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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.)"
Another issue is all the traffic generated by break-in attempts, spam and a lot of other junk traffic.
Or if I happen to have a small web server for personal amusement and it happens to get slashdotted...
Those are really going to blow the bandwidth cap.
It works fine with a bandwidth cap for plain surfing, but the net is more than that. And if I have my phone completely over VoIP, then they will cut the emergency call possibility by having a cap.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
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
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.
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Oh for fucks sake. Comcast is putting a 250GB cap on it. I, in Canada have a Shaw business account with the X-Treem or whatever it is option that gives me a grand total of 130GB a month transfer. I run a web server at home, I also run a backup server that backs up no less than 3 remote sites to my place twice a week just for geographical distribution (house is about 35 miles from downtown). I also download a bunch of things including audiovisual entertainments, and other things, surf the web, have people try and break in to my webserver, and a hundred other things. And I never exceed my cap. Ever. Once, with 5 days to go, and Shaw's customer service site reporting that my monthly usage was only 30GB that month, I thought to myself just for fun, I should see how much I can download in 5 days, after all that's 100GB going to waste, right :). Didn't put more than a moderate dent in it.
You, if you are doing what you describe above will NEVER "blow the bandwidth cap". Especially if it's twice what I can't use up.
The only way this will inconvenience anyone is if they are not a "moderate or heavy surfer" and are in fact running torrent downloads 24/7/365 pulling a constant load of 100kBps or more.
Think about this. Comcast's cap is 250GB, yes? There is 2,592,000 seconds in 30 days. 250,000 MB / 2,592,000 = .096451. That means to exceed your cap, you must have a constant network load of .096 megabytes PER SECOND all month. I SERIOUSLY doubt that's the case if you are using it as described.
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
So you're saying that not only were you paying speakeasy late, you were also considerably behind on your power bill as well (no utility is going to shut you off without warning and not just because you're 15 days late on a single payment). Can I assume you were also very late (read: months) on other bills as well?
I've had what you mention happen to me before: you go to the bank and fill out an affidavit of unauthorized withdrawal. As you say, it is a federal crime and the bank will investigate and you'll most likely get your money back. Since you didn't mention anything like this I'll assume you didn't. Is it possible that you had an agreement with speakeasy that gave them permission to debit the account if you were significantly late with payment? Read the fine print on your contract: most corporations aren't that stupid. You probably agreed to it somewhere whether you realize it or not.
As far as the calls from the credit department goes: you may not have asked for credit, but by allowing you to pay late, they were certainly extending it to you. When BB took them over, somebody in Finance probably noticed that a lot of customers were paying late and they were told to get their Receivables aging down to improve cashflow. You're a business, you should understand this.
Sorry, no cookie!