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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.)"
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
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
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
ISP's oversubscribe their upstream links.
That's how they can make a living.
Exactly. Like most networks, it's simply not cost effective to build it to handle the maximum peak traffic.
For an example, we have around 800 computers with gigabit ethernet connected to 40 gigabit edge switches connected to one central gigabit switch.
Most applications are run directly from an application server that has two 1 gigabit ethernet connections to this central switch.
This link is thus hugely oversubscribed.
But having gigabit all the way to the workstations cut the time to start applications down to between a fifth and a tenth compared to having 100mbit edge switches with gigabit uplink, since it is unusual for people to start the same applications at the exact same time and using the same functions at the exact same time.
It's the same with low cost, high speed internet services.
You get the benefit of fast response and short load times, but at a much, much lower cost-level than a service that could offer this speed 100% of the time to 100% of the customers.
As long as the ISP's upfront and honest with the fact that they can't offer all its customers 100% utilization 24/7, thus having a cap, it should be alright.
If they have a cap but don't tell you about it, that's when you should start looking for another ISP.
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)
First of all, do you think "throwing a fibre" costs nothing? Usually, the big ISPs prefer private peering to the public peering model, so they have to "throw a fibre" between each of their routers in a city. That ain't cheap. They also have to pay for the cross-country and cross-continental lines connecting their own routers. Have you ever seen the costs associated with laying a fiber between New York and London? That ain't cheap, either.
Second, ISPs have TONS of equipment to support their operations. They don't buy NetGear switches, either -- it's all Cisco/Juniper/Alcatel kinda stuff.
Finally, not all peering arrangements are settlement free. It totally depends on the size of your ISP and the size of the other guy's ISP.
You seem to be under the impression that the big ISPs aren't spending any money on their networks. Perhaps you should take a look at their SEC filings and see how much capital they spend.