gb, as reported by my Linksys router running Tomato firmware (http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato/). Normally, I would use from 12 to 25gb/month (2 persons, with lot of streaming radio).
The whole family uses the internet connection spread over 4 computers. We watch Youtube video's and for work I use the net a lot. Yet an average month uses up about 7 GB.
I just cannot imagine how a 250GB cap is a limitation in anyway unless you are a major torrent host.
Every area covered by cable is also covered by DSL and satellite.
Don't tolerate bandwidth caps.. when your ISP imposes them, jump ship!
Even if the other ISP has caps it impacts the bottom line on your original.
Enough people do this and they won't dare try that crap.
Also, FYI, my bandwidth usage annually is rather spiky .. i'll use minimal browsing 2 months, then fill up a 300 gig drive the next.
I wont tolerate comcast pulling this cap crap, and neither should you.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
I get a fully unshaped 8Mbit connection with 15GB transfer per month for £20.
Anything downloaded between midnight and 8am is not counted towards the cap
One of the tech gurus at my ISP wrote a fine blog article about how UK ISPs are charged for their transfer. It's a completely different market economic to the US, which is why we've had transfer limits for some time.
Beer Coat: The invisible but warm coat worn when walking home after a booze cruise at 3 in the morning.
lots of VoIP ..fair amount of gaming .. fair amount of downloading distros / patches / updates..etc lots of Streaming audio.. ummm some streaming video
2x people (who frequently work from home via VPN connection back to respective offices.)
I have been shocked a how little our usage actually is
still I'm not thrilled about a cap ... but OTOH wasn't TW talking about testing a lot low cap than this?
actually I am happy to see you, however that is in fact a banana in my pocket.
Although that can be so difficult it's a nationwide sport.
"Those undersea cables don't pay for themselves."
They only get laid once. Then they get used repeatedly. I'm sure they pay for themselves & then some.
You're asking the wrong question. ComCast et al are doing this DARING the market to complain about it. No complaining, then they have justified their position on the matter.
Thats the problem with this generation of users. They belive its OK to borrow and steal your private data, share it with others, they believe this is normal. They belive the ISP can do what they want with your communications, sniff, block, etc.
The fact is this was ALL illegal not too many years ago. But they began to do it, and simply challenge anyone to fight them. Pay off a few politicians and you get a "DEBATE", "A DISCUSSION" to argue if the practice is "OK".
In the end, the network "owners" will charge you by the byte, just like AT&T use to do by charging you by the "TIME" on the phone. ComCast isn't stupid. They know that all the major TV networks and others will begin pushing video to you, including ComCast. They see that the internet video business model needs the match the current CABLE TV pricing structure. So they need to begin NOW to structure and limit the bandwidth before its too late. They need to change the mindset of moron users that its OK to charge you by the byte.
900 gigabyte per month upload should be enough for everybody. But in reality. Some weeks I go over 5-10Gigabyte per week (Netherlands) just doing VPN kind of stuff. Other weeks I don't even hit 100megabyte. I would want to be able to send my parents the footage from my harddisk camcorder without any encoding etc, but the upload still sucks.
Use Adsense for Charity
I share my bandwidth with 2 other guys, comcast gave us an "unoffical bandwidth cap" of 100 gb's up/down a month, and we've broken that every month so the last week or soof every month our internet is horribly slow.
I track my (not roommates) bandwidth, and I'm around 20gb a month with light video usage, but I can get close to 30+ if I watch a lot of hulu and youtube. I also download full games, and that can pretty quickly destroy my monthly cap, especially with games like Age of Conan which was over 20 gbs.
...It's over 9000!!!! (gb)
So Nov. 1st when I get my over-bandwidth warning from Comcast, we are switching to 'Business Service', here in CO we pay $66 per month (plus tax) for 8mbit for residential.
For business class we have 2 options, 6mbit for $65, or 16mbit for about $90 - will probably go with 16mbit .
Point being, there is a workaround to their bandwidth caps - I called Comcast Business Services the same day this story broke, and confirmed no caps, and they do same-day service on reported problems, unlike the 3-7 days it takes them to show up on residential accounts..
So either we save a buck a month and lose 2mbit, or up it by 15 and gain 8mbit..
I hope this suggestion helps anyone else feeling screwed by Comcast.
hb93
please refer to various anti-australian rants on this subject.
stop congratulating us for a complete and utter failure of our markets to develop competition, and the rise of such abusive behavior.
i'm sorry if you live in ISP hell, but you should not be welcoming us.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
There was a story here on it a while back
I am so sick of these whiney posts.... wah wah wah, I might be capped soon.
I've been capped since around 2002.
I live in Australia, I'm capped to 80gb, I download around that each month (which is a lot), and I have 4.5mbit down and 1mbit up.
I also pay $109 for this privilege (although that's on top of $15 per month line fees).
Don't worry about your usage, 250gb is heaps, you will normalize once you're capped, I guarantee it!
Also if you find that your cap is too small, upgrade, change your ISP, or come up with strategies to maximize your cap.
For instance my ISP (http://www.adam.com.au) has separate caps for traffic inside of Australian than it does for outside of Australia. Additionally it also has CommunityNet on its exchanges which basically turns that exchange into a private LAN. Another method is to find people near you and setup your own LAN or sharing network.
There are many ways to maximize your potential.
This is not the end of the world.
You've still got it way better than us and a lot of the rest of the world.
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
One thought... What if you have VoIP and need to go an emegency call after you've been blocked? Doesn't phone companies have some responsibility to keep up the service so that you can make such calls?
Now and then around 250G/day, it adds up ;)
100/100 full duplex connection with no restrictions, of course I do live in Sweden.
Major ISP, 20Gb cap extra 40Gb off peak. I setup a nice scheduler and I usually hit the 60Gb on the last day of my billing cycle. I run the Tomato firmware so I could check up on what's going through my router, maybe this month... Stuck with plain old ADSL, no upgrades to the local exchanges anytime soon either.
Task Mangler
My ISP, Videotron, used to have a high-speed (10Mbps) no-limit package for about 75$. With that bandwidth it was possible to download around 80GB per day (especially with an external usenet service like Usenetserver.com or Giganews), but even as a rabid downloader I was cruising around 300GB/month max, not including Tv or VoIP.
Last year with no warning the ISP put a 100GB (total) limit for this same package. Apparently some people were abusing... I called to cancel my account, but they offered me a great deal: a lower-speed connection (8Mbps) with a small cap (20GB) for 45$, but with a ceiling of 30$ for extra monthly transfer, and they threw in a great deal on HPS and Tv (with bandwidth not metered). So basically I pay the same amount and I can top my bandwidth 24x7 for the same price I used to pay, just with 20% less speed.
Videotron is great, service is excellent, there is little or no outages, and when you combine services (internet + tv + HPS + mobile) you get huge rebates. I was a little pissed by the new caps, but overall there is no better deal. There are some fly-by-night ISP selling unlimited DSL for 30$ a month, but Bell Canada is messing with their bandwidth (and does not plan to stop doing it) in order to promote its own DSL. So Bell is the only major alternative, but it is expensive and the service is bad.
When you get the service with Videotron, the technician asks you exactly where in your home you want to put the outlets for tv, phones and computers, and he puts in new cables to fit your requirements. Then he checks if the signal is strong enough, and if it is not, he goes outdoors and drives a new cable from the house to the nearest hub. It is just great. All included in the installation fees of 50$ that are often waived as an incentive to subscribe.
On the other hand, when you get the service with Bell, nobody is coming, they ship you a shitty starter kit, and only if you request it after a while a technician will come, and if the "problem" is inside your house you get billed 100$+. Plus the installation fees. And the minibar price whenever you exceed your allowed bandwidth.
So in the end I don't mind a limit on my monthly transfer, as long as I get a good service and the fees are not ridiculous.
lucm, indeed.
Comcast are wankers. As the rest of the world goes to faster (FTTH/ADSL2) solutions we are stock with crappy DOCSIS 2.0 or original DSL.
I had a 50/100MB link (FTTH) in Japan when I worked their for about $45 USD a month, No caps on the connection.
I pay MUCH more than that for a stupid 6MB cable connection.
Where is any source of consumer protection in the US? The FCC is incompetent and is basically an industry partner, not a regulator.
We have a US exchange student staying with us and the cultural difference in usage is very obvious. The first two weeks he was here he chewed through 80% of our cap before we had a chat and I educated him on our pathetic limits here in Oz.
Yes we Australian's are jealous of true unlimited caps and like our UK brethren enjoy a little whinge now and then. For $60/mo I get all of 30GB down (and 20 more between 1 and 7 am, woohoo). It is fast, averaging 20Mbps but that just means more time spent rationing between fast large downloads :(
What do we use? Well most of the peak download, ie 20-30GB/mo.
For the a little more you can get 150GB/mo but 110GB of that is between 3 and 9am, not very sociable hours.
We have four people sharing our network, although only two of us really use the net for much more than surfing. Even with 15GB this is the first month since we got this plan where it looks like we wont be going over the limit (our month ends on the 18th). Would move to ADSL2+ which I can get with my ISP for the exact same price as I pay now and with 20GB of data, but because the company that provides the ADSL have really shitty prices compared to the company who my ISP gets its ADSL2+ off in order to switch to ADSL2+ I would have to downgrade to 56K and then upgrade to ADSL2+ which is apparently a nightmare and could leave me without internet for up to 3 weeks, which is something I cant live with. Understandably I'm annoyed, but there isn't much I can do until my ISP implements a simple changeover (which has been 'just around the corner' for years apparently). I'm in Australia BTW.
With respect, I was just stating my opinion. But if a cap is unsuitable for your needs, then hell yes, vote with your feet and leave that company for one that suits your needs more. I'm all for that.
I'm not saying 'live with it' and I'm certainly not congratulating you. I'm just saying its not as bad as you think.
Also, I was saying I kind of prefer the situation here, not that I live in ISP hell. No evil traffic tampering and a choice of 20+ highly competitive ISPs in most places (e.g. I can pay for large caps like 200GB+ if I wanted, I simply don't need that much though).
I agree that the situation in the US seems amazingly anti-competitive though. As stated, I can choose from 20+ ISPs where I am. But it seems in the US there's usually only 3-4 per area. In some areas, only 1 DSL and 1 cable option.
Disclaimer: I spend half my year in Australia and half my year in the US (Chicago area). My comments on the state of US broadband reflect what I have experienced in that area.
Those, plus 5-10MB animated .gif's that you don't expect can really eat into your bandwidth. Best solution is Firefox with Adblocker and NoScript.
When your usage is caped, you start to realize that you are _PAYING_ to view those annoying banners.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
Bring back the 1200 Baud!
In Sweden, typical monthly peak average is between 20 and 400 kilobit/s depending on type of access and type of users.
This is equivalent to around a few GB per month (remember, it was peak bw usage during the day in 5 minute interval) to 40-60 GB per month.
This means that in most markets, 250GB is hit by a few percent of the users, but on the other hand 250GB per month is 0.7 megabit/s average usage, and with 10/10 megabit connections, a user can theoretically hit 10 times that cap, thus I understand why Comcast wants to do this.
I like that idea. Connection "slowed" after the cap is hit. It's better than charging or cutting someone off completely.
They only get laid once. Then they get used repeatedly. I'm sure they pay for themselves & then some.
That phrase is the perfect description of Slashdot as a whole.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Can't you just install some larger-diametered pipe-thingies from your house's plumbing to your hard drive? Or maybe you just need to have a second main run from the easement?
Besides, I heard somewhere 640k ought to be enough for ANYBODY! Where's my Senate intern? She knows more about these things than I do...
I can't believe the ISPs in the US still give you bandwidth limits. This is what I have in France, for 35/month : - ADSL 1 (10 Mbps downstream, 1 Mbps upstream. Had my DSLAM been ADSL2+ compatible, I'd have 28 Mbps downstream for the same price) - VoIP with calls free of charge to 30 major countries (including US, Canada, North Africa and the European Union) - About 15 Multicast (IPTV) channels - Built in Unicast (VoD) service (3/24 hours for newer movies) - No bandwidth limitation - No traffic shaping I have about 50 Gb of monthly traffic (two persons in the household). Of course I am "allowed" to host webservers and such if I want to. I use one of the most expensive ISP (Orange), other ISPs are at 29.99/month. One of them even has a MIMO set top box. If I was one of the lucky guys with Fiber To The Home, I'd have a 50 Mbps *symetric* bandwidth, for about 50/month, and the same services. If I had cable, I'd get 100 Mbps downstream, 20 Mbps upstream, for 30/month (same services, as well).
About 90GB per month. I'm on a business line for a reason. Part of it is the SLA, since my work is often time-sensitive.
People say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Why? Is there any shortage of bad ones?
I used to have uncapped broadband in the UK. Sure, it was only 1Mbps which made it challenging to get any decently large files down but there was no upper limit imposed. Now I live in NZ and it is very different. At first I thought it was great because I was getting 3Mbps but there was a 1.5GB cap at which point you got dropped down to dialup speed. I chewed through the 1.5GB in less than a week. Upgraded to 5GB limit and found my speed dropped to 1Mbps and I still managed to use it all. Upped again to 10GB and each month I chew through that and sometimes have to put up with a few days at dialup speed until I tick over to the next month and the counter resets.
All this talk of 250GB limits makes me sick. I can't even consider regular movie downloads in SD let alone the few HD ones on offer. To make matters worse, bloody Blu-ray went and won the format war so I can't even buy US discs without worrying about them being flipping region A when HD DVD was always region free so my HD projector is somewhat starved of material.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
It takes a good 10-15 years to recover the cost actually. But the ISPs aren't shafting us, I don't think. A decent sized download allowance is very affordable (which wasn't the case 5 years ago, but things are a lot better now).
Also we literally can't build international links quick enough to keep up with the rapid increase in traffic over the last few years (youtube etc.). In the long term, they will pay for themselves but it DOES take a long time.
Remember, you are building a 10,000 km long cable to service an Australian population less than a single large US city.
This is honestly pretty pathetic, but I just check our router at home to see what my parents have been using with me not there...
We have a 20Mbps down/5mbps up FIOS connection.. and according to the router, we've used just about 3.8GB downloading in the last 37 days, and just over 2.1GB uploading.
When I'm home Im sure that number jumps exponentially, but that's honestly pretty sad. I guess they really only use it for casual browsing, email/gmail and occasionally uploading pictures to flickr. Plus they both work, and obviously have connections at work too.
I feel bad though; I need to set up a VPN and start using some of my home bandwidth :P
appleguru.org
I'm not worried about ISPs enforcing these insanely high caps, I'm worried about when all ISPs enforce caps and they can start toning them down to make their users pay more for the same thing.
greedy greedy bullshit they need more money for worse service... fuck em....
My problem is that I know the majority of the months I don't even come close to 250gb which will be my limit come Oct 1. But then there are those months which are rare that I might actually throw myself way above 250gb. So thats what I am afraid of. Having a month where I throw myself over cause I have to send my bi-yearly data updates to a centralized server.
Cant we have roll over bandwidth? Like roll over minutes?
Count yourselves lucky. Here in New Zealand we have third world internet. For $40 NZD a month with our plan we get a 15 GB data cap (Uploads and downloads) with data used between 1am and 7am not counting towards that limit. We also have a 256kbps download and 128 kb upload limit. How does that sound eh? This months data usage for a household of 5 was 32GB, and that was a busy month. Count yourselves lucky.
I have a relatively large household. I have one person doing a bunch of 3d Modeling, so there's a lot of images both up and down on his part, as well as the usual IM and IRC stuff. I've got a writer/comic artist, which means a lot of chat traffic on his part. I've got the WoW/EVEer, who always wants the least amount of lag. And then, there's me. I mostly work on flash/multimedia sites, so I've got a fair amount of up/down. We usually pull somewhere around 1.8TB/800GB a month. Gods help us if Qwest starts any of that Cap crap.
The cow goes "tink"
those 20+ must be in collusion if you still have caps then, probably as corrupt and in bed with the government as big pharma and the car insurance industry is here..
in my area of the nation (southeast) the speed has been 6 x 2 mbps for some time now.
I dont need 6 mbps bursts.. 2 will do just fine, but i dont want caps, and despite any resignation shown, nobody else does either. Sooner or later everyone will hit them, and it will stifle the internet over time.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
There doesn't seem to be any restrictions around here. It's never been verboten to run servers, or download/upload as much as you can. ... positive (pdf).
That's because my ISP has heavily invested in its infrastructure, and the results are
If US ISPs spent half as much on lawyers and lobbyists, maybe they could afford bigger series of pipes.
Well, here in Ottawa, Canada we get 95GB/month on Rogers' highest plan. We regularly use about 150GB/per month. The great thing is that in our part of Ottawa (Old Ottawa East) Rogers has a monopoly so we can't switch to a cheaper provider because we don't get DSL...
I live in Belgium and I have a cap of 100 GB which is huge in comparison to other providers in this country. My usage of the last months is:
Period Download Upload Total
16 july 2008 - 15 august 2008 19,6 GB 8 GB 27,6 GB
16 june 2008 - 15 july 2008 7,7 GB 4,5 GB 12,2 GB
16 may 2008 - 15 june 2008 22,9 GB 11 GB 33,8 GB
16 april 2008 - 15 may 2008 25,4 GB 11,4 GB 36,8 GB
16 march 2008 - 15 april 2008 13,6 GB 4,9 GB 18,6 GB
As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.
I'm not worried about the massive caps now, I'm more worried when all ISPs enforce caps and then can start pushing them down till they can yank money out of a good portion of users.
Be glad you don't live in New Zealand. We have more enlightened hosts starting at 20GB per month with each additional 10GB at $10 (assuming you don't live in the technology wastelands of rural NZ), or you can try and live with the (it's not they swear) monopoly called Telecom. Their professional plan is 10GB per month at $70, and you can't buy additional. Be glad at cap reach it goes to dialup, there's still a few plans they tout which incur costs per MB!
Don't get me started on "3G" (they call it T3G) or the lack of GSM support for the country's major carrier... Just been pushed out to June 2009. Go that CDMA!
I use a Smoothwall for my firewall, heres my average stats for last month: In - Hour: 45.9 MB; Day: 620.5 MB; Week: 16.9 GB; Month: 48.3 GB. Out Hour: 12.2 MB; Day: 162.2 MB; Week: 565.9 MB; Month: 5.6 GB I do a small bit of torrenting, tons of downloading of MS patches and other software updates for work, and I consistently game and use VOIP on a nightly basis.
"It's mercy, compassion and forgiveness I lack. Not rationality."
Hi guys. In SA we've always had caps. Actually, we are new to the internet, in general. ;-) I pay between US$80 - $130 each month for a 1GB international and 10GB local cap. And they don't split the traffic, so my first 1GB in the month goes off my international cap, regardless of where I browse, and for the rest of the month I can only surf SA sites. (Of which there aren't that many...)
The cost varies because I found a local ISP that will sell you 1GB/US$10 pay-as-you-go, and sometimes I just can't wait for the end of the month for more bandwidth!
You think 250GB is a LIMITATION!? ;-)
All things are relative.
K
> a bandwidth monitoring solution
You mean "a bandwidth monitor" or are you the sort that calls a spade a low volume human powered earth moving solution.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
emerge -vauD world
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
No I honestly don't think so (re collusion/corruption). Australia is one of the least corrupt countries in the world (very little corporate-government interaction or influence compared to most other places, although Scandinavia and NZ have us beat on that front).
The caps are there simply because of the peering/transit costs mentioned, as well as the fact that the last mile copper phone lines are owned by ex-government monopoly telco Telstra (think AT&T, but worse), which charges other ISPs a fair bit to use 'their' lines.
There have been ISPs offering true unlimited here. They all went bankrupt within 18 months. It just can't be done here on a sustainable and economic basis. The US is a different kettle of fish though and I do agree with you that caps aren't necessary there.
Other than the 'Telstra issue' though, ISP competition here seems to be working well and is leading to constantly increasing caps. Average caps for home connections have gone from 5 GB to 100s of GB in just a few years.
Keep in mind my 25 GB quota is small! Most of my friends have 100+ GB quotas, and they are affordable. I just chose 'faster' over 'more data'.
But yeah, I'm not fundamentally disagreeing with you. The US market needs more competition and can support unlimited internet. I was simply drawing the distinction between the two places, and saying that life with a cap isn't bad at all. But I'm not saying you shouldn't fight against them in the US.
Are you really sure that you've got "true unlimited"?
I'm asking that because unless you've transferred stuff at or near your maximum bandwith 24/7 for about half a year, and haven't gotten any reaction from your ISP (throttling, nasty letters, unexpected outages, whatever), then you're just believing that you have "true unlimited".
24 gigs a month, on Japanese connection with a ridiculously high effective limit. The majority is Amazon Unbox TV shows, which weigh in at about a gig apiece, plus the odd rental movie or digital delivered videogame, and YouTube usage.
Content which isn't a game or movie is so small these days it can't even move the meter. (I laugh in the general direction of worrying about how many kb my homepage has -- honestly more important that the Javascript renders quickly than it download quickly.)
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
But then again, that's just web surfing, e-mail, a few hours of MMORPG per day, and the occasional download.
I have unlimited dsl for 6 years now (in the EU, central Europe), my peak was ~60 gigabytes, and I usually stay below 30. With some people downloading above 300 per month, I wonder why caps weren't introduced upon you eariler :) Honestly. I can only imagine using up so much bandwidth by downloading isos and movies 24/7, so I'd say cap-ing was really something to be expected.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
This is just part of the government's clamp down on the Internet. When McCain and his whore get in we will see wholesale monitoring of everything going through the pipes. Screw the government and revolt!
I live in Sweden and am single. I have a 1mbit upload adsl connection. As a p2p user, download doesn't really matter although if you are wondering it is 24mbit.
I am a heavy user, mainly using bittorrent to download anime/tv and various other things. I also watch youtube and download other big files from the internet sometimes. I consider myself a good torrent citizen, so I usually upload atleast as much as I download.
Since 2006-07-22 I have uploaded 3344GB and downloaded 2667GB for a total of about 6000GB. That makes for 7,8GB per day or near 240GB per month on average. Some months see more heavy usage (up to 350GB) while other months are less usage.
As a small ISP in California, I do not cap as such. I advertise a certain bandwidth (and if the bandwidth is available they can go over) but I do not limit the monthly total.
I say for the EXPENSIVE high prices they charge, we should be able to use whatever bandwidth we'd like! Here is yet another example of you DON'T get what you pay for, and THEY come out on top as always! The old motto was "The Customer Is Always Right", and now it's "F*ck the consumer, let's just worry about the bottom line".
My ISP is Yahoo BB here in Tokyo and my monthly average is around 300-320 GB DL/month. Mostly (~95% )because I stream a lot of video news from the U.S. and the odd distro(available on servers local to Japan).I end up paying around $35 for a 50MBPS connection.
Though 250GB is a large amount, I know I have gone over this without touching a torrent, I am a web developer and operate several online servers, and when I am uploading and downloading thousands and thousands of images, the bandwidth starts adding up.
The problem is the principle of the matter, once this trend becomes popular, we are going to find ourselves receiving internet like we do cellphone use, paying for minutes of use, or in this case GB.
This isn't acceptable, especially from companies like Comcast whose service is sub-par at best, I am switching ISP's and I encourage anyone else who is having a bandwidth cap imposed to do the same. Send these ISP's a message that this is not what we want, or else we will be paying for it in the future.
-Tuxnerd
then the point of corruption is telstra.
honestly, i'm going to shut my mouth now. I don't want to inspire the kind of cynicism which has destroyed my patriotism.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
What you need then (and what many most likely have) is a Cap & Rate system where you get a fixed amount for your monthly fee, then a metered amount thereafter. (ie: 250 GB included, then $1/GB over your limit. Which is a fairly typical setup)
My ISP (woosh.co.nz) recently decided to redefine my "Unlimited" plan as 10GB/month.
They won't be my ISP for very much longer.
My ISP officially offers unlimited bandwith on this 20/1Mb connection.
ATM data rate Kbit/s down 16910 up 1011
Below the stats of my Fritz!box modem, please note I'm often away for weeks.
Last month included some Linux iso's and usenet binaries.
Use might get as high as 500MB.
Online Time Data Volume Connections
Period [hh:mm] total sent/received Number
Today 11:20 5054 MB 107 MB/4947 MB 1
Yesterday 24:00 8748 MB 178 MB/8570 MB 1
Current week 11:20 5054 MB 107 MB/4947 MB 1
Current month 11:20 5054 MB 107 MB/4947 MB 1
Last month 742:08 118319 MB 2832 MB/115487 MB 36
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
I don't know what it is now, but when I start watching a high-def video every day over Video-over-IP, it's going to skyrocket. I think I saw a claim that 250MB is enough for "5 high-def videos." That's just over 1 a week, which isn't much.
Among other things, the bandwidth cap is to reduce the number of potential customers from these services. This will deter investment in such services and/or make the services sit down at the table with Comcast and negotiate some form of revenue-sharing. They may have an eye on sports junkies and the 2010 and 2012 Olympics and hoping for some ca$h from NBC.
This is the kind of anticompetitive behavior you have when Internet providers' profits are influenced by the other services they offer, such as Cable TV and video content distribution.
If they had no caps but charged "reasonable and actual" rates for excess usage they would be at much lower risk of getting into legal trouble.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
"Basically, unless you are a MAJOR torrent leecher, you will find that you won't have any problems whatsoever staying under 250 GB (Comcast)."
the problem here is. there is no reason why there should be a cap, or why you should have to meter your bandwidth consumption. too many people look at bandwidth as an Un-renewable resource like oil. much to the chargin of the big ISP companies. they would have you believe that a user downloading GB's of files during off peak times has a direct influence over the peak time congestion problem. thats like saying a semi hauling a wideload that takes up three lanes of a four lane express way at three in the morning is the reason why traffic is backed up at 5pm the following day. on that same example. what would you say if your local government decided to put a cap on how much you can drive every month instead of expanding their road and hi-way system?
the problem isn't people using their service in a way that the ISP's themselves advertise it to be used as. it's that they have too many customers, and too little capacity. the ISP's capping our internet usage are the one's at fault here, and we are the ones that are to be punished for their unwillingness to expand their capacity.
for a linux vnstat is a great utility to measure internet usage.
My bandwidth usage skyrocketed when I was in the process of obtaining the 10 seasons of Stargate SG1. Months that I don't use Bittorrent, my bandwidth drops off the map. All we do in our house is browse forums and post 95% of the time.
They /said/ unlimited so I took them at their word. They told me off for 157Gb in a month. Weirdly enough they didn't cut off my service but offered me a choice of 20 or 40 Gb services which I have so far ignored. Loosely phrased contracts rule.
Unlimited 10Mbit up/down, static ip (can run any servers etc), no limit.
For 14 euro/month.
what you got is what i need
hd pron
This article is currently featured on the Google News front page.
I hope the Slashdot servers are up to it.
Something similar here. Static IPs (10), no cap, no contention, ADSL2+. Moved about 960GB last month, little more the month before. When you don't think about the bandwidth, people get into the habit of downloading huge things, then throwing them away - it's easier to re-download than store them.
I have measured this by using a bandwidth metering program, and noticed that my usage does not go beyond 25 Gigabytes a month.
Of course, I do not run my home PC 24/7, but only about eight hours a day. And then there's the usual email, browsing, software download, radio, torrents etc. 35 GB should be enough for most. Heck, 95% would be happy with 25 GB/month or less at home!
I do about 500 GB to 700 GB a month (both up and down).
This is a home with 5 people, 1 PC, 3 laptops in it.
Lots of surfing / you tube / photos / online gaming / downloading / etc.
I also run the PC 24/7 on bit torrent.
At any one time I am probably seeding 5-10 files (mostly some linux ISOs so that the rest of you can get it and a bunch of porn) :P
Am on a 100 mbps down / 2 mbps up connection (Singapore).
Yes well, Telstra does have a crippling effect on our internet industry, no doubt about that. It's not ~corruption~, per se, though. It's just the fact they have such a huge segment of the market, as they used to be the monopoly providers. Anti-competitive, yes - corrupt, not really.
Actually, Telstra HATE the government, cause it was the government regulators that forced it to open its network to competition in the first place ;) The same competition that has increased caps ten-fold in about 3 years. In another decade I imagine Australia might be able to sustainably offer unlimited connections too, the way things are going.
Anyway good luck in your fight against caps there. I agree that it does seem like a backward step. Hopefully they won't catch on across the board in the US (it affects me too, cause I do live there half the year and may be there permanently in around 3 years time). Also, I hope Verizon gets around to rolling out FiOS in IL/WI by that time.
2 people.
In the past 2 days playing some Counter Stike Source and downloading a few reflexive games, watching a few streaming videos, browsing , checking email, and reading news I've used 2.1 Gb total Up + Down according to the bandwidth monitor.
So no IPTV for you people. This is stopping Joost and other P2P TV/ broadcast business.
How they are going to guarantee "No Account Hacking from happening".
So you sign up for more than one plan to raise the 250GB limit?
I average about 3 GBs a day
I would understand if your international bandwidth was capped but not why your national is...
Aug 2008
Download : 134.68 GB
Upload : 152.07 GB
Total : 286.75 GB
Running my own web server, downloading and uploading a bit, surfing, streaming videos, playing games. It adds up :)
It's The Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules."
I do not monitor my usage, nor does my ISP to the best of my knowledge. I calculate my theoretical "usage limit" is ~ 400 GB per month for a 1.5Mbps/368Kbps service. This is ~ 0.2 megabytes per second up + down.
I find it hard to consider Comcast's policy a cap because it is so much different than the typical capping situation. Normally the supplier monitors usage and when the user hit the limit, they take an action. Depending on the contract, they typically will either stop the service until the next billing cycle, or charge additional for usage over the limit.
Comcast's policy is to declare a user who exceeds the limit an abuser. The user is contacted by their abuse department, and warned that if they exceed the limit again within the next 6 months, their service will be terminated and that they will not allow a new account to be opened for the next 12 months.
While you might be able to convice me that a 60% usage rate for the 1.5 Mbps service is abusive, there is no way you will convice me that 5-6 % usage of Comcast's 16 Mbps service is.
240 last month, 60 up, 180 down.
I don't have a tv and download quite a bit tv shows. My ISP has no problem with it though, never heared of any caps here since DSL got widespread
Because the ISP's backhaul is a limited resource. Selling it as being unlimited doesn't change the facts.
Because it will then become 200GB. After all, you didn't complain and so bandwidth caps are therefore acceptable.
Oh, 150GB.
100GB?
50GB?
5GB?
Bwahahahaha!
However, there's a good way around this: demand that, since you now have more restrictions on your contract, you need a reduced cost of contract. After all, a contract is only valid if there is a meeting of minds and value exchanged.
My router is showing this:
Uptime: 36 days, 02:37:50
266.94 Gigs download
35.90 Gigs upload
Total: 302.84 gigs
My usage patterns:
1. I am a heavy VoIP user. 2-4 hours per day.
2. Heavy VPN user to connect to work.
3. Lots of torrents for things I can't find on usenet
4. I have a subscription to Giganews and regularly download large files.
5. I have streaming real-time quotes for the stock market running most of the day.
6. We have 2 other people in the house that are heavy users of email and browsing.
7. I download a full backup of my webserver once a week. ~3gigs
8. We upload and send large photos to our friends.
The download statistics are a bit skewed this month because I downloaded raw HDTV footage of the opening and closing ceremonies. That kicked up my bandwidth this month by more than 50gigs.
We don't really use much YouTube, streaming video, or webcam stuff.
This number is during the summer months which means the TV show series haven't returned. I follow dozens of shows and at 350megs a pop, that can add several gigs to my monthly download. So not counting the HDTV footage, I'll probably coming in lower than the 300 gigs I have over the past 5 weeks.
I never download the x264 Blu-ray rips of movies. I also rarely download HR.HDTV or 720p TV shows.
Comcast warned me once a few years ago. Since then they've never complained.
This Comcast 250gig limit is a bit crap but I'm not too concerned because I can always send torrents and NZB files to my friend down the street so I have a 500gig/month effective limit.
Where I live(Slovenia), i have 20/20 MB/s FiOS without cap(26 euro). But I try to maximize local traffic. Thats because its faster(international lines are usually slower). I have around 50-80Gb download and 200 Gb upload per week, so US caps would be bad for me. But for my ISP i am not very expensive, because 90% of my traffic is local. So I think if there is need for caps, they should only be imposed to international lines.
Wow. Just... wow. Where should I send your medal of "least informed post of the year"?
ISPs are NOT in collusion - there have been many, many attempts to offer truly unlimited internet at affordable prices, and all these attempts have been swarmed (by people like you) and the ISPs have had to close shop because they were simply unable to maintain the level of traffic. Given you're talking about how you "don't need 6mbps", whereas my entire city (admittedly one of the larger ones) is wired between 10 and 24mbps, I wouldn't subscribe to the philosophy that the evil ISPs of Australia should follow the glorious example set by the brave and generous US ISPs if I were you. Given the US's population density and the relatively low amount of international traffic, I'd say it's your ISPs that are in collusion if you're getting 1/5th to 1/12th the bandwidth of the most inconvenient region on earth to route to.
My connection here is:
~5000kbit/s down, ~600kbit/s up ADSL 1 connection
Me and my one flatmate use about 50 to 100 GB a month, I have a 50GB plan, usual New Zealand plans are 5 or 10GB with 20GB "Heavy user" plans, mine is actually a 0.5GB plan with a 50GB add-on.. total cost is $92 NZD per month (~$65 US)
If I go over the 50GB it's $2 per GB... so it's $92 a month if I don't go over the limit, and if I do, like last month (me and my flatmate used heaps and download3d movies and TV shows hard-out so) we used about 100GB and the bill is $181
Usually the speeds are fairly all right here, although if it's a stormy day or a weekend and a lot of people are on the net then it will be slower...
ISP bandwidth restrictions are rampant so your "Max" speed connection often seems closer to a 1mbit or less... usually torrents or other p2p traffic that is limited... seems a little unfair as they are charging you for the bandwidth, then not letting you use it at full speed.
I read some of the Aussie posters on here saying they had nice unrestricted speeds and lots of local software mirrors... lucky bastards, no company in NZ would bother providing free mirrors or anything for that matter, all data is the same cost if it goes 4000 miles or 40....
anyway, so yeah 50 to 60GB on average, up to 100, and cost ranges from $92 to $181+
if you get a capped connection it slows down to modem speed if you hit the limit, which I have noticed when I go to other people's houses, they are usually over their limits... it's pretty bad.
most isp in belgium offer standard-use cap, that is around 15GB a month.
I used to live in Romania, had a 100Mbit connection at home. Bittorrent was always running and I did from 5 to 50 GB/day upload and ~5 GB/day download.
The ISP didn't really care, because most of the bandwidth was consumed with Romanian peers, within the 'metropolitan' network, which has a lot of capacity.
So if you plan to watch HD movies and TV shows and do a lot of seeding, about 1500 GB/month should be enough :).
But I still manage to get around 100GB a month or so. If only I could get a "real" internet connection...
If brute force isn't working, you are not using enough.
Once I see some of the 'average use' people are doing around here, I look at mine and go WOW...
Simple 3mb/768 Verizon DSL in sunny california...
I'm on a fresh XP Install since my Sabayon system crapped out, and its only been running for about 12 days and shows 74GB Downloaded and 12GB Uploaded.
Just to put it a bit more in perspective. It's been september for 4:26 minutes as I post this. I'm showing 2.8GB Downloaded and 872mb uploaded.
If it was capped, I would do what I used to do, push it to the limit. I would have a goal of 249.99GB to spite them. Then I'd go borrow my neighbors network and use theirs. But this month, I still have 170GB on Azureus.
Now that I've seen 25/gb month and 7/gb mth as an average ... I'm suprised I havent been dropped yet.
I know one thing They should not beable todo this at all their is no reason for a cap besides making more money then they are now and it is a crock. They need to update their equipment! look at it this way u got 300 million people in the U.S right lets say 1/2 pays for internet ok that is 150 million people alot of people right well the avg of a sub for internet should be around 40buck a month that is 6,000,000,000 a month tell me 1 good reason why they cant update their equipment when they are making a large amount of money?
Listen here is all you have to do if your ISP puts cap limits on your broadband. Its called "piggyback" buy a $20 wireless modem card stick in the back of your desktop. When you get near your monthly cap unplug that wired ethernet cable. Do a search for any "open" wireless networks and your in business. I'd suggest getting a MAC address spoofer BEFORE you connect. So if your neighbor knows somebody is piggybacking on their system they can't tie your original MAC address back to you if you both use the same internet provider. Don't start with "your stealing internet". Its called STUPIDITY on your neighbors part. Anybody who doesn't encrypt their wireless is an idiot. So people don't fret just "piggyback" of your clueless neighbor. See I've got 7 wireless networks in my area. 3 are encrypted the other 4 WIDE OPEN ACCESS! I'm in a regular neighborhood with single family homes. I can't fathom how many networks you'd find in an apartment place or condos. Hey its not the fastest access but its FREE. I save close to $500 a year just in internet fees. Good luck to you all!
Does it really matter if you ISP is worse? Comcast is doing this for control.
Comcast makes most of its money from cable TV. They do not want people watching TV or buying movies and downloading them over the Internet. That cuts into Comcast's main profit center. It's no different than the RIAA trying to force customers to buy CDs.
Comcast does not want you using the full bandwidth of your pipe 24/7 -- no matter what you're doing.
If Comcast can weaken the 'Net Neutrality concept -- and a bandwidth cap is a first step in that direction -- then Comcast gains more control. Comcast knows that they can turn that control into additional revenue at some time.
Your argument seems to be a "race to the bottom" one. i.e., "My ISP in another country is worse so what are you griping about."
Let's instead work to force ISPs to be honest. If you say I have 6mbps (or whatever) of bandwidth and a 24/7 connection to the Internet, then I should be able to use that 6mbps * 24 * 7. The fact that this may cause Comcast's network some add'l work or problems is not the customer's concern.
I doubt this will get formatted correctly...
WAN Bandwidth - Monthly
Date Download Upload Total
Aug 2008 18.62 GB 5.25 GB 23.87 GB
Jul 2008 29.72 GB 6.10 GB 35.82 GB
Jun 2008 17.35 GB 15.78 GB 33.13 GB
May 2008 38.12 GB 28.71 GB 66.83 GB
Apr 2008 54.46 GB 32.70 GB 87.16 GB
Mar 2008 60.42 GB 28.61 GB 89.03 GB
Feb 2008 1.27 GB 0.83 GB 2.10 GB
But in the realm of 30GB down, 200GB up. I host a couple servers, so they do a good bit of traffic. I am, of course, not a typical home user. I have a business class line which means I get to do whatever amount of bandwidth I like.
However, as the downstream implies, you don't use as much as you might think. A good chunk of that is things like Youtube and downloading game demos/patches. Surfing and playing games really doesn't use all that much. I don't think I've ever gone over 100GB down in a single month (at least not that I can remember), even when doing a lot of stuff.
Now I should note that I don't torrent/P2P stuff. I'm not saying I never use bittorrent, but it is something like downloading the new WoW patch or the like. I'm not copying games or movies or the like.
I think for the most part, you'll find that caps are easy to live with unless you are big on P2P. The ones I've seen proposed sit way outside the realm of what most users do. If your connection sits idle a large part of the time, which is what happens unless you are running something like a server or P2P app, you'll find it hard to use up to a 250GB cap the rest of the time.
Also, if caps bother you, you can always get a business class account. That's what I've got. 10MB down 1MB up no caps of any kind, no ports blocked, no restrictions at all basically. However, expect to pay for it. I'd say in the realm of $150/month. You have to decide if it is worth it to you. However so long as you aren't going nuts with the P2P, or wanting to host a server, I doubt you'll need it.
Depending on whether I'm doing BitTorrent (who? me? surely not, your honour...) I average around 3-5Gb per night, and that is monitored but not restricted between midnight and 8am.
So, I set Azureus* going my iMac to wake at midnight and to sleep at 8am (though normally I'm up before that anyway).
Last month I downloaded around 108Gb. Previous month it was a LOT less - maybe 30Gb. So, it does depend. However, I'm limited to 15Gb/month between 8am and midnight, but as I work days that limit is fine for me...
j.
* none of this 'Vuze' silliness for me, ho hum...
The very origin of problem is simple: you are paying for a 24h/7d connection, is on contract. If the ISP is unable to deliver the contracted bandwidth, WHY he sells this for you?
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
250 Gb/month should be enough for everyone....
Here in the UK we generally already have caps. The package I have with my ISP (£15/month ~= $27) has a 15GB limit for daytime (8am - midnight) usage and they provide tools to allow you to check your remaining bandwidth allowance. This is plenty for mine and my girlfriend's usage (and she often uploads over a thousand photos (admittedly with a fair amount of compression) a week [generally ice hockey games, before people's imagination gets the better of them]).
I have only exceeded that limit once, and that was downloading a Linux distro and then all it's updates and several gigs of backups when setting up a new server, on top of the normal monthly usage.
Generally, if I want to download something large, I now schedule it to download after midnight so it doesn't count towards my allowance. When I was trying out Linux distros on my laptop my total usage reached about 25GB, but billed usage was still well within the limits.
If I was given a limit of 250GB, then I might download more Linux distros to try out more regularly, but I doubt my usage would be that much higher, and I certainly would find it hard to hit that limit...
I could not find any reply's from Teleworkers. Say an open Remote Desktop connection, VoIP phone calls, for 9-10 hours/day 5days/week. It would be interesting to see how much that would use.
I would like to start monitoring my pipes. Any suggestions on what works best without being a resource hog?
Can I bum a sig?
I know a couple of people who are trying to create wifi-to-wifi chains to mazimize internet access for their neighbors in the USA, and that is the fastest-growing method for new internet access in Africa. Comcast has reached the end of their rope (or cable, heh-heh) now that wifi is commonplace. Today their biggest competitor is not DSL, but bandwidth cannabalization (new potential clients lost to wifi broadcasts from current clients). I think that's the reason for the 'cap'.
I watched testimony about caps and bittorrents on C-span, and there is a review of that testimony at CNET Politics and Law The main issue was whether Comcast can legitimately set caps in order to protect stockholders, or whether Congress needs to get involved in monitoring the cap Comcast sets. I'd predict that eventually they will be able to reduce bandwidth, rather than cut it off entirely, because a "month" is a pretty clumsy unit of measure, like serving toast with a Catepillar bucketloader. They will have to let people make an emergency VOIP call, like cell phone service provider, and that will mean reducing bandwidth rather than cutting it off.
Gently reply
I get 12GB/month for AU$90 from Telstra Countrywide. That is a rip-off (and about the only option for me), so those of you worrying about a 250GB cap should stop bloody whinging!!
You people have no idea...
I pay 69AUD for 12GB
250?
A mere pipe dream....
....I have no idea how much toilet paper I use.
That's why I don't read sLASHdOT anymore.
And by typical, do you mean with or without "illegal" content? As the use 'without' is probably significant lower for a large part of the users here.
As for me, I will estimate my own 'without' use at 30G/month (high res pictures, animation and some code work).
Carbon based humanoid in training.
I would be interested in a bandwidth monitoring solution. I get internet from Etisalat for Dh450 ($125) per month in the UAE. They impose a 10GB monthly limit and a penalty of Dh3,000 for each GB over the limit. The big catch is that there is no way to find out how much bandwidth has been used. Using their 3.5G router and GSM service for a connection, it does work pretty well.
We have 24Mbps down / ~3-4MBbps up for 30 euros / month + free phone for wired calls + TV with good ping (on game servers : ~20-40). :) not Mega Bytes.
Note : Mbps stands for Mega Bits Per Second
Your argument in favor of caps is a false dichotomy. The choice isn't between caps on the one hand and tampering and overcommitting on the other hand. Theoretically, there can be neither, and, plausibly, there can be both.
Personally, I prefer honesty. If you're selling the connection as so-many-bps, it should actually be that fast. I'll allow for occassional hiccups, but nothing like "slow during peak hours" or "fast only until you hit the cap" or "unless it's bittorrent" or "we'll send you nasty letters" or anything of that crap.
I have no issue with ISPs wanting to limit my usage of the network per se. But let them be upfront about it, so that I can choose one whose limits I can live with. In that sense "250 GB a month" is better than "Unlimited (Fair Use Policy)", because, at least, I know what I get.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I've been trying to figure out how this will affect me as an avid Squeezebox user throughout the house.
I'm guessing that streaming audio (voice/music) averages .5-1 mb/ minute. Running this for 10 hours a day, 30 days would be around 11-22 gb.
Should come under a 25 gb cap (as long as we don't run two different streams in two rooms too often) and don't use our bandwidth for much else.
Certainly not going to invest in a Roku to use with my Netflix account until I find out how horrible Time-Warner's going to be with this.
I think that that's the real effect of this stuff. Netflix will waste a huge amount of investment in video on demand, and music services like Pandora/LastFM etc. will start to see people thinking twice about whether to use them or not.
Of course, a 250 gb cap should not have any real effect, but caps in the range of 25 will
DD-WRT says that for the past few months I have been uploading 60-70GB and downloading 50-60GB each month
instead, as usual, we pay more and get less
it's amazing how little anyone really cares
Perhaps your router tells you? I'm running tomato firmware on my linksys wrt54gl, and it tells me i use about 1.05Gb/day.
The stats: two adults, a 2-yr old and a 3-yr old. Work from home, and we have no tv so we watch online tv and movies. OTOH, there's nothing on right now, and it's summer, so we're outside a lot.
So I'd expect 2-4Gb/day in winter.
Two human users (web+email+etc), three websites (around 115k hits/month total), and cvs server for an open source project (a few dozen "cvs up" a day).
If I want to download porn until it chafes, I can easily get to just under my ISP's monthly cap of 30GB/month, after which it's 0.50USD/GB.
In my household we would blow through this. In my house we don't have cable, or dish, or even an antenna. We do have Netflix, and 2 Netflix players (3 when that xbox software comes out). I would estimate we watch these 4-6 hours day (maybe not direct watching but the watch now stuff is great for background noise). By my math those 2 devices alone could eat up 100-125 GB a month based on our useage. We also use hulu and the occasional HD rental from Xbox Live (these can come in at up to 6GB). I dabble in linux so there are the usual torrents to be downloaded, flickr for photos, youtube, internet radio, a good bit of online gaming, skype, etc... Right now I would wager we do 250GB a month, maybe a little more or less depending on activity. Granted I might not be the "average" consumer yet but you can bet your a$$ that I will be soon enough. I am the one paying top dollar for the top tier accounts that should be making them the most profit to build out their network. To be honest I have up to 10Mbit DSL (Iowa Telecom, it actually taps out at about 6.5 Mbit but I'm on a pretty long loop) and I've never heard a peep about useage. I think the telcos tend to have lower speeds but don't oversell their bandwidth as much.
But on the plus side, because we pay for what we use, there are a number of advantages. My ISP, like most in Australia:
- Is far less contended than most US ISPs. Download speeds are always meet my connected speed. I have an 8/1 Mbps connection, and I get that speed, all the time (~850 kb/s downstream and slightly over 100 kb/s up). Whereas some US ISPs, when I've used them, seem sluggish in peak hours.
- Never fiddles with my traffic. No bittorrent deprioritising, no deep packet inspection, no random throttling or any of that nonsense. In the US though, well you know all about the shenanigans some of your ISPs have been up to.
- Allows me to run anything whatsoever on my connection. Whereas most US DSL providers I have read the AUP for have 20 clauses about how you cant run servers etc.
...
So yeah - don't fear your (very generous!) download caps over there. It's good news for you. Get the 0.1% of people off the network that abuse the hell out of it, and speeds will be faster for the rest of you.
What I do not understand is this:
What good does your "faster speeds" do if you can't download? I have ADSL 4096kbps down 768kbps up (23EUR/month) and in past 12 months I downloaded 2615GB (that's 218GB/month on average) and uploaded 1424GB with peak download of 544GB/month. If my ISP had a bandwidth cap of say 300GB, I would just have to cap my average speed to 960kbps, and I wouldn't really care if the connection speed was 1gbps... Your 25GB/month cap is just another way of saying 80kbps.
I'm planning to go to a new ISP that can offer 100mbps both ways national and 8mbps both ways international for 27EUR/month. I go primarily for the upload 9since I use p2p and don't want to be a leech, who doesn't upload to get at least 1 ratio). Now, it's just a problem of them somehow laying those 55 meters of optic cable...
So, can you tell me what is the point of having a "fast" connection if you can't download anything? You say your ISP does not interfere with p2p transfers (mine also doesn't). What good does that do if you can't download anything?
Oh I fully agree. Preferably having 'neither' would be best, absolutely. But realistically, there's not much incentive for ISPs to do that. They like to oversell their bandwidth to make maximum profit.
So it's a false dichotomy, but a realistic one, given the business pressures on ISPs (here at least, I don't necessarily speak for everywhere). No ISP actually has enough backhaul capacity for everyone to max their connection out all the time (or even most of the time).
If the ISPs here suddenly removed their caps and allowed everyone unlimited downloads, performance would go to hell. I doubt they could physically upgrade the links fast enough, and demand will always outstrip supply. You give people more and they will take it, and then some.
I have two choices with my ISP:
Low Latency 100GB Cap
High Latency Unlimited
I chose the low latency with cap. And I come close.
Most of the major ISPs are imposing a 60GB cap.
The point is that this is damn short sighted. The ISPs are doing this because they know whats coming. High Def streaming. If you don't get near 250GB now, you may soon enough.
--- tracer.ca
I too live in Australia, but visit the US for about 90 days per year, and have quite a different experience from this correspondent who seems to be living in a different world, let alone continent. I live in an inner suburb of a major city (Melbourne) and have an ADLS2+ internet connection through a major ISP. By comparison with my US friends and colleagues with whom I stay in various parts of the US, my connection is slow - rarely does it manage to achieve the minimum of the range of 8-24MB/s quoted here, and at times - on weekends for example - is cochlearic. Of course distance to the exchange is part of the issue here, but we're well under a kilometre from ours. Yes our connection is expensive as a function of download capacity - around AUD90 per month for 15GB peak and 30GB offpeak - and certainly this is partly due to the cost of cable but that's pretty easily amortized over time and users. What are less easy to amortize are the charges extracted from ISPs by the grossly inefficient and bloated privatized telephone company that has been handed a virtual monopoly on the copper by previous governments, that is constantly in trouble with the consumer commission for its uncompetitive business practises, and that is dragging its feet about further investment until the government gives it another hand-out. In my experience, in terms of internet connectivity the US is paradise compared to Australia. In answer to the original question, our limit is sufficient for 4 internet users (light to medium) provided we're careful about doing major downloads - movies, distros, etc - in the offpeak time between 2am and noon. If we don't do that, we can reach the end of the month with a 56kB/s connection!
You lot should really quit you complaining. In Aus uncapped internet is extremely rare...Caps usually range from 1gb through to 20gb for heavier usage. Most of our plans are configured into on and off peak as well so half your cap you can only use at night ie between midnight and 7am.
Well in a way, a lot of 'national' bandwidth is uncapped. Generally traffic within the ISPs own network is free (not counted against your cap). MOst ISPs have massive mirrors that host a LOT of stuff (e.g. full Tucows/Sourceforge/etc mirrors, debian and ubuntu repositories, etc). As an example, last month I used 17 GB 'metered' downloads, and around 10 GB unmetered/free. Generally about a third of my traffic is unmetered (mostly linux updates/ISOs).
I know that's not what you meant exactly, but it's on the same track. Traffic within your ISPs own network (which is usually a nation-wide network) doesn't cost them a cent, and thus it doesn't cost the customer a cent either.
Most of the posts are about average users and downloads. This discussion needs to be widened into how this effects websites that offer free downloads (info)and large industry trying to copyright and control information, content control basically. Way too much self centered non thinking and parroting going on right now.
Although I'm running a small server with just my web site and SSH access, an increasing proportion of my bandwidth is taken up (read "wasted") by the scumbags trying to hack into my machine. This is obviously worse in the summer when all the script kiddies decide to play hacker and now that the little bastards are back to school my ISP should stop sending me those warning notices. The problem is that even if I block them at my router firewall they still use bandwidth and complaining to Russian and Chinese ISPs gets you absolutely nowhere.
If it was 10 years ago, the limit would be 5Gb p/month - to stop us all downloading DVD's.
Now the average seems to be 50-100Gb p/ month - presumably to stop us all downloading HD's.
I was with ZenADSL (unlimited d/l) from the beginning of broadband in the UK, and paid double the average cost for a number of years for the privilege, until they decided that they weren't making quite enough profit. So, out went the emails to all their users proclaiming that the contract they had previously insisted upon was now not quite what they wanted, and could they have their ball back, please. I replied apologising for using the connection within the limits they had insisted upon - and thanked them for 'forcing me to download like it's 1999'.
So I went to BE about a year ago, and haven't looked back. Their support may be lower than low (remember the call centre in Transformers? That's what you get), but the benfits are beyond worth it.
Usage? You can measure it now, but it won't stay that way for long. What about BBC iplayer? What about C4's 4oD? These services are going to increase in number, not go away...and what about Flash? I was disabling it ten years ago because of the amount of wasted bandwidth Flash pages can use, and that was when we were all on 56K modems. I have not changed this approach with the advent of Broadband - just as I don't buy a huge CPU so that MS can throw away my cycles on a pretty desktop (etc.), I don't have a unlimited fast connection so that Yahoo can allow landrovers to drive across what I'm trying to read. If you follow that thinking, and disable stuff like Flash, you won't have to worry about what's being used up when you're 'not looking'. But the actual bandwidth isn't the real issue here - it's what we're downloading...
The problem we face now is that 'they' are all terrified of us downloading HD and HD-Audio, when (for the most part) we've got all that stuff already - and anyone who hasn't probably knows someone that has (yes, we've had that long). Of course, if they hadn't wasted so much time trying to perfect a way preserving their seventies business model, I'd have bought dozens if not hundreds of BD's already - but since I refuse to spend hundreds/ thousands more on a system that won't do as good a job as my PC, to watch films I've already paid at least three times for (Star Wars, anyone?)...well, you don't have to be a market analyst to see what's happening en masse. I paid £25 for a copy of War of the Worlds in 1986 - an album already nearly 10 years old, by then. Why did it cost that much? 'Because it's a double'. Or £16 for Dark Side of the Moon (again, not new). And for years afterwards, all investigations mysteriously agreed that CD's 'were not a rip off'. Anyone notice how the lowest BD player jumped by $100 when HD-DVD went down? I suppose that must have been coincidence too.
Maybe if they hadn't lied so many times about how much CD's cost to make over the years, I'd be a bit more sympathetic. Or if Metallica hadn't illustrated just how greedy four men could be once their primary songwriter left. Or if the studios had invested in Digital Screens *everywhere* seven years ago like Lucas was trying to get them to do...that's just three examples, and I have over a dozen more, each of which would have made a real difference if they'd only been a bit less greedy - and not bothered with silly UK ads which no-one pays attention to (Knock off Nigel? Why would he be *buying* DVD's?)
By the time they have a lid on the pirates, it'll be too late (in fact, it is already). But they don't know what else to do, so sit back and enjoy watching one protection system fall after another.
Remember everyone, 'Home Taping is Killing Music' - but someone has to keep Amy Winehouse stocked up with gak.
I live alone and my Tomato router has me averaging 9.13 GB per month over the last year. I use my Tomato box as a PuTTY proxy for browsing at work in addition to its regular duties. I download some bittorrent stuff from time to time.
If you're using this for anything important, you're insane!
On the one hand it seems a few people are using many magnitudes of bandwidth more than the average person and the rest of us pay for it with congested networks.
BUT
I can't help but notice that all the things I get from my cable company (Internet, Phone, TV, Pay-Per-View) I can get for 1/2 the price over the internet. Does anyone else see a problem with one company being able to set the price of it's competitor's products?
If we want to stop this B.S. the key is using market forces to send an unambiguous message to the ISP. My tactic will be to immediately switch ISPs to a competitor with a written statement of my action to each member of the company board. If enough of us do this it will turn the market on it's head and might prompt some competition...something that appears to be woefully lacking in many areas.
I got an xbox360 for my birthday earlier this year. When I heard the new dashboard update would allow netflix streaming, I had to get a netflix account.
I watch a lot of Internet TV. I play a lot of games. I download a lot of porn. I surf a lot of web.
My ISP, comcast has said, I can only download 8GB a day. If I'm watching a marathon of TV from netflix instant, I will blow through that in about 12 hours.
Tack on the fact that I download demos from xbox live that are usually 1-1.5GB apiece. I play PC games regularly. I am also a steam user who buys a new game at least once a month. I download Linux isos also, though not regularly. I can see how I easily use up that much bandwidth a day.
Comcast is gonna get sued. There's gonna be a class-action. Since they are the only provider in my area that provides the speeds they do for residential services, there is no alternative. Comcast oversold their network capacity. I'm doing nothing wrong. I'm using the Internet access that I signed up for and paid for. Comcast knows they need to expand network capacity but are unwilling to do so. They take a hit in cost and can't charge any more for more network capacity. They'd just oversell it again. Considering that comcast charges a universal service fund fee since they provide Internet access and local telephone service, the USF should provide them with ample monies to enlarge their member's capacity.
When netflix institutes HD streaming, I won't be able to take advantage of it because comcast wont provide me the bandwidth or througput to do so. My ISP will effectively prevent me from enjoying the services I pay for throughout the web.
Comcast thinks that I'm a heavy Internet user. They gambled on grandmas signing up for cable modems and then using them 2 or 3 times a week. They lost and now they're welching.
That being said, they're even charging illegal modem rental fees to me and countless others. Check your original documents from your comcast installation. There's a document titled, "Terms and Conditions for Sale of Cable Modem". I have that document, meaning they sold me a cable modem, not rented me one. Now they're charging fees illegally. They're really gonna get sued. I'm not the fat guy at the buffet. I'm the skinny guy who eats a normal amount. They are the ones trying to save their money by limiting the amount of trips to the buffet you can make. They say I'm eating too much. Well, now even in India, they're eating as much as me. In Japan, they're eating three times as much as me and they pay half of what I do.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Well it depends on your needs. There tends to be a tradeoff between speed and download cap here. So for someone like you that downloads a lot, but doesn't mind waiting a bit for it to arrive, you can get a similar connection to what you have now, (large multi-hundred GB cap, but slower speeds).
Here's why I like 'faster speeds' over a higher cap:
a) When I download something, it's usually something I decide to get on the spur of the moment. Like "oops I missed an episode of that TV show a few hours ago ... I'll just download it from usenet". Then I can go and pull down that 500 MB in just a few minutes, and play it on my home theatre PC (connected to TV) straight away. But I don't download things that often. Maybe every 2-3 days I might grab a movie or TV show.
b) I like streaming HD video (an Australian TV station allows you to do this right from their site, and it requres at least 6 mbps to perform acceptably)
c) Even if I hit the cap, I CAN still download fast from the ISPs own mirror sites. About a third of what I download is unmetered (internal network traffic). Having a 700 MB Linux ISO come in in a few minutes is nice (and isn't counted towards my cap).
d) Gaming and web surfing benefit from faster connections (although admittedly the difference between 4 Mbps and 20 Mbps is minimal for these things).
e) Uploads aren't counted towards your cap. I do a lot of remote desktop/remote FTP access to my home from work which benefits from a fast connection. And I seed torrents all the time (again, uploads don't count against my quota, so I try to get a good ratio on all torrents).
BUT - it's totally dependant on how you use the net. I have friends like you who download huge amounts of content (torrents etc) but don't mind letting large downloads go overnight. As a consumer, buy the kind of service that suits you.
PS. 100mbps both ways, nice! Europe really has the best connections by far. I'd love that :)
I don't care what your personal bandwidth consumption is or isn't. Just because a cap suits your needs has no bearing on whether or not it's reasonable. My grandmother only eats about a thousand calories a day, should we assume we can all switch to that diet plan. Just because you're an 80 pound (36 Kgs for our Aussie friends) 4'10" Italian Grandma as far as your internet usage is concerned doesn't mean a thing.
This is a just giant step backwards. I paid per usage on AOL in the mid 90's.
Some time ago I've set up my router to make pretty graphs out of bandwidth usage at home.
This is how it looks so far (javascript req'd): http://rwx.homelinux.org/rrdtool/date.html
Move to Internode if you can. I'm on Internode ADSL2+ in Canberra and I never get anything other than the full sync speed of my modem. Not sure who you are with now (sorta sounds like iinet?), but if you're less than 1km from the exchange you should be able to get some insane speeds (better than me, I'm about 2 km away).
Internet in the US 'feels' fast cause the ping times are so much less than what we are used to in Australia (since most content is close by, not the other side of the world). You can really feel the difference when web browsing in particular. But actual throughput is no better than in Australia, for the most part.
I have 18Mb/s service, and I pull anywhere from 500-2000 GB a month, while my ISP wants to keep my use below 95GB. They don't seem to enforce their cap beyond a small overage fee. Video streams take quite a bit of bandwidth, more than I though they would.
im in the uk and use Be Unlimited. i sync at about 11mbit and to be honest, the biggest limit on my downloads is my storage space. i watch a few HD 720p movies and a lot of standard definition stuff and my monthly usage clocks in at around 160GB a month. my max was about 230GB one month. i havent got my HDTV plugged in to receive broadcasts, its just plugged into my PC so all my tv and movie watching comes down the interweb pipe. other usage is pretty minimal - the occasional game, youtube, transferring stuff via scp to my girlfriend's parents house when she's staying there and wants something to watch etc.
4GB / day on average, on a 1mbps link
All the talk of caps has got me wondering how much those friendly little streaming video commercials eat up? The problem is if you do a lot of surfing they can be near constant. I often leave CNN open on a browser and it constantly does updates but most of them are to update the video commercials not content. Where as I doubt they take up the majority of my web surfing and usage I can easily see them pushing me over the top. In effect their commercial which I stubbornly refuse to watch can help drive me over the limit and either threaten my service or force me to get a more expensive service with a higher cap. I'll guarantee you that if I ever get a warning the first thing I'll do is stop surfing those sites. I really would like to know just how much of my bandwidth is being eaten up by advertising?
It may be easier to quickly gauge your use to the 250GB limit if it gets translated to numbers we more normally see. 250GB divided by 30 days, 24hours, 60 minuets, 60 seconds, equals 809kb. That's an average of every second for 30 straight days. You can roughly estimate your usage and bandwidth to that. Google Calc
Don't judge me by my spelling
I'll also praise Covad, who ATT in my area acts as a reseller for. It's 30/mo but I get 3M/384K and they deliver, no caps and 20ms latency. Not even any blocked ports, but 384k is a little low for a webserver.
And the ATT website explicitly mentions Usenet piracy (they still run a Usenet server) - they say to watch out for viruses in MP3 newsgroups. So frankly they couldn't care less, and they don't block torrents
I know a lot of people hate ATT, and a lot will think i'm a tool/astroturfer, but I couldn't be happier.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
In Iceland most isp's have around 80gb limit per 28 days for foreign use, but I think its upload+download
I do use my internet a bit reading news, playing games, watching vids and using torrents. so I do reach the top, then the isp's have lowered my connection speed
However thats useless for them on my 8 meg connection I could in theory download 2362,5gb and therefor I can only use 3,38% of my connection which limits me to an average ul/dl cap around 34,67kb/s. So lowering my connection from 8 to 6 meg wont help them
I would say that 250gb would be nice but under 100gb makes no sense but it depends on if upload is in there or not
This amount however needs to be increased each year by 50-100%
I work in tech support for a VoiP company and to think that an intermediate user of the Internet will have to choose between phone minutes or watching their favorite shows online...is EXTREMELY disappointing. That scenario may be a little over the top, but at the same time look at the direction we are moving in. It would have made sense to cap internet years ago. We have music streaming, movie streaming, Tv Show streaming, complete media downloading. If you cap, you should lower prices, or at least give the option of unlimited usage. Personally I think its a bunch of shenanighans. These companies need to raise the bar and stop ripping customers off.
this comcast capping buisness has me scared cuz som of those hi def movies are like 25gb. same with new games comcast is gonna put a cap at 250/ month. that way their stupid on-demand will have far less competition. not cool
USENET FOREVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I see lots of posts talking about the 250GB cap on Comcast. It isn't 250GB, at least, no in my area; I know one guy (it isn't me, I swear) who lives in the next closest major city to me (same state), he got shut off twice (under 2 accounts) for going over 1 TB; me, I got a call from Comcast when I went over 500 GB for 2 months in a row. So, I did what he did: at the suggestion of the "Quality Assurance" rep, I switched to business internet. I pay about $20 more a month, and I had to sign a 3 year contract, but they don't call me anymore, and if I have to call tech support, I'm on hold for maybe a minute.
Here in Finland there are no caps on broadband connections and I sure am glad about that ^^ I haven't heard of them planning such either, so I guess we are doing quite well here. But well, let's see..
We got 3 computers, we play WoW A LOT, both do surfing around the web and so forth. We download anything quite rarely though. My machine shows that I've gathered about 160 megabytes of outgoing data and 105 megabytes of incoming data during the last two days and 5 hours. Multiply that with two, and 15 (so we get the amount of 30 days) and that'll be about 4.68Gb outgoing data and 3,07Gb incoming data for a month.
My last Rogers bill (Canada) included an additional $208 charge for additional bandwidth.
They have recently begun charging for every GB beyond a base amount. The amount is determined based on your subscription package, and each GB is $2. Some plans are limited to a maximum of $25 in additional charges.
My typical month is between 50 and 100GB.
a) I too download TV shows. The difference is that they are not shown on TV in Lithuania, so I have to get every episode. Since I like HD (I have a 21" CRT monitor capable of 1920x1440@85Hz) I download 720p versions if I find them. 720p means 1.1GB per episode. Not much, but...
b) that's cool if it does not count toward your cap. Otherwise you have only 9 hours of HDTV per month...
c) Our ISPs also have FTP servers and DC hubs, but usually you can only find popular new movies and a few TV shows, but not old movies or TV shows. The incentive to use ISPs FTP or DC is that you can max your connection as is possible physically (my ADSL plan is 4mbps down, but modem actually connects at 5mbps, so if I download from FTP I get 5mbps). However, ISPs now have a fast national network, so it is not so different anymore. For example the ISP that I hope to go to, provides 100mbps ethernet connection. That's what you get in their local network. If you pay more you can get 100mbps link to all Lithuanian ISPs.
d) games benefit from lower latency, you can play Counter Strike with a dial-up (I did a few years ago). I agree about web surfing, that's why my next router will have traffic shaping and prioritize HTTP over P2P.
e) At least that's good. You can run a server (assuming your upload is sufficient) and/or seed torrents. My cell phone operator counts downloads and uploads (500MB/month at up to 3.6mbps (HSDPA) where available for 15EUR/month) and it's usually OK (because it is not my only connection, only a backup or when I am not at home).
When I download something and the torrent is almost dead, sometimes the download takes weeks...
I would have to agree that reasonable caps are actually a good thing.
From 1995 to 2001, I worked for a dial-up ISP. We serviced about 15,000 customer across 30 cities (most of them small towns) in Arkansas.
Back in the those days, the number of hours you spent on-line was the "capped" resource since the telecommunications economics of the time meant that the server end of each dial-up connection cost the ISP well over $100 per month, IIRC. We were charging $20 a month for an initial block of hours and then some amount for each hour over the limit.
I think the initial hours allotment was around 120 hours per month, which was fairly generous for the time. Only a few of our users went over this. Those that did were offered a more expensive account that had a larger allotment.
However, when all the other ISPs went to "unlimited" accounts, in order to compete, so did we. With no incentive for people to disconnect, many of our customers would start their connection, start something (like a ping) that would keep the connection active, and leave it connected 24/7. As this began to tie up more and more lines on the server side, more people started doing this so that they wouldn't get a busy signal when they actually wanted to use the service. Then there were those that gave their login information to all their friends. With unlimited usage, why not?
Obviously, this killed our quality-of-service. Just "adding more lines" was not an option unless we doubled or tripled the cost of an account. The economics just didn't work.
We considered implementing some complicated (for us at the time) monitoring so that we could detect those who were abusing the service. We could try to detect sessions that were not *really* doing anything and limit simultaneous connections on the same account. However, when we realized how much work this was going to be for us, we decided to try something else first.
We changed our unlimited accounts to have an initial allotment of 360 hours, which was triple the amount we had before we went unlimited. In order to use this up, people would have to be connected for 12 hours every single day of the month. If people actually did this, the economics still wouldn't work, but this was not a decision based on economics, but on psychology.
At the time, most people's actual usage didn't come close to 360 hours. The psychological effect of knowing that the cap was there had the desired effect. Our customers only connected when they actually needed to do something. Our quality of service returned to its previous higher-than-average level.
Of course, there were a few customers that had been using more than 360 hours per month. A few of those were using more than double that amount by using multiple modems. Most of these left our service for someone else with an unlimited offering. Good riddance.
I know that comparing hours and bandwidth is comparing apples and oranges. My point is that once you get people actually thinking about how much of the resource they are using, they will monitor their usage themselves, usually not coming close to the cap. Also, the abusers of the service will either cough up the funds to pay for what they are actually using, or go somewhere else. The point is that the service provider can actually afford to provide a quality service.
It is interesting that this dial-up usage issue seems to have been re-incarnated in the age of broadband.
These bandwidth caps are not completely about P2P, mostly, they are a stalking horse for killing VoIP and video from third parties.
One quarter ago, 30% of Skypes calls were video-enabled.
Netflix video downloads cut into Comcasts $$$'s as does thirdparty VoIP.
Just because the bandwidth cap is 250GB today, doesn't mean it will be tomorrow. And then we move onto tiered QoS for all those services.
I use way more bandwidth since I stopped using torrents (don't have to throttle or pay back at 1/4 of the speed). I'm on 1meg and regularly hit 250GB/month.
Thankfully I'm on a "Full Unlimited" package at the moment, but my isp is trying to force me off it claiming that BT is sunsetting fixed speed DSLAMS within the next few months and only offering me 8meg (of which their "unlimited" service costs £100 /month more than I'm paying right now) regardless of the fact that BT will only gaurentee ~1.5meg to my line on ADSLMax.
I have a new provider in mind that I'm switching to shortly who will do 2meg fixed for £5 per month more than I'm paying my current isp for 1meg.
While it does seem that BT will eventually be sunsetting the fixed speed DSLAMS, it looks like it will still be some time away, and I've been informed that they will even then still be able to offer speed capped 1 and 2meg connections via the ADSLMax DSLAMS. The crux of which is that my current isp has no real requirement to force me into a speed upgrade on a new contract for any reason aside from them not wanting to make good on the "Full Unlimited" at the price I'm currently paying.
I only buy pepper spray that's been tested on anti-vivisectionists.
I have no clue whatsoever about my bandwith usage. I think it's not even that much higher than any 'avarage' household.
What do I do through the internet: /. and site alike)
-Downloading a few songs onces in a while
-Browsing (going through email, listen to some music on YouTube when I'm too lazy to download it, reading
-Messaging (rarely using the webcam)
-Downloading one Linux distro per month on avarage
-Updating my Linux install and downloading some packages per week
-Downloading and playing Valve games through Steam online with wine
-Downloading one film per 2 months on average.
I think that's about it... My dad and his girlfriend use the internet every 3-4 days and are only checking their email and doing bank stuff online. My dad rarely downloads a few song. Oh yeah they have Windows XP so updates are also nopt very common...
Here be signatures
I live in Canada, about an hour away from Buffalo,and up here our cable ISP's have band width caps. Mine is about 60GB, and we go over it once in a while, but not often. We have 5 people living here, myself(21 year old nerd) downloading torrents and streaming media, My mom, torrents and online poker, her boyfriend web surfing, and pc online gaming, mystep bro, streaming media and pc online gaming, and my grandmother, web serfing. We also have two xbox 360's with live. I find even with that 60GB is plenty, depending on how many torrents we download though a month.
Have Comcast "Blast" San Francisco 20 down for $67 a month. Most of us use DU Meter. Our gripe was that the download/upload limit was invisible and varied. Now that we have a cap, I've reformed and don't expect to need to go over 200GB per month. Many Comcast users depending on where they were were terminated and shut out of service for one year for going over 150 GB if they also used heavy upload bandwidth. I'm quite happy with the cap.
DU Meter Monthly Report
Period (Month) Download Upload Both Directions Dial-Up Time
June 2007 107.09 GB 3.94 GB 111.03 GB N/A
July 2007 538.24 GB 19.33 GB 557.58 GB N/A
August 2007 469.17 GB 16.41 GB 485.58 GB N/A
September 2007 524.70 GB 18.81 GB 543.51 GB N/A
October 2007 644.26 GB 22.99 GB 667.24 GB N/A
November 2007 534.11 GB 19.05 GB 553.16 GB N/A
December 2007 607.19 GB 21.85 GB 629.04 GB N/A
January 2008 664.59 GB 23.96 GB 688.55 GB N/A
February 2008 453.16 GB 16.38 GB 469.54 GB N/A
March 2008 531.67 GB 19.28 GB 550.96 GB N/A
April 2008 649.49 GB 23.51 GB 673.00 GB N/A
May 2008 768.11 GB 26.97 GB 795.08 GB N/A
June 2008 689.82 GB 24.20 GB 714.02 GB N/A
July 2008 658.21 GB 23.38 GB 681.59 GB N/A
August 2008 145.05 GB 6.75 GB 151.80 GB N/A
September 2008 83.37 MB 5.64 MB 89.01 MB N/A
I'm not one that likes to waste something that they've paid for. So if it turns out that at some point in the future I will be paying for a limited connection with a bandwidth cap, I'll be writing a program that monitors logs from my router and generates extra traffic to make sure I'm always on target for my bandwidth cap. I'll shoot for like 90-95% of it every month and adjust from there.
I can count to 1023 on my hands. Ask me about #132.
250GB a month sounds high but it actually is not. 500GB a month cap would be much more reasonable. Comcast is scared of a large percentage of users watching movies over the internet though service like Netflix, Amazon Unbox to Tivo, etc. When you consider that a single ipod movie download through iTunes often runs about 1.5 to 2 GB it's not inconceivable to hit your limit. The average web page and e-mail sizes listed by Comcast are a joke as many have pointed out. 0.5 kb per message? Come on try anywhere from 20kb to 400kb for all those ad e-mails from e-tailors galore. Comcast is also looking at their own movie delivery so they are essentially taking an early step to kill or at least stifle the competition. Once again another uncompetitive practice from the 800 pound gorilla.
Slashdot accounts like mad..
I wonder how many thousands of accounts telecoms have procured to make sure their sock puppets have enough mod points at any one time to shift conversations toward apologists like this.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
DD-WRT bandwidth meter:
August 2008 (Incoming: 17734 MB / Outgoing: 3549 MB)
July 2008 (Incoming: 12001 MB / Outgoing: 4202 MB)
July 2008 (Incoming: 12001 MB / Outgoing: 4202 MB)
Most of that is just from me - music/movies/linux isos, etc. I do have a roommate but youtube is about as bandwidth intensive as his use gets.
You would have to use a LOT of bandwidth to hit the 250gb cap comcast reported the other day. I download a lot and I'm not even at a 10th of that cap.
The Answer
Oh, I'm just lucky that here in Poland they are going from capped to uncapped instead of the other way around.
Still 20 â for 1 Mbps sucks.
I think that bandwidth caps are a slightly stupid way for ISPs to look at what they sell and why people buy it. I think that things will change, especially as decent bandwidth becomes available in the last mile. A few months ago I posted about pricing models and how they might evolve: http://www.fiberevolution.com/2008/03/ruminations-abo.html I think, ultimately, that the issue is about competition. If given the choice, customers will favour non-capped offers over capped offers, so apping only happens if there's too little competition or if all available options involve capping. What I find surprising is that in a capped ecosystem (ie. every ISP offers capped only) it only takes one player to launch a non-capped acquisition strategy. I'd be curious to understand why none of the Australian ISPs (to take an examble of an all-capped country, as far as i can tell) have decided to acquire customers using that argument as marketing...
Typical is whatever the heck I want to use.
From Bladerunner -know to be a slave is to always live in fear. When will my metered allowance expire?
This is a market-place. BT-downloaders have changed the rules. I can easily run my DSL at 100-percent pegged in/outbound bandwidth ALL NIGHT AND ALL DAY with two or three clicks of a mouse.
Do I choose to do it? Sometimes. Its my own damn business. This is a market-place and someone will sell me internet but only if it makes business sense to do so.
If I am a pig I will get fat and if I am a hog I will get slaughtered.
... so a simple IFCONFIG on the ppp0 interface to the DSL modem will give all the usage if you are really that worried about it (hint: don't bother unless you know already they have good reason to think your a problem ... they ain't talkin about youtube ... the are targetting pirated movies and for otherwise (of course, non-DSL tech-savvy HD folks should realize that their ISP wants to be the conduit to control the HD content and if you fight them you will lose.
At my house we typically use between 10-30 GB total (upstream + downstream) each month. That includes usage for online gaming, game demoes and videos from Xbox Live, online data transfer from home to work (e.g. Live Mesh), Skype, digital music and video purchases, and plenty of web browsing. With my current plan my ISP gives me a 100 GB cap a month. Unless there is a dramatic shift in my usage habits, that 100 GB a month is effectively unlimited. I have never had to worry about going over it.
The Google Calc guy was a nifty idea.
My typical telco too distant 2000-circa ADSL gives me 74K of bandwidth to download and my firewall gets flaky if I overdrive the DSL modem can only handle 12K uploads. To allow surfing (for my point and clicks to go back up to the website) I set it to 6K upload max in microtorrent.
Now if I choose I can easily drive the full 74K download for six hours straight, four times a day, for 31 days, 60 minutes in an hour, and 60 seconds in a minute. Therefore:
31 * 4 * 6 * 60 * 60 * (74 * 1 024) = 202 958 438 400
Assume the rest is upload and 250GB sounds just about right on the money for a hog on ancient DSL.
Why give the higher speed folks any advantage since the world is mostly stuck on ADSL at best.
In quebec, for the standard high speed cable modem package we have 20 gig download limit. This is what most people have.
Never went above it, except that time when I was downloading an illegal DVD rip of a tv show I couldn't buy.
I posit that it's not the size of the cap: it's the mere existence of cap that is important. Recall the old joke about the economist who establishes that a woman who is willing to sleep with him for a million dollars is a prostitute. Everything else is haggling over price. Once Comcast subscribers have accepted a cap--any cap--it opens the door for Comcast to stratify users and fees by usage.
Man I hate sweden now. I was there for a month.
It rocked. I had was leeching a 24mbps connection via Wifi, everything was blazing fast (I hear in some places like Japan service isn't always at max, or the servers are too slow/far away to max out) and I kept seeing ads for 24mbps/99SEK.
That's intense. Especially since we were in a small town, "bedroom city" (Marsta).
I hit 1233gb a month without any penalty from my ISP.
Eugene 'HMage' Bujak
Ive here a 100Mbit/s Connection at home. Im running some servers 4fun here in my basement. My Router is a FreeBSD pfSense. In Germany my Connection is called VDSL with normally 50 Mbit/s but I got more (dot`t ask ;) ).
A home ftp server...
Can I get a L/P?
lol..
site adduser Foo bar pirate@123.456.789.111
site flags Foo +1
That will work. kthnx
--Toll_Free
You could consider me an extremely heavy home user. I spend a decent amount of time downloading torrents, and I share my connection out with about 20 people in my neighborhood via wireless, and I very rarely go over 250 GB in a month. I did once in one very heavy month (hit about 300 GB), but normally, I'm about 200 GB/mo.
In the past 30 days, I'm at 202 GB, for the past 6 months I'm at 1.08 TB, and since mid october of last year, I'm at 1.45 TB. That's upstream and downstream combined.
-M@
The whole point of an electric power grid is that the peak load from 1,000 customers is a lot less than 1,000X the peak load of a single customer.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
Nothing's forcing any US ISP to cover more than, say, New England, which probably has a much higher pop. density than France.
And covering long distances doesn't cost much. In fact, a while back Free bought a company that had deployed long distance fiber across the country; they never even used it (maybe they did recently, didn't check), because it turned out to be cheaper to buy wholesale.
They were able to reach a large number of people because the regulation authority forced the former monopoly operator to open its local loop at fair prices. Free invested rapidly, developped its own DSLAM and set top boxes -- because it turned out that, despite almost a decade of hype, no vendor was actually offering an ADSL / TV set top box!
And they continuously upgraded their core network, which allowed them to constantly one up the competition, from being the first on this market to offer 2M down, to free VoIP, then free DSL TV, to being the first to implement ADSL2+ on a large scale.
VOIP providers provide e911 numbers to their subscribers. The users have to provide their service address, and the provisioning systems will map an e911 number to the VOIP service for that service address. However, since you can take your VOIP router with you where-ever you go, it is important to update your VOIP service provider when you move (if you are billed automatically by credit card, people can overlook doing this). MOST IMPORTANTLY, you need to VERIFY the e911 number is updated too! Some tragic events have happened because this was neglected, overlooked, or not even realized by the subscribers. In Canada, this resulted in the death of a little boy earlier this year or late last year. An ambulance was dispatched to an old address... the original service address for the account. Meanwhile the family had moved halfway across the country.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Sorry.
...Lorenzo / I'm into kinky crustaceans. I just discovered internet praWn.
Whoever wrote the headline (kdawson I guess) should go back to school.
If the submitter is has a cable modem connection, I'd suppose his bandwidth usage is about 6 MHz.
Come on, people; let's get literate and say what we really mean!
-b
myselfmusic
When it comes to normal web traffic, 250GB per month is fine, and most people wouldn't ever come close. However, what if you subscribe to a VoD service other than Comcast such as Vudu or Netflix? IMO this is stricly anti-competitive behavior in the VoD arena. Now that there are choices emerging why would customers stay on the uber-premium Comcast packages simply to get four measly HD movie channels?
Assuming I wanted to download h.264 encoded videos
How much do the videos' publishers charge to download these videos?
play games (that maybe I need to download via a content delivery system)
How much do the games' publishers charge to download these games?
My point is that if the prices for the works that you're downloading dwarf the price of your current Internet access, then it might not hurt to upgrade to a plan with a higher cap.
They better be able to pay for themselves in less than 10 years actually. Mostly because in 10 years many of your old lines will become obsolete. I imagine they can upgrade the signaling along them somewhat, but they're limited by the repeaters installed underwater. In 10 years, it's likely that a new line will be able to hold at least 10 times (probably a lot more) the traffic of the previous line (that costs about the same after normalizing for inflation, etc). This means that by the time the line is 10 years old its value has diminished significantly, and will soon cost more to operate than it is worth.
Phil
This is nothing to do with "bandwidth".
This is "Data Traffic".
Jebus Chribt on a Fusking Pony! Isn't this supposed to be a tech site?
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
3 people in my house (12 year old girl and two 36 year old adults) -- I am by far the biggest bandwidth user. I torrent a bunch of weird stuff, and watch movies and television via Hulu and Netflix, along with a smattering of youtube videos. I also do backups of some remote websites a few nights a week. Also, I work from home, but the usage there accounts for perhaps 1% of this or less (there is this weird idea the industry has that telecommuting is somehow bandwidth intensive - what is intensive is torrenting or streaming video content, neither of which ever happens on my job).
Anyway, this is with vnstat, which is available for Linux. It runs on my router so this really is the grand total for the home:
Oct '07 62.66 GB
Nov '07 70.33 GB
Dec '07 112.86 GB
Jan '08 84.45 GB
Feb '08 61.16 GB
Mar '08 56.57 GB
Apr '08 94.83 GB
May '08 168.23 GB
Jun '08 148.78 GB
Jul '08 143.43 GB
Aug '08 184.32 GB
I am a Comcast customer. Note that in February we cancelled television service permanently. A lot of the increase is streaming bandwidth for the smattering of television shows we watch via Hulu and Netflix. Not sweating the Comcast cap yet (August was a heavy torrent month), but I'm wondering if it's going to be a problem in a year to two years' time.
Would still like to see tiered pricing - a cheaper 100 gig cap for a bit cheaper, and then a 400 gig cap for more.
This numbers game is as old as phones. If you ever noticed having to wait a few seconds for a dial tone around the day the time changes, that is about too many people trying to use their phones at the same time. When the Internet exploded into use, the phone company said they measured things and 38% of all calls were internet, and 58% of all internet calls were longer than three hours. No wonder the cost of phone lines went up, and they could hardly wait for cable modems and dsl.
If I hadn't already commented in this thread I would have moderated you up. That is exactly right.
The real trick is renting one of the offices in his building and getting the unreal throughput for several hundred a month, and an office too. I have known some people that had offices there and it was a great deal. I was with them from ISDN until DSL.
My user is probably closer to that of an average person than most slashdotters. I watch a few TV episodes online per month, download about 30 hours of podcasts per months, do some general surfing, youtube and email, and from time to time upload or download 1Gb data files for work. I'm part of a 2-person household.
I have a 100 GB monthly limit, which I busted at least 3 times in the last year... Granted I download and upload a lot more than most usersn
Biggest problem with the internet in AU, peering between any two points in Australia cost pennies in the dollar, connecting to anywhere else in the world costs a lot. Infrastructure between cites is not an issue (between remote towns is still an issue but not as bad as 6 years ago), even the bandwidth available on the last mile is still greater than that of the international links.
Some ISP's aren't trying to shaft us. Some like iinet and Telstra are doing a very good job of bending us Aussies over a barrel and giving us a good Rodgering. Fortunately the ACCC wont let them get away with the kind of crap that the US telco's can. They can cap but and limit bandwidth but they cant stop usage entirely, they cannot interfere with connections nor limit connection types, wholesale prices are set which is preventing Telstra from leveraging its monopoly on the copper.
I'm looking to move away from iishaft (iinet) as they are giving you less allotted GB's in the peak time than in the off peak time (12am to 7am) by a ratio of 1:2. As in 2 thirds of my cap is only available to me in 1 third of my day (the bit of the day when I'm fucking asleep as I have a 9 to 5 job to pay their exorbitant fees for this connection), this to me is pretty fucking stupid but stupidity seems to be a common problem with the larger ISP's in Australia.
Australia have only three undersea links to other nations. A consortium of companies (including Singtel and Google I think) is working to build a forth link to Guam at the cost of A$200bn, an undertaking like this takes a decade to make profit not counting for maintenance. This is not because ISP's don't want to upgrade, its because they cant afford it, only the largest Australian ISP's would even be worth A$200bn let alone have that kind of change lying around.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
If providers begin to limit bandwidth usage, then they will have to regulate content and browsers.
Vampire-bandwidth usage, (also known as 'vam' ) is the defined culprit. Vam, namely appears in the form of pop-ups, advertisements, side-bar animations of features and services, news articles,videos on front news-pages, e-mail attachments, viruses, worms, and malware.
Unusupecting surfers try out a web page and are hit with an autoplay video that begins to download immediately. Many will complain that this is a restriction of commerce and free speech.
This is not the biggest problem as much as the global and global pirate activity that will continue from unregulated countries. Much like telemarketers who target cell phone numbers, it is the subscriber who pays for the call. In the case of bandwidth limitation that disadvantage goes to the subscriber.
Home restrictions for students will have to increase and as well, public libraries, schools, special organizations,
and unsecured wireless home networks. Educational and medical communities might be granted special usage licenses but the future of the internet will be compromised. A subscriber should not pay for splash screens and windows that are not requested. This goes for users of myspace, facebook, and youtube. Furthermore, should you use your wii phone to browse or even so much as do institutional research, you will find that you have splash alerts that your very usage being metered.
Not a smart idea. Then as if there will be a new marketing formula, the company that comes out with unlimited bandwidth usage online service will be the one most favored.
AOL, stand aside.
Eli Green
Internet Analyst
California
Honestly the 250GB is pretty far out for most people. That's why Comcast picked it. The greatest complaint I have about this issue is that it's a clear statement from the American ISP's that, "We will not innovate, we will not help move into the future, we are deadset to try to drag America to the bottom."
Think about it... WHAT IF suddenly everyone in the US had high-speed connections on par with Korea and Japan, and unlimited caps? You'd suddenly have all sorts of new media emerging. Direct streaming HD movies, or maybe you'd suddenly have de-centralized net-based OS's sprout up....
Anyhow, my point is it's in the FUTURE. All this cap serves to do is lock us in the PAST.
Warren Ellis is a relatively prominent writer of comics and speculative fiction. His domain, warrenellis.com, is primarily a blog and forum site, and reported the following statistics recently: "101629 unique visitors came here 398345 times, generating almost [7000000] hits in getting [2000000] pages served to them over the month and sucking 130.84GB out of my new hosting. According to the search logs, people come here to learn about things like 'computer blogs internet,' 'fucking,' 'Magdelene Veen' and 'forced anal.'"
I don't quite understand why some people are so opposed to monthly traffic caps in principal.
How would you feel if your electric company told you you could have 800 KWH, and that's it?
That's silly, right, they just charge you more, and if you go over a 'basic' amount, they charge you even more. That's what Comcast should do.
AFAICT that's not what they're doing. 250GB and you're done. "No Internet for You!, back in line!" until the first of the month rolls around.
This doesn't make economic sense and potentially leaves people in a lurch.
Back to the matter at hand, 27GB for a linux geek and household. 42GB for a neighbor who leeches mp3's all night. This was before the Netflix Roku box, though.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Slashdot accounts like mad..
I wonder how many thousands of accounts telecoms have procured to make sure their sock puppets have enough mod points at any one time to shift conversations toward apologists like this.
Actually I think the point is quite eloquently made.
To provide 1:1 contention is cost prohibitive and not usually required*
It's expensive to provide 100Mbit upstream connections for every four users who may or may not use their 24Mbit DSL2 connections. Should you be required to pay 25% of a 100Mbit fibre connection?
Secondly, until youtube and facebook actually require fulltime 24Mbit connections modest oversubscription is still a valid business model.
Not to say telecoms companies wouldn't stoop to buying mod points
*We have both business-grade low-contention fibre and standard DSL connections. We require low contention on the fibre as it's used for customer's off-site backups. Of course we pay for the privilege
"We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over." - Aneurin Bevan
I use 250GB, because that's when Comcast shuts me off.
Modesty is one of life's greatest attributes
We homeschool. Our children access video content and courses over the Internet for several hours 5 days a week.
I have no idea how much bandwidth we use as we have 4 computers and a wii connecting.
I do know that we are not pirates!
If you ask me, 250GB today is pretty much fine even though I hate Comcast and am tempted to disagree just to disagree.
I think the end game is to establish a cap now that will be used to leverage 'upgrades' in the future as bandwidth gets eaten up faster and faster. Think about the acceleration of usage, and their need to squeeze more dollars out of the same tubes.
I use my bandwidth for everything, I use it to bypass internet censorship on the university, download software, movies, games, ANIME..., In two weeks I downloaded about 10GB of data, but I still want more bandwidth D:, I can't live without it and my internet connection is shared on 3 computers on my house, 1 wireless laptop for my cousin that live next to my house and the wireless laptop or my neighbor, also my VoIP line sounds terrible when someone (including me) uses the internet connection :(, the good thing is that for this moment I don't have any bandwidth transfer limit or something like.
... As the rest of the world goes to faster (FTTH/ADSL2) solutions ...I had a 50/100MB link (FTTH) in Japan ... for about $45 USD a month, No caps on the connection...Where is any source of consumer protection in the US? The FCC is incompetent....
You are right, our elected officials abandoned us back in 1996 and continue to leave us without. The FCC's actions dictate that you are right, the FCC is incompetent, sad for US consumers!
Bandwidth CAPS and throttling is 'another' shot at a 'pay as you go' system where the caps are so low, as with most cell phone providers, that you will have no choice but to pay more. If not now, then definitely down the road...WAKE UP USA consumers before its too late! Okay, 250 MB might seem like allot now, but do you honestly believe they will not 'lower' those caps over time and give you, yet another excuse! Also future applications might require more bandwidth. I can think of some virtual reality applications that would be nice to have if we had 100MB / 100MB...like remote Medical diagnosis and treatment. (It's not that far fetched). What kind of bandwidth might those types of applications require just to run!
Of course only companies in other countries have enough bandwidth to make the attempt, we are at a competitive disadvantage here in the USA, thanks primarily to our anti-American Cable companies.
Net Neutrality is another shot at ultimately 'limiting' you and controlling you for their financial benefit. We MUST have NET NEUTRALITY! It's imperative for any freedom loving American.
Anyone who opposes Net Neutrality or supports bandwidth throttling) are simply and sadly miss-informed. WAKE UP!
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0711/ - 13 countries have better service then the United States...not Japan getting 100MB (that's up and downstream for those that care, for between $20 - $45 depending on who you talk to, but typically less then $30 per month)
A washington post article about Japan's 100MB / 100MB access was removed or I would have linked to it, perhaps you can search for what I put here in quotes and find it or something similiar:
"Obviously, without the competition, we would not have done all this at this pace," said Hideki Ohmichi, NTT's senior manager for public relations. "The experience of the last seven years shows that sometimes you need a strong federal regulatory framework to ensure that competition happens in a way that is constructive," said Vinton G. Cerf, a vice president at Google. In the United States, a similar kind of competitive access to phone company lines was strongly endorsed by Congress in a 1996 telecommunications law. But the federal push fizzled in 2003 and 2004, when the Federal Communications Commission and a federal court ruled that major companies do not have to share phone or fiber lines with competitors. The Bush administration did not appeal the court ruling.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/21/google-plans-undersea-pacific-cable/#comment-269961 - good comment, Japan having 100MB since 2003. Article should give all hope, as Google is laying fiber across the ocean. Also giving hope, plenty of 'dark' fiber in the USA that can be bought and lit up...can't happen soon enough.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/10/AR2008071003327.html - by John Dunbar; 7/11, 2008; Head FCC recommends punishing Comcast for blocking internet traffic. "The commission has adopted a set of principles that protects consumers access to the Internet," FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin said. "We found that Comcast's actions in this instance violated our principles.";"Martin said Comcast has "arbitrarily" blocked Internet access, regardless of the level of traffic, and failed to disclose to consumers that it was doing so."
http://www.fcc.gov/telecom.html - Telecommunications Act of 1996; Our government let us down, had this gone in favor of consumers, we would probably have 100MB / 100MB in this country as early as of 2000.
Search online for "Net Neutrality" to learn more, the article I had was removed, surprise, surprise.
Is your Internet Throttled? Install DD-Wrt, OpenWRT or Tomato to learn the truth! Google: 1Gbps/1Gbps: 5 Communities
For fucks sake. What do you expect? You pay 19.99 (euro?) and you get 10mbit and a cap of 150G. What is the problem? You pay shit for a service which is 24/7 avail. You can leech you ass of on all the porn you want. Please stop wanking and the whole "we are being ripped of" act. Get a grip! You pay shit, you get shit!