Belgian ISP Claims One Customer Downloads 2.7TB

An anonymous reader writes with this envy-spawning excerpt: "While for most people the data limit is never reached, with media-rich websites becoming every more prevalent, and more media services going online (we're looking at you streaming video services), it won't be long before the average user is surpassing even the highest caps commonly imposed today. But how much data is it possible to download every month? And do the so-called data-hogs really burn through that much more data than everyone else? According to Belgian ISP Telenet, the answers are 'a lot' and 'yes, they can.'"

Comments

Human nature

[Colin Smith]

It's free, so consume it till it's all gone.

 

Re:Human nature

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a lot of "Linux isos", which will actually be pirated media and porn.

Re:Human nature

[Anonymous Coward]

Human Nature

It's free, so consume it till it's all gone.

Do I detect envy in there? If you have the proper infrastructure and equipment, no, having your customers consume your service doesn't result in it "all gone".

The people at that Belgian ISP were not complaining, unlike the constant whining we hear from ISPs in USA. These guys were actually bragging.

Re:Human nature

[mcrbids]

Any linux ISO can be considered a pornographic file when paired with the appropriate one time pad

Re:Human nature

[Anonymous Coward]

Although in that case all the actual pornographic *information* would be contained in the one time pad. Why not take the easy route and pair it with an appropriate fetish instead?

Re:Human nature

[SimonTheSoundMan]

BT Broadband claimed I used 170GB per month on average over a 12 month period using my 2.5Mb connection.

Meanwhile, 2.7TB is nothing if you have a leased line. Just had a two week film shoot, used 6TiB. We have had to transfer all the daily rushes via the Internet.

Re:Human nature

[interkin3tic]

Human nature? That's the nature of life. All life forms from bacteria to dogs to people fail to rationally ration themselves. If there's food on the ground, and you don't eat it or take it, something else probably will and you won't get any benefit from it.

Overcoming eons of evolutionarily reinforced instinct to consume all that you can as fast as you can is something that humans are better at than most other species. Lets give ourselves credit where credit is due.

Re:Human nature

[ewanm89]

No, the one time pad would have as much or as little pornographic information as the linux iso, only when used together through an XOR stream cipher would they become the pornographic file.

Re:Human nature

[ewanm89]

Just to add something XOR is the same as any binary addition modulo 2, which is the case we actually are usually interested in when dealing with binary data.

Re:Human nature

[ultranova]

Human nature? That's the nature of life. All life forms from bacteria to dogs to people fail to rationally ration themselves. If there's food on the ground, and you don't eat it or take it, something else probably will and you won't get any benefit from it.

Actually, most animals change their rate of reproduction based on available food resources.

Re:Human nature

[Anonymous Coward]

Or if you find Tux arousing.

Re:Human nature

[Anonymous Coward]

While we're at it, here's a child porn generator:

for (int y=0; y480; y++)
for (int x=0; x640; x++)
{
  draw_pixel(floor(random(16777215)));
}

Re:Human nature

[marcansoft]

As far as copyright law is concerned, the "one-time-pad" would be a derivative work of the Linux ISO and the porn film, and thus would be considered to contain the information.

Re:Human nature

[obarel]

And the other way around: "You don't understand, this is just Ubuntu, I've got the key on this USB stick..."

Re:Human nature

[commodore64_love]

These don't appear to be leased lines.

With my $15 connection at 768k, I could download a maximum of 248 gigabytes but only if I did nothing but download. No surfing or emailing... just pure downloading of file-after-file.

So this 2700 GB user must have at least at 9 Mbit/s. If we assume he only spends 8 hours a day downloading or watching videos, then that translates to a 25 Mbit/s line..... typical speed for a shared Cable Internet connection.

Re:Human nature

[commodore64_love]

P.S.

According to Telenet's website, the "Turbonet" service supplies 30Mbps download speeds. So that's pretty close to what I estimated. About 7 hours a day of downloading.

Re:Human nature

[commodore64_love]

BTW for those who think Europe is "heaven on earth" for internet?

Telenet built their network with support of the Belgium government, and now has a monopoly on cable internet. In other words they are worse off than us Americans - while most of us do have Comcast/Cox/whatever monopolies at least those coaxial cables were laid usage Comcast's money, not government money.

Re:Human nature

[Anonymous Coward]

Human nature? That's the nature of life. All life forms from bacteria to dogs to people fail to rationally ration themselves. If there's food on the ground, and you don't eat it or take it, something else probably will and you won't get any benefit from it.

Actually, most animals change their rate of reproduction based on available food resources.

So do humans. When there is an abundance food, humans tend to reproduce less. When there is a shortage of food humans tend to reproduce more...

Re:Human nature

[mysidia]

Consume is not the right word here... bandwidth is not "consumed" really. Infrastructure is utilized.

The difference is when you 'consume' something it's gone, when you utilize something it is just tied up until you are done with it.

For example: You consume a piece of meat. Because once you eat it, that piece of meet is gone.

However, when you check a book out at the library you don't consume the book, you just have a hold of it temporarily, you utilize one book, and are supposed to return it in a few days.

Similarly, when you download a file, you utilize network capacity, and once your file download is completed, the network capacity in fact is automatically returned, without you having to go drive somewhere and return your 100Mb of bit time on the wire.

By definition if you are no longer using those bit times, they have been returned.

Re:Human nature

[mysidia]

Are you sure it's the Linux ISO that is pornographic and not the one time pad that is pornographic?

With the right One time Pad, you can turn a Linux ISO into a Windows XP install CD....

Re:Human nature

[Jedi Alec]

Little history lesson about my own country(one north from Belgium):

Back when most of the cable infrastructure was put down, it was owned and operated by government(local ones).

Later on when "privatize! privatize!" was all the rage, this infrastructure was *sold* to the current cable companies, in quite a few cases in exchange for part or full ownership of the company, meaning that although it was ran as a business all the profits would still flow back to local government.

Right now we're seriously looking at breaking up the cable market to get more competition in but alas...once something is in the private sector that is a heck of lot harder to do. So either we(we being "the people") buy the stuff back or we find an alternative.

And...for the record, I can pick from, oh, 15 different ISP's or so. Currently running a 50/5 connection with no bandwidth cap except for a reasonable use policy which is actually reasonable. Unless I start downloading in the TB range for several months in a row...noone's gonna notice.

Re:Human nature

[guruevi]

It's not, Telenet has bandwidth caps (30GB or so for the last good decade) and has recently allowed going over the bandwidth cap without being moved back to 56k by buying more GB's. They are complaining that people bought extra credits for bandwidth (or the most expensive packages in their line up) and are using it.

Telenet has a monopoly on Cable Internet in Flanders (the populated northern part of Belgium) for the next 20 years or so (the government sold this monopoly a couple of years ago)

Re:Human nature

[Ironchew]

Ignorant troll, I'll bite.

First off, you'd be surprised how much telecommunications infrastructure in the United States was researched and paid for by the U.S. government. In many ways, we got a good return on our tax dollars, except for the little bit about allowing unaccountable private entities to have exclusive access to these lines. Comcast and the like are only accountable to their shareholders, and they're using our tax money to enrich themselves. It's pretty clear that treating the lines as a public resource, like they do in most of Europe, stops the price gouging and actually encourages investment in upgrading the lines. I really don't see why you think privatization and deregulation are a better deal with the internet.

Re:Human nature

[commodore64_love]

>>>you'd be surprised how much telecommunications infrastructure in the United States was researched and paid for by the U.S. government

But you cited the electrification act, fiber/56k upgrade plan of 1996, and ARPAnet, none of which have fuck-all to do with Comcast, Cox, and other companies laying down coaxial cable to city and suburban homes to provide TV in the 70s/80s. That project was done using their own monies, and not one dollar of government money.

Re:Human nature

[jsebrech]

Governments can't hold on to infrastructure that can be exploited commercially. Whether it's buildings or cable networks, eventually it gets sold off to balance that year's budget. The belgian government went on a decade-long selling spree to balance a structurally unbalanced budget, and the consequence is that now there are gigantic budget issues and the government needs to make the deepest cuts in the history of the country.

In other words, just another typical government.

Re:Human nature

[Ironhandx]

Except they're using that SAME copper still, just with upgraded equipment along the lines, and they pocketed most of the money from the government.

P.S. It cost them nothing but network equipment to hook all those that already had cable up to the Internet, and while not exactly cheap, network equipment isn't exactly expensive either.

Re:Human nature

[commodore64_love]

>>>Except they're using that SAME copper still, just with upgraded equipment along the lines, and they pocketed most of the money from the government.

Coax not copper.

And please provide proof Comcast, Cox, and other cable TV companies pocketed the money. And no opinion blogs that offer zero evidence are not sufficient.

Re:Human nature

[rhalstead]

It's human nature to use what you pay for. It's also human nature to over eat, hoard, to stand in line over night for things we don't need, and use credit to have things we can't afford. IF and I emphasize the IF...an ISP sells you a 10 meg connection with no band width cap, then I expect the user to be able to run 10 Megs 24X7 and not be called a bandwidth hog. After all we pay, (I pay) for the bandwidth my site uses and I believe that is standard practice. IF it has more hits than usual and uses all the bandwidth I paid for I can, for a small fee increase the bandwidth for that month. However I'm told up front how much bandwidth I purchased. Many years ago I had an ISP call to tell me I was using about 10 times the bandwidth of the average customer. My reply was, "and that is a problem why? You sold me a connection guaranteed to be unlimited connect." His reply was, "well...yes, but every one does it, but no one could afford to do it". To which I replied "then it sounds like you should be selling customers what you can provide. It's called "truth in advertising". This was before P2P, streaming video, and many other things we now take as a given and the "average user" might read e-mail and surf the net for an hour or two per week if that much. My first ISDN line was close to $190 per month. I think it dropped to $160 for DSL which is now a fraction of that. Cable is even cheaper and provides good service which is more than I can say for their TV service. I do a lot of photography and AVI work. I don't think I've hit 1T in a month, but probably close. I do not have a dedicated connection as it's on cable for the speed. During storms I usually have two computers running Weather RADAR in motion. Each download is not a terrible amount, but they both download once every 5 minutes and have done that 2 days straight and that is on top of my regular use. For a person who uses a lot of streaming video which the marketers (and networks) are pushing any user who has the connection speed could easily hit 1, 2, or even more Terabytes and I do expect to see that become the norm as some (maybe many)new HD sets are coming with direct connect to the Internet. Miss the show? watch it on the Internet in HD. A show you can't get? It's probably available (for a price) on the Internet. 1.5TB is going to be small potatoes. ISPs large and small have to realize that when they sell a connection they have a contract with that consumer and they like the consumer are bound by that contract. It can say unlimited, or just 20 meg connection but it could as easily say "Unlimited connect for a maximum of XX total gigabytes for $$ price". Often they sell a XX speed connection with all the limitations hidden in a TOS that may be difficult to find and reserve the right to change the TOS any time they see fit, but it still gets back to "truth in advertising"

Re:Human nature

[Corwn of Amber]

You obviously know NOTHING what you're talking about.

Telenet is a small, private ISP. They lease lines from Belgacom, the previously-state-run company that ACTUALLY owns the cables.

Know what? If 27TB is one-third of the total traffic that can go through the cable in a month, then what they sell is actually a ( (30Mbits/s / 8) MBytes * 3600 * 24 * 30 ) /1024 = 9,26971435546875 TBytes / month.

Yeah. Thus the plan is for 9TB. Acceptable download cap? 10TB. Else, your so-called "company" deserves to get fuckin' burned to the ground by angry pitchfork-wielding mobs. Since it's all a money-printing license that only works because of market segmentations and astronomical barriers to entry (those being : 1.sex up the right person and 2.find a billion Euro for leasing lines and buying ads. And a couple underpaid McJobbers, in case you're doing it wrong and actually interact with real-world customers instead of just parasiting like leasing a line and selling... traffic. To small-time ISPs. *evil laugh*)

Traffic doesn't cost anything. Cables, infrastructure, maintenance, upgrade - those cost money. Constantly. It's a constant stream of money, going away from the company. Luckily for them, their clients pay every month. That's a constant stream of money coming in. But then they oversell their bandwidth, because they don't upgrade as fast as they sell. Then they put download caps, because "it's profiteering when you use all the bits your 30Mb/s can carry, all the time". Then they SELL traffic packs at one euro per gigabyte. They made zillions of euros with that "traffic costs us" scam already.

Belgium is a fucked-up banana republic like that...

Re:Human nature

[kdemetter]

Living in Belgium , and having telenet as ISP , i have to say it's not all sunshine :

It depends on what package you are buying : you have different packages , for different prizes : if i recall correctly there's 40gb , 60 gb , 80 gb a month and 'unlimited' , each of them more expensive.

However , this 'unlimited' , is not really unlimited : you have a gauge which shows you how much you use in comparison with other users . If you download to much , telenet will charge you extra.

But with unlimited , it's impossible to see the exactly how much you downloaded this month ( something you can see with the other packages ) , which means you never know how you can actually download ( i solved that by installing a bandwidth meter myself )

Its possible

[ickleberry]

If he had a decent connection and was downloading all the time. Unfortunately if I tried it I would be well inside the 1c per MB excess usage tariff within a day. and my ISP is owned by bankrupt Australians who need every 1c they can get

Re:Its possible

[dk90406]

You'll only need 8 Mb/sec to get that 2.7 TB over a 30 day period. If I fully utilized my (Danish connection) I could get more than double of that. Koreans and Japanese would get 20 times. I suspect both UL and DL are included.

Re:Its possible

[ickleberry]

maybe he was running a TOR node then?

Re:Its possible

[kneutral]

I'm visiting Australia for work and was shocked that the hotels have usage limits on their wireless (in addition to their already mildly annoying practice of adding a surcharge for wifi usage - though the more pricey hotels do this in most countries it seems, whereas the cheaper hotels provide it for free). $20/day for a 500Mb/week limited internet connection. At first I thought that would be fine, I'd cut out skype, streaming video, and stop downloading podcasts and wouldn't have to worry. Sadly I'm 4 days in and already over ($.30/Mb now) -- the internet's just no longer made for such ridiculous restrictions.

Re:Its possible

[TheRaven64]

I have a 10Mb/s connection, but it gets throttled if I go over certain thresholds (3000MB in the morning, 1500MB in the evening) at 'peak' times, with 14 hours in the day when there is no throttling. The throttling lasts for 6 hours, so maximum total throughput is achieved by staying under that limit. That means that the maximum that I can download in a day is (a href="http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=14%20hours%20*%2010Mb%2Fs%20%2B%204500MB">14 hours at 10Mb/s plus 4500MB, or 67.5GB. That gives just under 2TB/month, so I'd be unable to download 2.7TB with my connection.

Mind you, I have one of the cheapest connections that my ISP provides. If I bought their 20Mb/s package, I could download just over 4TB/month. With their 50Mb/s package, it would be over 16TB. This is in the UK.

Even so, 2.7TB seems excessive. In a typical month, I download well under 100GB. The only time I've ever hit my ISP's throttling caps was when I was uploading the source material for a DVD to my publisher. Even with an Internet radio stream left running most of the time and fairly regular downloads from iPlayer, I don't come close to 1TB.

Re:Its possible

[yyxx]

No, because the limit there would be upload rates, which are much less.

Re:Its possible

[Anonymous Coward]

Brought to you (slowly) by Virgin Media.

Re:Its possible

[dintech]

I'm on the 50Mb package which doesn't get throttled (yet).

Re:Its possible

[eharvill]

If you've cut out the "heavy usage" stuff at the hotel, what else are you doing to use that much data? I travel frequently as well and don't use that much data (unless I'm streaming Netflix or something). Web browsing, occasional VPN, work/personal email don't add up to a whole lot, especially for just a couple hours at the hotel each night.

Re:Its possible

[houghi]

Could be or he is a business user.
The rest of the top 25 (original in Dutch: http://userbase.be/nieuws/telecom/366-telenet-publiceert-top-25-grootste-downloaders) is well below that. These are the top 25 users of that provider.

At 25 we are already at 700GB, so well below the number 1. I get that with mainly upload (It is usage, not download) of Linux torrents. This is done over a one payment period of one month. July is a holiday month. So there are many ways to explain this.

To me these numbers mean absolutely nothing. They are anomaly in any statistic. I bet the bottom 25 are 0 or close to 0. The theoretical maximum is about 22TB. The average of the top 25 is roughly 1TB. And again, these are the top 25 users of a provider. I am sure many cable providers who look at their top 25 will see similar or higher numbers.

Re:Its possible

[Dan541]

Have a look into using 3G wireless prepaid. Surprisingly it is often cheaper than what the hotels will charge.

Re:Its possible

[master811]

Minor correction, the throttling actually lasts 5 hours 10am-3pm and 4pm to 9pm for downloads, although the upload is 3pm - 8pm, so there is an overlap. But still it is a pain. The daytime cap is not too bad, but the 1.5GB during the evening is so easy to go over, I often get throttled back to 2.5Mb.

Re:Its possible

[Anonymous Coward]

Have a look round the back of the TV for an ethernet cable. Fake the MAC on your computer, plug the cable in, sniff it a bit or similar to figure out the IP range in use on the network, set your PC in the same range, and you'll probably be able to surf away. And you won't have to worry about the usage limits.

I am shocked you have gone that high though if you have been avoiding downloads and video. I guess you don't block adverts, scripts, and flash? 500 meg of web in 4 days is a lot, unless you let the crap through.

Re:Its possible

[RobertM1968]

You'll only need 8 Mb/sec to get that 2.7 TB over a 30 day period. If I fully utilized my (Danish connection) I could get more than double of that. Koreans and Japanese would get 20 times. I suspect both UL and DL are included.

We regularly hit that, and though the "download" traffic isnt actually initiated on our end (it's actually uploads to our server), I am sure it's still measured the same way. The post production work for Star Trek Phase 2 eats a LOT of bandwidth in both directions. The website on the other hand is only 1/4 to 1/2 a terabyte (outgoing - and of course roughly 1/10th incoming).

Fortunately, we've got a business account, and no traffic throttles or such. Dreading the day when/if more US ISPs decide to start metering again.

Re:Its possible

[mindwhip]

I was going to upgrade to the 50Mb but they wanted to charge me £50 for someone to come out, disconnect the coax screw connection and connect it to a new modem... something for which I would have to take a day off work to do to be sure of being home during any of the slots they offered... so changed my mind.

Last time I needed my modem replaced (because the old one was OLD and didn't work with the network upgrades for the 50Mb service) they posted me one and told me to fit it myself... and they posted the thing with 3 day shipping causing more delays. I guess they went for the cheap option then since they couldn't charge me because it was their equipment and fault... and I had to argue like hell for compensation for the time I had no service.

Re:Its possible

[n_djinn]

Best I can do in my town is 6 mb/s with unlimited. Nothing faster for consumers.

Who cares?

[McTickles]

It is the ISPs problem if they can't deliver the bandwidth they promise their customers. Their business is data transferings so if they should rejoices peoples use their pipes to transfer datas.

Re:Who cares?

[_KiTA_]

It is the ISPs problem if they can't deliver the bandwidth they promise their customers.

Their business is data transferings so if they should rejoices peoples use their pipes to transfer datas.

Except the industry -- at least, in the US -- is nowhere near capable of handling 100% utilization by 100% of customers. Heck, I'd be surprised if they're ready for 100% utilization by even 10% of customers.

Like it or not, everyone's fat pipe is sold under two unspoken conditions: That you're not going to use it 24x7, and that those who vastly under utilize (grandmothers checking their email on DSL, for example) are going to subsidize the rest of us.

In theory, they'd be working on infrastructure to supplement the need, but in reality, well, buying hookers and yachts for lobbyists and politicians aren't cheap, you know.

Re:Who cares?

[Ginger Unicorn]

Their business is data transferings so if they should rejoices peoples use their pipes to transfer datas.

comparethemeerkat.com. Simples!

Re:Who cares?

[MoonBuggy]

Overselling is a necessity if we want sensible prices - I won't reiterate the whole argument here, but Dreamhost explained it pretty well.

What should be banned is the rampant false advertising that we see now. If my household is using the 50Mbps connection to download around 200GB/month then we want an oversold connection - no point in paying for the tens of terabytes more that we're not using. The ISPs, however, should be required to state clearly what the limitations of the connections are - if they're selling 'unlimited' then I sure as hell want unlimited, however impractical that may be on the prices they're charging.

Beyond that, sensible limits (two standard deviations from the mean, perhaps?), reasonable per GB charges or voluntary throttling or cutoff over the monthly limit, and a rolling three month average to calculate whether or not you've gone past your allocation would all be beneficial for both the customers and for the ISPs reputation.

Ah well. We can dream. Or try to get investment to set up our own ISP, with blackjack and hookers.

Re:Who cares?

[Dan541]

It's ok to oversell services but customers who want to use 100% must be able to do so. Otherwise the ISP is failing to provide.

Re:Who cares?

[mwvdlee]

In theory, they'd be working on infrastructure to supplement the need, but in reality, well, buying hookers and yachts for lobbyists and politicians aren't cheap, you know.

I don't know how much a hooker currently goes for, but surely it's cheaper than a server-grade router.
So if they were smart they'd just buy each of those 25 top users a hooker. That'll keep those nerds occupied bragging about how they "made love" to a "woman" on forums, which uses a lot less bandwidth.
It's much cheaper than upgrading hardware.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Overselling is a necessity if we want sensible prices - I won't reiterate the whole argument here, but Dreamhost explained [dreamhost.com] it pretty well.

OMG. That article actually uses the example of throwing a party while only having one bathroom as 'overselling'. That example sucks. People only use the bathroom for a short period of time. Lets say 10 minutes every 6 hours as an example. That means 6 people per hour, or 36 people over 6 hours. As long as you have 1 bathroom for a 6 hour party with 36 people, IT'S NOT 'OVERSOLD'!!

Re:Who cares?

[foniksonik]

Set it up like the cell carriers with rollover GB. You get 500 GB/mo and roll over. It's a limit for heavy users and practically unlimited for everyone else.

Re:Who cares?

[blackraven14250]

Not when you need hookers for lots and lots of people, and they're the high class type.

Re:Who cares?

[MBGMorden]

I think that's the crux of this argument. I don't think too many people would care about the simple idea of overselling - it's by HOW MUCH they oversell.

ISP's typically advertise a max speed figure, and then throw a shit fit if you use your max speed for more than 5% of the time. If they were overselling to the point where you could only use that, say, 30-40% of the time then I'm sure it wouldn't be seen as too much of a problem. As it is though, it's ridiculous.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

If ISPs can sell their service as "upto" 10Mbps, then I can say Im using "over" 1Megabyte. 1 megabyte is really small.

Re:Who cares?

[Jawnn]

I don't know how much a hooker currently goes for, but surely it's cheaper than a server-grade router. So if they were smart they'd just buy each of those 25 top users a hooker. That'll keep those nerds occupied bragging about how they "made love" to a "woman" on forums, which uses a lot less bandwidth. It's much cheaper than upgrading hardware.

Some of us have standards, you insensitive clod. Sure, you can buy a buttload of streetwalkers for that kind of money, but quality Danish imports cost serious money.

Re:Who cares?

[CastrTroy]

I think the problem that the ISPs face is that they don't want to charge grandma for the amount she is using. If you look at the way electricity is charged, strictly by usage, then the internet providers would stand to lose a lot of money if they could only charge people for what they used. While there are a lot of techies like us who download 100 GB per month, there are 100 grandmas and other similar people who only use 10 MB a month, because all they do is check their email, and the weather. I think that if things ever switched to truly usage based, that the people downloading a lot would curb their usage, so they could afford their bill, and a large chunk of people would be left paying something like $2 a month, because truly, that's all the data they use. I think the internet providers are trying to keep it the way it is, so that they can continue to charge all the low volume users $30 a month, even though they don't use anywhere close to that volume.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

The (two) problems here with overselling isn't with the very nature of overselling, but with the logistics. Overselling is sane and reasonable as your dreamhost link pointed out.

The problem is when the provider who oversells CANNOT COVER. If you sell me for $7.95 20gb/month space, and I use less than 1 gb a year, I don't care. I don't care if you sell that to thousands of people. I don't care if your used disk space by customers to what is promised is .1% and you reap mad profits. Good for you. You are, from my point of view, delivering on what you promised, where I keep below a certain amount of usage, and you provide that usage without complaint.

The problems come when I want to use what you promised, and you fail. If I and a dozen customers suddenly have to upload 20gb, you better have spare disks available to install and not whine when capacity swings up.

And that brings up the second issue. When ISPs cannot cover, THEY BLAME THE CUSTOMER. Here, an ISP is using a customer as an extreme example of "bad" behavior, if merely by simply releasing the data. Sorry, if you claimed an unlimited connection, he's not breaking it, and if you're complaining, then you are simply pointing to you own faults and emphasizing your own lies and false advertising.

Re:Who cares?

[sjames]

GOD NO!

The last thing we need is another 57 page bill laden with overcharges and gibberish.

How about they just set up a reasonable queuing system and advertise the actual configured commit and burst?

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

just an fyi. I know it is comon for non native speakers to add an 's' to the end for plural context, but data is the plural form of datum so it is one datume a many data. I work with many Europeans and this is a common mistake.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

But what happens when they want to upload/share the videos?

Re:Who cares?

[cthulhu11]

Limitations are due in part to the distance the local node is from the CO (or cableco equivalent) as well as the condition of the cable plant and equipment along the way and in your walls, not to mention whatever other customers of a shared pool are using. There's no more deception here than any of the other places in daily life where we encounter wording like "up to" or "as low as". My credit union says VISA rates are as low as 6.9% -- no reasonable person expects that to mean that everyone who walks in the door will qualify for the lowest rate.

Re:Who cares?

[wvmarle]

A more workable model would be like the telephone: you pay a fixed amount for the connection, plus variable amounts for usage.

This I think is reasonable, as the cable to one's home costs a certain amount per month for maintenance and so, no matter how much data is transferred over it. Data is cheap; rates should reflect this.

I thing customers will revolt though used as they are to unlimited plans.

Windows Update

[Anonymous Coward]

Poor guy just left Windows Update set to automatic.

Re:Windows Update

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually I think he was trying to get a video driver that would work with Linux.

Re:Windows Update

[CharredMetal]

WU/MU does diffs.

Re:Windows Update

[jopsen]

Or he's left it off and is growing worms...

Re:Windows Update

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, it was just iTunes updating.

GOD HAVE MERCY

[Anonymous Coward]

Lordy!!Lordy!!That be a heepin heppin' of that ther gud stuf he don gotz nowz!!

WANTED!

[neonux]

We will pay up to $50,000 for any information leading to the identify and ultimately capture of the individuals present in the Ten Most Wanted list published by Belgian ISP Telenet.

Warmest regards,

Signed RIAA, MPAA and BSA.

Re:WANTED!

[Anubis IV]

Luckily for you, screen names are given for four of them in the image in TFA. Where do I collect my $200,000?

Re:WANTED!

[Anonymous Coward]

Where do I collect my $200,000?

Dude, we said "up to."

Hardly a big deal

[neoprint]

I've done just under 2tb in a month before, I've heard of other people on the same internet plan as me (Big Time on New Zealand's Telecom, unlmited ADSL2+) before they took it away because of people like me. Most I heard of was just shy of 3TB, this was on a horribly shaped connection too. Why is this news?

Re:Hardly a big deal

[_KiTA_]

I've done just under 2tb in a month before, I've heard of other people on the same internet plan as me (Big Time on New Zealand's Telecom, unlmited ADSL2+) before they took it away because of people like me.

Most I heard of was just shy of 3TB, this was on a horribly shaped connection too.

Why is this news?

This is news because if the US ISPs have their way, we'll be limited to approximately what, 0.37% of this per month?

2700 GB -> 5GB AT&T cap, 10GB theoretical cap by my ISP (cableone), etc etc.

About 1/3 of 1 percent of what your connection could use?

So in other words, the people selling us "Unlimited Broadband" would really like it if we would only use our connections about 2.6 hours a month (0.37% * 30 days = .111 days * 24 hrs = 2.6 hours).

Of course, my math is probably wrong. It's 4 AM, and harble bleeb SNARF.

Re:Hardly a big deal

[Danieljury3]

The max I've used on Telecoms Big Time is about 380Gb and I've had to give up torrenting (total ratio 1.045) now that I'm stuck on 20Gb a month. Telecoms biggest plan is 40Gb and the largest plan I could find with another ISP (actually a power company) http://www.kinect.co.nz/Broadband.aspx?m=2 was 100Gb on their big user plans although for that ISP's plans under 10Gb any data you haven't used carries over to next month and if you go over you just buy another data pack

Re:Hardly a big deal

[russ1337]

Not sure what you're paying, but you could look at Xnet. http://www.xnet.co.nz/hsi/pricing.shtml

Basically $34/month for the plan, then $1.02 per Gig (unlimited), so 35Gig/month costs around $70 but no actual cap unless you want one. Just pay $1.02/gig

or you could go with their "Torrenting" plan.... http://www.xnet.co.nz/hsi/ and pay 1.52 per gig, with downloads free from 2am to 8am.

I am with xnet, and am pretty happy.

Re:Hardly a big deal

[Danieljury3]

On the torrenting plan it's only free from 2am to 8am for the first 75Gb, after that it's $2.56 per Gb

Re:Hardly a big deal

[skyride]

How do people actually manage to use that kind of bandwidth? I personally rarely exceed 50GB/month. To be fair I do own a dedicated server which I download torrents on (among a huge range of other things such as websites for friends), and even that rarely exceeds 150GB/month.

Re:Hardly a big deal

[Anonymous Coward]

Xnet has ok speed for torrenting, nowhere near what they say is max.

If you intend to game on ps3,xbox,pc you'll be ok, as long as its not 25man raiding in wow.

The torrent plan is crap (the speed is severely crap at those hours you get much better down at what works out cheaper on the normal plan at any time you like). It used to be 10pm-9am or something decent untill torrenters got too much for them.

Xnet used to be good before everyone started going there now they can't provide the service they used to.

If you want the best quality connection in NZ telecoms xtra is pretty much your only option.

Xnet customer 7+ years. Their pay for what you use plan is unbeaten for many.

Re:Hardly a big deal

[nacturation]

The problem is that $34/month seems to get you absolutely nothing. Unless of course you want 0GB and have your speed capped to 64Kbps up/down for the month. It wouldn't be unreasonable if the first 50GB were included at that price.

Re:Hardly a big deal

[MightyYar]

Setup Crash Plan along with a friend and watch your numbers spike :)

Seriously, your entire hard drive(s) will be sent to your friend's computer and your friend's sent to yours at the same time, totally saturating your respective upload bandwidth for months unless you "seed" the download with an external drive first.

Download caps?

[loufoque]

What are these? Is that a relic from the past?

Re:Download caps?

[Anonymous Coward]

they brought them back when they realized people were catching on to their smoke and mirrors sales pitch regarding 'unlimited.'

Re:Download caps?

[CharlyFoxtrot]

The ISP in question has only very recently (since juli) stopped using download caps. They had an 80Gb limit on their most expensive subscription IIRC. This could be people acting out, downloading whatever they can and repairing their ratio's, etc. I'd like to see some more statistics in a couple of months, my guess is usage would level off. With the speeds I'm getting on Telenet I think 2.7 TB would be an always on connection going full blast for the whole month.

Re:Download caps?

[GrumblyStuff]

...in a galaxy far, far away in the retro future!

Re:Download caps?

[thegarbz]

Nope. It's a glimpse of the future.

Re:Download caps?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a hat you wear to get hammered by your ISP incase your head goes over it.

Re:Download caps?

[Anonymous Coward]

What are these? Is that a relic from the past?

No, they are your future.

Re:Download caps?

[Anonymous Coward]

In New Zealand we used to have uncapped plans..
It was a golden time, though the speeds were not that flash.

Amazing!

[Anonymous Coward]

Onlive must have found someone foolish enough to actually sign up. Shocking!

Well...

[Raxxon]

In theory:

28 Day "Month" (4 weeks), 24h/day, 60 min/h, 60 sec/min, 2.5Mb/sec..

I see a possible 6Tb in total transfer (and that's assuming you're not also transmitting!), and that wouldn't be saturating my internet link. However I do find it quite difficult to (1) Maintain 2.5Mb/sec constant (speaking of Torrents/other P2P in general) and (2) Having things to constantly download at that rate.

Re:Well...

[loufoque]

The headline is 2.7 TB, not 2.7 Tb.
6 Tb is 0.75 TB

2.5 Mb/s is pretty slow though. Some European ISPs already provide 100 Mb/s. So the maximum limit would be 230 TB.

Re:Well...

[loufoque]

My bad, I fell at this myself too. I meant the maximum limit would be 29 TB.

Re:Well...

[beelsebob]

Telenet provides 30Mb down 4Mb up connections.

Re:Well...

[Turiko]

Actually, the bandwidth counted by the ISP's here in belgium add download and upload, and that's what they show as your volume. That way, it's a bit easier to reach crazy amounts... perhaps he's seeding a few hundred torrents? :P

Re:Well...

[Hatta]

Run Tor. There's plenty of data for you to proxy.

Re:Well...

[Anonymous Coward]

I downloaded ATK in just over a week using perl-LWP. It was just under 1.5 TB.

Re:Well...

[Dumnezeu]

[..] I do find it quite difficult to [..] constantly download [..]

There's an easy fix for that problem!

Re:Well...

[Raxxon]

Except the transfer rate I'm specifying is not Mbit, but Megabytes/sec. In this case I'm using roughly 20Mbit of traffic, which is slightly more than half what I have available to me.

If I meant Mbit, I'd have used Mbit.

Re:Well...

[Raxxon]

Yeah, back in the dark ages I had an ISP that gave me an xfer limit per month with a single shot "oops, I fucked up" clause. Guess what got used the last month I was on the service before I moved... ;)

Of course back then it was also nntp I abused for that... but blowing through a 25Gb cap in 2 weeks was still easy.

Re:Well...

[Raxxon]

While that would do the job it would also likely leave me with almost no bandwidth usable for myself... hardly optimal. ;) hehe

Re:Well...

[Raxxon]

That's assuming I want that VOLUME of pr0n. If this were 12 to 15 years ago I'd have been all over that... these days.. "meh". Quality vs Quantity argument I think.

Re:Well...

[tokul]

In theory:
///snip///
that's assuming you're not also transmitting! ///snip/// However I do find it quite difficult to (1) Maintain 2.5Mb/sec constant (speaking of Torrents/other P2P in general) and (2) Having things to constantly download at that rate.

What if he has 3-4 MB/s uplink, he is transmitting and his P2P program holds everything he downloaded? I am pretty sure that uplink will be maxed all the time.

Re:Well...

[loufoque]

Learn your units: b is bit, B is byte.

Re:Well...

[Raxxon]

Just as soon as the world wants to agree that Mega doesn't equate to 1024*1024...

Re:Well...

[loufoque]

Right. that's not M, that's Mi

Re:Well...

[Raxxon]

And if I really wanted to be a jerk, I'd point out that you specificed MB, not MiB. :p

Re:Well...

[loufoque]

I said the maximum limit would be 29 TB (29*10^12 bytes), which is exactly what I meant.
I didn't mean to say TiB there; otherwise I would have.

What is the actual cost to the ISP?

[thue]

Based on what we are paying for Internet traffic, 2TB of traffic would very roughly cost about $50.

So since this is their one biggest user, and even he is probably paying more than $50 for his internet connection, I don't see the problem with bandwidth hogs.

Re:What is the actual cost to the ISP?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

So since this is their one biggest user, and even he is probably paying more than $50 for his internet connection, I don't see the problem with bandwidth hogs.

That's actually the reason the ISP posted the information - they want to convince their customers (and potential customers) on cheaper slower plans that not only is the ISP capable of handling massive bandwidth consumption, but that they encourage other people to upgrade/switch to the same unlimited plans and really take advantage of the available capacity.

Its totally the reverse of what we are used to in the USA with places like comcast bitching and moaning about hogs - apparently this ISP understands that bandwidth hogs are a business opportunity to be cultivated not capped.

Re:What is the actual cost to the ISP?

[thenickdude]

I wish I lived in your country. Here in New Zealand, we get data at NZ$1/GB. 2.7TB would cost us US$1900. We currently download 180GB/month. If we had a truly unlimited data connection, we'd do our darnedest to pull 3TB!

Re:What is the actual cost to the ISP?

[mobby_6kl]

First of all, it's 2680GB, so it's more like 2.6TB. Second of all, where are you getting your data transfer prices? Amazon has some of the lowest prices around (unless you count the "unlimited" bullshit on dreamhost or something), and even with the >150TB discount it's $0.08/GB, bringing the bill to $214. Of course AWS's pricing isn't directly comparable to an ISP's but that's the best I could find. Finally, Telenet's most expensive offering is 99 Euro, so effectively everybody else is subsidizing this guy.

Interestingly, Telenet says that they are not complaining, but are showing this to encourage users to switch from the capped plans to the more expensive ones. The trick is that the expensive ones have a "fair use" policy, and they can slow your connection down to 512 Kbps until the next billing if you download twice as much as the average user.

Re:What is the actual cost to the ISP?

[Rich0]

Yup. The real problem is charging for an unmetered service, and then trying to somehow meter it.

Look, is it "unlimited" or not? If yes, then just live with what you promised. If not, come up with something reasonable.

The last mile of telecom is a natural monopoly, and price should be PUC regulated just like your water or electricity. Does the electric company publish a list of top-10 electric consumers? Of course not - those are its best customers.

I'm fine with paying by the GB, provided those rates are reasonable. Then everybody can use whatever they want to.

Probably the best free-market solution is to have the telco/cable co own the last mile, and charge PUC-regulated rates. They only provide data service to the central office, and they cannot sell "internet" service (email, etc). Then you buy your internet service from an ISP, who runs their own bandwidth to the CO and rents rack space at a regulated price there. That is no longer a natural monopoly, which means every town in America will likely have 3-50 of them to choose from. That means you'll probably get a fair price, and get to pick whether you want usenet, email, plain old routing only, or whatever. Your local telco just transmits raw ethernet frames or something like that, so it also means that IPv6 will be available as soon as some local ISP decides to offer it.

Also - if the telco provides service over a shared line, they could meter it. However, if the telco's technology uses dedicated lines (like DSL) then they would have to offer it uncapped. Prices would of course be tied to actual costs, and investment decisions/etc would be PUC-regulated.

This isn't rocket science - we've operated utilities for years...

Re:What is the actual cost to the ISP?

[Anonymous Coward]

Their homepage list it with 61,32€ (~76$) Don't see a problem either.

Re:What is the actual cost to the ISP?

[mobby_6kl]

> Does the electric company publish a list of top-10 electric consumers? Of course not - those are its best customers.

Those customers also pay per kW-h used, so this is a completely opposite situation.

Re:What is the actual cost to the ISP?

[Idiomatick]

Uhhh I don't get 5~7 9s of uptime on my ISP you? I also don't get and fancy ass hosting stuff.

http://www.100tb.com/dedicated-hosting/ = $0.002/GB and that is a hosting solution not simply a line you get to use as an ISP is (also it is 50% off atm). Comes with a computer and all that shit... and given that this is an ISP they likely pay even less than this. (BTW when i started looking I expected to find like $0.02/GB which is sorta normal... I've no idea how 100tb can possibly exist without crushing its competition or going bankrupt)

Re:What is the actual cost to the ISP?

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems that you have no knowledge of the Belgian ISP climate, it has been the worst of Europe for the past decade. Once Telenet was one of the fastest providers in Europe surpassing broadband leaders such as Sweden and The Netherlands. When the revolution of Napster came up, many of the Napster root servers where hosted on Telenet machines basically almost toppling Telenet over in usage.

That is where the age of heavy data limits started, up to last year it was very common for Belgians to have a download cap of no more then 30GB a month. This new "Fair Use" plan has been introduced just a few months ago and you can see how some of the users are playing catch up.

So don't be envious of the Belgians at all, they might just have been pulled into the current age, but their broadband market is still heavily monopolized and overprized.
Countries as Sweden, Denmark, and The Netherlands have far better connection with no caps or limits what so ever, I bet many Swedish ISP can show 2.6TB logs 5 years ago.

Re:What is the actual cost to the ISP?

[John Hasler]

The real problem is charging for an unmetered service, and then trying to somehow meter it.

But many slashdotters become hysterical at the suggestion of metered service (which I would prefer, being a low-volume user).

Re:What is the actual cost to the ISP?

[Bert64]

It depends where that bandwidth is going among other things...

In the UK at least (not sure about belgium), traffic over the telco's adsl platform is very expensive and that just gets it to the isp, it then has to traverse the internet...

On the other hand, internet transit is quite cheap, he.net for instance appear to offer $1/mbps (quick google search - http://he.net/ip_transit.html?gclid=CJi3mPy3yqMCFQGY2AodCWImuQ), 1mbps continuous over a month is good for about 300GB in each direction... A large isp is also likely to get much better deals if they bulk purchase.
There is also peering which can be much cheaper if not free...
Not to mention traffic which never leaves the isp (eg torrents might have peers nearby), and the biggest the isp the greater chance traffic wont leave.

Re:What is the actual cost to the ISP?

[CharlyFoxtrot]

That's actually the reason the ISP posted the information - they want to convince their customers (and potential customers) on cheaper slower plans that not only is the ISP capable of handling massive bandwidth consumption, but that they encourage other people to upgrade/switch to the same unlimited plans and really take advantage of the available capacity.

Its totally the reverse of what we are used to in the USA with places like comcast bitching and moaning about hogs - apparently this ISP understands that bandwidth hogs are a business opportunity to be cultivated not capped.

Although according to their website if you go over the double the average usage for people with a FUP subscription your connection is slowed. These guys are getting a free ride now because Telenet need the publicity. A couple of ISP's have switched from capped downloads to a FUP recently and I guess they are feeling the competition. Let's see how they treat these guys in a couple of months.

Re:What is the actual cost to the ISP?

[Rich0]

I'm a moderate-volume user, and I wouldn't mind it if the price was fair.

If 3TB is really $50, then 1TB would probably be $10-20. 100GB would be only $1-2. The typical email+web customer might pay 50 cents per month.

Sure, throw in a $5/month fixed billing charge like the utilities do. Your ISP might sell email for another $1/month/account, and webhosting/etc for $1/month for those cheapo file-only accounts.

The key is for the pricing to be fair - wholesale cost plus a few percent profit. The utility has zero risk, so it doesn't need much reward.

Net neutrality is a total non-issue, as the last mile just delivers ethernet frames to a regionally centralized point. You buy your connection to the internet at large from a competitive company. If your current ISP starts throttling VOIP then buy your net connection from somebody else. If local offerings get out of hand just about anybody can buy a line to a tier-1 carrier and start their own regional ISP with very minimal costs (maybe a few k per month, easily scaled to the amount of bandwidth you actually sell). I doubt it would even be necessary - if you have 25 competitors do you want to be the guy who slows down Vonage or Youtube?

Re:What is the actual cost to the ISP?

[Rich0]

Yup, which was my whole point. The model has to change so that it isn't the opposite situation.

Re:What is the actual cost to the ISP?

[Anonymous Coward]

Smart marketing move by the company. Slow if 2x times use of all others on same plan, tout plan as way to have unlimited downloads with no caps, sell it to everyone, including grandmoms who check email once a week, and the "average" user amount will be low. Then throttle the most active users because they are exceeding the "average" use limit by 2x. Because on any network, as TFA shows, the average user amount transfered is going to be far, far less than the power user.

Re:What is the actual cost to the ISP?

[John Hasler]

> ...I wouldn't mind it if the price was fair.

There is no such thing as a fair (or unfair) price.

Re:What is the actual cost to the ISP?

[skyride]

kimsufi.co.uk (A subsidiary of OVH) offer a server for £14.99/month with 3TB/month bandwidth. The server itself is a low end celeron, but thats still £0.004/GB on bandwidth, not counting the fact you're also paying for a machine connected to this pipe in that price.

Re:What is the actual cost to the ISP?

[Anonymous Coward]

From one of the comments of TFA:

"Maybe they should also mention that that person pays 69 euro which is 87 dollar a month for his connection. The other people in that list pay 99 euro which is 125 dollar a month for their connection. Until a few months they also capped those connections too 100gb which made use the laughing stock of europe. It wasn’t until there was pressure from our government that our ISPs(which are only 2) stopped capping our bandwidth. They didn’t remove the bandwidth caps from every connection only from the most expensive ones. Also Telenet build their network with support of our government and now has a monopoly on cable internet in Belgium. So all in all it’s kinda sad that it’s them that always do the complaining about how horrible their users are."

Re:What is the actual cost to the ISP?

[Kjella]

And you're also subsidizing the user who can't tell his cable plug from a hole in the ground or complains his internet connection is slow because his computer is utterly virus infected or has some issue wtih his physical line or whatnot. Not every customer you have is going to profitable, but usually it's more trouble than it's worth to actually get rid of them. Near as I can tell, by the time you hit user #10 you should be breaking even. If those are the only unprofitable customers they have, this would be golden...

Re:What is the actual cost to the ISP?

[Anonymous Coward]

Then if it goes by average user what you want is to make all users big downloaders.

Re:What is the actual cost to the ISP?

[The Living Fractal]

2680 is more like 2600 than 2700? *boggle*

Re:What is the actual cost to the ISP?

[toddestan]

As in 2680/1024 = 2617?

Re:What is the actual cost to the ISP?

[bart416]

To make it clear internet providers in Belgium are fairly strict on traffic limitations. Up until early this year the common limit was 20-30GB. Now Telenet is trying a fair user policy that isn't exactly fair at all. But yeah, they offer a line with more than 50mbps and are amazed people might actually like download things. Actually it's sort of idiotic considering the speed vs what you're actually allowed to upload/download. Most people can get to their limit in a single afternoon easily if they really wanted.

Re:What is the actual cost to the ISP?

[Rich0]

Sure - just a matter if definition.

Fair = min(your-cost,avg(cost-of-others-doing-same-thing)*1.2)*1.03

Unfair = > Fair.

Now you have a fair price, and if it becomes law we can all agree on using it as a standard.

I do agree that in a healthy free market the price is dictated by dynamic agreement by buyers and sellers. However, the last mile of telecom is a natural monopoly, so there can be no free market price established in this manner.

Re:What is the actual cost to the ISP?

[The Living Fractal]

As in... the wrong use of the term "gigabyte"?

Telecommunications companies across the world do not use binary notation for transfer of data.

A megabyte is one million bytes. A gigabyte is one billion bytes.

So, no, not as in 2,617. As in 2680/1000 = 2.680 which is closer to 2.7.

Re:What is the actual cost to the ISP?

[Anonymous Coward]

No that's not what they are doing. They are telling the other users of Telenet with FUP that the system they have in place is OK. Which it isn't. When you download too much during peak hours, you get set on a 512k download speed limit every night between 5 an 11 pm and the entire day on sunday. This till the end of billing term where it will be reset. Can you imagine gaming on a 512k line? The system is rubbish, but they are using this Top 25 to threaten their other FUP users into accepting it.

useful data?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've just been reading this morning's BadScience so my statistics brain is running a bit hot this morning.

There's a lot this data doesn't tell you. For one thing, the start dates are all different, and the guy that downloaded the most had the earliest start (along with a few others). Are they counting to a specific date, or over a period of time. If it's the former, the guy who is second has a whole 10 days more of data to download, or roughly 1/3rd of a month.

Also, what about the people that didn't agree to this, are there people who are higher, but didn't agree to have their data usage shown? Or a lot of people thought their usage was excessive, but actually was at the 1TB mark. It could be that the top guy there is a line that has a lot of students on it, all downloading P2P data, all with no anti-virus so all with trojans turning their computers in to zombies that are sending out incredible amounts of spam.

Another point, what about the rest of the data? This is obviously the top %age of users, but what percent is that? 1%, 0.01%? This could be a guy doing a lot of HD video editing, or has a company editing for him and he wanted review different edits at home. It could be that most people are on holiday in July in Belgium and therefore not downloading, so it's much easier to download more data because the contention is lower. It could also just be that it is 'download all the crap you possibly can' month in Belgium, totally throwing this data out of whack.

Basically what I'm saying is, while this data is very interesting, it's not useful. I would love to see a more about the context of this information. I bet there are plenty of people (like me) who go to work and don't P2P, and aren't using anywhere near their data cap.

Re:useful data?

[cappp]

Ars has a better summary which addresses your points. It notes that

Telenet recently published a list of its top 25 downloaders to a discussion forum—but the goal wasn't to demonize the users. Instead, it was to show other people just how much data could be transferred in a single month. The ISP hopes to encourage people to migrate up from its least-expensive plans (with 50GB and 80GB data caps, respectively) to its more expensive "fair use" plans.

In this case, "fair use" doesn't refer to copyright but to downloading. Telenet doesn't want to call its plans "unlimited," but it does say that "'fair use' means that you can send and receive a very large quantity of data via the Telenet network. Telenet will only ask you to adjust your consumption in the case of excessive volume consumption that may threaten the comfort of other subscribers."

So the data provided is fine for the intended purpose - advertising to customers what they could be getting if they upgraded their service - but insufficient for the point others seem to be interested in making.

Re:useful data?

[Anonymous Coward]

the image in the article shows more or less what they pay and what their limitations are

1 & 2 : 61 euro (max download 30mbps)
3 & 4 : 75 euro (same internet, but extended with hdtv, decoder rental,fixed phone...)
5 : 69 eoro (if on 50mbps) or 99 (if on 100mbps)

(prices from the isp's site www.telenet.be)

Re:useful data?

[Anonymous Coward]

My worry though was that ISPs might seize on this as the reason to have caps. Which this data doesn't really show. But yeah, it's intended purpose is certainly correct.

Put it into perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm from Belgium, and i would just like to add that Telenet has always had bandwith caps untill recently (Max 60gb/month, we pay around 60 euros for it). These statistics are from the month in which it was abolished.

This guy was obviously just overcompensating for all the years he had to live with a 60gb/month bandwith cap.

the article

[Anonymous Coward]

they are just saying it gonna start getting a trend more then the exception it is atm. and they are right.

most people don't ever reach their bandwith limit atm, thats because they actually are very carefull what to download. the trouble of having your speed extremely low just is too much, so you limit yourself, by a lot.

All you can eat

[Anonymous Coward]

So, the ISP, in essence, advertises and sells an all-you-can-eat buffet, then complains when people pay for it and proceed to eat all they can? Cry me a river.

Re:All you can eat

[Anonymous Coward]

They are not complaining, they are bragging.

Does this come as a surprise?

[thegarbz]

The article itself mentions it. Youtube is 1080p, netflix is getting into online streaming. Everything is getting bigger. Alien Swarm (a free and short game on Steam) 2GB, Left4Dead 2 is 7.5GB, god forbid someone pirates some 1080p movies then there's another 12GB gone.

Download limits get you no where these days and ISPs don't get this. 10GB limit on Telstra here in Australia (one of the first in the world) was fine in 1999. Dropping to 3GB crippled my fancy new broadband connection. We put up with Telstra's 10GB crap for years constantly hitting the limit and they called us a power user. Now here we are in 2010 I have a 150GB download limit, 110GB offpeak, and 40GB onpeak. We hit the 40GB onpeak limit every single month. This does not include any download, high def porn or any other such nonsense since we schedule that to run through the night. Yet even then we still do about 70GB offpeak per month.

I'm almost scared of what we will be doing in 2020. What a nail-biting election we're having today too. Tonight we find out if the future of Australia is to make the worlds dumbest monopolistic ISP (who still think 10GB is for power users now in 2010) even bigger, or if we're going to get FTTH setup by a political party.

Re:Does this come as a surprise?

[KiloByte]

Don't they have 30GB caps in Japan?
Per day, of course.

Re:Does this come as a surprise?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fingers crossed, huh? (I'm Australian too)

Re:Does this come as a surprise?

[Idiomatick]

Thats only NTT, most don't.

Re:Does this come as a surprise?

[TapeCutter]

Although Telstra would dearly like to be a monoploy again those days are long gone. These days there are plenty of ISP's to choose from. The Optus cable plan I have been on for over 10yrs years had a 20GB cap, when I recently started bumping up against the cap for a couple of months in a row they rang me up and said for an extra $5/month I could have a 170GB cap. It was win-win, I was happy they noticed and offered a cheap solution and they are happy to be getting an extra $5/m. I know Optus are far from the chapest ISP out there but they sure beat the shit out of the luddites at Telstra.

The only reason I haven't switched to iiNet or one of the other cheap ISP's is because of the excellent service I have recieved from Optus over the years. Since I often work from home a responsive helpdesk is more important to me than minimum price, even better is the fact I've only needed to use said helpdesk a few times in the last decade.

And no I don't work for Optus, I just happen to think I get exactly the kind of reliable service I'm willing to pay for.

Re:Does this come as a surprise?

[Idiomatick]

And that is counting upstream only. And the punishment is a warning unless you do it repeatedly.

Re:Does this come as a surprise?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's 30GB per day upload

Re:Does this come as a surprise?

[Jedi Alec]

I bought a digital download game last night...15 gigs of game and 5 gigs of patches later...

Heck, I picked up 3 games from www.gog.com last week, 4.7 gigs total as well. (those guys have 1 big pipe btw, easily made it to 50Mb)

Re:Does this come as a surprise?

[Dock]

Most YouTube videos are 360P at 330 Kbps, topping out at 720P at 2.25 Mbps. But I hear 720P is very rare. (Source)

Re:Does this come as a surprise?

[thegarbz]

Well yeah the option just came out. 5 years ago streaming video was rare, now we have a service that just brought out highdef. Half of the videos I've seen are available in 720p, but admittedly I don't watch a lot of handycam home videos of young Asians playing the guitar which make up the bulk of youtube.

Nearly every camera over $150 these days comes with a highdef video option, even DSLR still cameras have high def video options now. Expect the list of 720p features on youtube to grow and not shrink.

Re:Does this come as a surprise?

[Chowderbags]

Wow, 10 GB? If I didn't have adblock, I'm not sure that would cover all the flash "punch the monkey" ads I'd see, let alone any actual content.

8,07 days.

[Tito1337]

The guy has a Turbonet connection, means he has 30Mbits down and 1,25Mbit up. If he used this at full speed, 2680GB would only take 8,07 days.

so what?

[yyxx]

It's easy to accumulate 2TB in video data, say on iTunes. And it's reasonable to want to transfer that from one machine to another over the Internet (e.g., to back it up to a machine somewhere else or in the cloud).

If ISPs don't want this to happen, they need clear limits and rules, not underhanded complaints and name calling.

Re:so what?

[Turiko]

Actually, this ISP isn't looking for a way to put back draconian limits - the limits were only removed last february IIRC. Before that , i believe it was 80 GB per month. They're using this to show off their service :P

Re:so what?

[Idiomatick]

They are actually bragging that a customer reached 2.7TB on their slow line saying that even our slow line is good for mega users. Too much North American news made you jump to conclusions a bit.

So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

The ISP I worked at (Netherlands) had a top 10 that consistently managed 2+ TB each month and that was five years ago.

One of them managed to reach 98% of the theoretical maximum for a month.

So basically I don't see the point is this so-called "News"....

Consumption

[Mr_Silver]

And do the so-called data-hogs really burn through that much more data than everyone else? According to Belgian ISP Telenet, the answers are 'a lot' and 'yes, they can

I'd be interested to know how people can consume that much data! Assuming 1080p rips at 11GB a pop lasting 3 hours, you're looking at 251 movies or 754 hours worth of entertainment.

Assuming you don't work and you don't sleep then there are only 744 hours in the longest month! Assuming you're unemployed and you do sleep, then this puts this down to a "mere" 496 hours and you'd have to be watching them from the moment you wake up to the moment you fall asleep.

Even in a house of 4 people, that's still each person downloading 54 HD movies a month - how on earth can you watch that much in a month? Or find that many movies worth watching for that matter?

Re:Consumption

[chichilalescu]

I don't know where that particular user lives. However, in Brussels you can find houses that are rented out to students, and have just one internet connection. So you might raise that 4 to 10 or even 12, and it might just be possible that some of them are moving away, and they wanted to make a collection before moving to a country where it's more problematic to download movies.
hell... think of a mirror to a porn site and that's enough :)

Re:Consumption

[The Living Fractal]

It's not about actually watching the movies, or listening to the songs, or fapping to the pr0n. It's about having a bigger ePeen than the rest of your buddies.

Friend, boasting, says, "Yeah man, I have 2,030,591 photos of Natalie Portman photoshopped with hot grits in various ways."
You say, "Well that is quite impressive my friend. How will you ever find time to look at them all?"
Friend responds, "Look at them? Why would I want to do that? Grits are disgusting, and I'm a homosexual."


See how that works?

Re:Consumption

[atamido]

A straight Blu-Ray rip is often 25GB+ for 1.5 hours. Although, for sake of argument, a Blu-Ray has a maximum bitrate of 36Mbps, or 4.5MB/s. That limit is reached pretty easily when using DTS-HD audio. So, a maximum bitrate video with a maximum of 2.7TB, would be ~600,000 seconds of video, or 167 hours. Over 30 days, that would mean 5-6 hours of watching videos per night. If it's a household with different people wanting to watch different videos, it's certainly doable (although those people would probably need to get outside more).

Digital Download games

[Hadlock]

This summer there were an astounding number of digital download sales. Each title was originally designed to be packaged and distributed via 8GB DVD. When you're offering 8GB of data that is to be absorbed over a period of days or weeks, people tend to jump up and buy/download it when it only costs $2.50 or so. Couple that with EA's store recently having several $1.99 pricing snafus, and the careful shopper can buy 35GB worth of data for under $10, and feel right in downloading it that very day (who doesn't want to play with their new toys?). That doesn't include any of the 20 three minute 720p videos I watched on youtube this afternoon.
 
A Terabyte is what, 1000GB? I signed on to steam yesterday on my linux machine (via wine) to message someone about something, walked away and came back to find out that it'd finished downloading all 11GB of Call of Duty 4 and 3GB of Street Fighter 4, in addition to countless updates to other steam games I had installed to test but never play on that machine. Let me put it this way; I accidentally downloaded 15GB of data this afternoon. Didn't phase me a bit. Didn't cost me anything, only downside on my end was maybe a couple extra cents on the electricity bill for running the laptop a couple of hours. Valve pushed out a 64mb patch tonight to fix the fact that all their game characters were wearing birthday hats on the wrong day. My roommate probably downloaded 60gb worth of "HD" netflix movies this afternoon. Data is cheap, practically free after the cost of infrastructure, and the baseline of data being pushed around is growing by the day, because, hey, it's better to have it locally just in case, rather than wait 60 seconds to download it.
 
No doubt as market saturation begins to plateau, we'll all see large caps (15gb, 20gb) installed, with a couple of neighbors splitting the cost of a pair of bonded T1s to skirt around it.

Re:Digital Download games

[KiloByte]

A Terabyte is what, 1000GB?

No, 1024GB. It's only drive makers and a committee that try to redefine that.

Re:Digital Download games

[Hadlock]

I knew I would be corrected, but I wasn't expecting someone to have created an alternate account for specifically correcting people. Kudos to you, good sir.

Re:Digital Download games

[John Hasler]

> No, 1024GB.

No, 1000GB.

> It's only drive makers and a committee that try to redefine that.

The prefixes were defined long ago by the BIPM.

When we started using "kilobyte" to refer to 1024 bytes interchangeably with 1000 bytes we understood that it was an approximation. Same with "megabyte". "kilobyte" has always meant 1000 bytes, "megabyte" has always meant 1000,000 bytes, "gigabyte" has always meant 1000,000,000 bytes, and "terabyte" 1000,000,000,000 bytes. KB, MB, GB, and TB have always been the abbreviations.

Re:Digital Download games

[grumbel]

No, 1024GB. It's only drive makers and a committee that try to redefine that.

The 1024 scale is completly stupid. The only area where it makes a little bit of sense is RAM, everything else, HD storage, bandwidth, etc. it is completly meaningless and useless, as size doesn't increase by power of two in those areas.

Here is a thing: Just because you have grown up with something doesn't make it right or a good solution. All the 1024 scale does is cause lots of unneeded confusion, because it makes calculating between TB, GB, MB, KB extremely hard, instead of completly trivial as it would be with the SI scale.

Re:Digital Download games

[MacAnkka]

I've been living with only a 380kbps cellular internet connection for the last couple of months and I don't have the luxury of downloading multiple gigabytes accidentally. Just some hours ago, I decided to spend the evening painstakingly downloading 150MB worth of Arch Linux updates over the connection.

(... Only to reboot the machine after the update and realizing that the crappy internet didn't work anymore. Took couple of hours to get it fixed. Another exciting day in Linux land)

But besides huge downloads, I can generally get by with a slow connection like this, even these days. Online banking, news, messaging and so on are no problem.

Re:Digital Download games

[KiloByte]

"The only area"... that's in a pinch, anything that ends in "byte".

And for calculations, what makes powers of two worse than powers of ten? With the subject matter at hand, it has significant advantage. And for drive sizes, have you ever looked at filesystem internals? With sector size, page size, all internal divisions in filesystems I know being powers of two, that's vital -- not "completely meaningless and useless".

Re:Digital Download games

[KiloByte]

It's not an alternate account, it's my only one.

I've used that nick since around 1995, way before that good-for-nothing committee that decided to redefine pi^Hkilobyte was formed.

Re:Digital Download games

[grumbel]

And for calculations, what makes powers of two worse than powers of ten?

Our whole number system is based in power of ten, not power of two, thus calculating in power of ten is a lot easier and feels more natural. Most importantly however going from MB to GB in power of ten is a magnitude change, you move a comma and you are done, in power of two it is a unit conversion. Thus simple questions like: Will this 700MB file fit on my drive with 0.68GB free? Become rather problematic, even more so when you cross multiple units at once (i.e. going from MB to TB).

And for drive sizes, have you ever looked at filesystem internals?

The only advantage power of two notation has there is that it allows you to have a shorthand notation. It is easier and more exact to write 2GiB then ~2.147GB. But as soon as you want to do actual math with arbitrary numbers you are back at square one and the power of two doesn't help you at all.

Re:Digital Download games

[evilviper]

No doubt as market saturation begins to plateau, we'll all see large caps (15gb, 20gb) installed, with a couple of neighbors splitting the cost of a pair of bonded T1s to skirt around it.

A T-1 is only 1.5Mbps, and will run you about $600/month. 10 neighbors sharing the bill might make that price reasonable, but then you're all SHARING 1.5Mbps, or 150kbps each at least during peak usage (worse than the cheapest $10/mo. DSL).

Re:Digital Download games

[Kjella]

I've written this too many times to take the long version. A lot of people working on various details (i.e. not just trying to determine if file X fits on medium Y) need units with powers of 2. Just because you don't, doesn't make that any less true. The smartest thing we could do is have one base 10 unit (MB etc.) and one base 2 unit (MiB etc.), rather than trying to make everyone agree on an either-or, because it's not going to work.

math?

[Anonymous Coward]

since when does 2.617 TB == 2.7 TB?

Re:math?

[chichilalescu]

are you seriously going to start the 2.6 = 2.7 debate when they're still fighting about Kb, KB and KiB?
the numbers are more like guidelines...

Not so bad ...

[Anonymous Coward]

According to this article : http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/357548/_unlimited_broadband_dead_water_iinet_iprimus/?fp=4&fpid=5

There's some guys in Australia on an AAPT Unlimited plan who do 3-5Tb per month!

"Malone claimed a number of AAPT’s unlimited plan users had openly bragged about downloading three to five terabytes per month on ISP community forum, Whirlpool. "

Amount downloaded isn't very interesting

[rawler]

I could easily saturate my 100mbit line, from Giganews or other usenet source, setting up my own news mirror, mirror a few big download sites, or find some other way to waste bandwidth.

My theoretical monthly download capacity would be something like 10MB*3600*24*28 = 24TB, and if that's not enough, there are gigabit upgrades available. However, that's not very interesting, since just the storage cost for 24 TB is much much more than I care to pay.

And, especially, what could I possibly consume that requires those data amounts? Scene-released 720p averages at 7mbit, assuming 1080p averages at 10, and I have to watch 10 simultaneous Full-HD streams around the clock to consume that bandwidth. Who's got the time?

Re:Amount downloaded isn't very interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to watch 10 simultaneous Full-HD streams around the clock to consume that bandwidth. Who's got the time?

You really don't though. First off I assume you'd be using something like SickBeard with that usenet connection, which likes to grab an entire season of TV at once if you let it. Sometimes its okay to just let stuff pile up and watch it later, especially if you're planning on being without internet for a while, so theres no reason you need to watch all 10 streams at once.

The other major factor people forget is not everyone is the only user of their internet connection. What if you lived in a family of 4? Everyone streaming their 1080p movies and tv, downloading games (potentially the same ones to multiple machines, just because its easier to do that than set up windows file sharing), etc.

Not that I expect you to hit a full 24TB any time soon, but you just never know.I can certainly do 1TB in a month if I have friends or family staying with me that want me to grab them a few movies.

Caps?

[Anonymous Coward]

Welcome to the 90s?

Whats the problem ?

[unity100]

just charge per bandwidth. ffs.

Re:Whats the problem ?

[John Hasler]

> just charge per bandwidth.

Thereby causing the many slashdotters who believe that downloading TBs of unauthorized copies of movies and music at no extra cost is a basic human right to squeal and squall.

Belgium? Pretty much a non-country.

[roman_mir]

You have a charisma of a damp rag, and appearance of a low grade bank clerk. And the question that I want to ask is: WHO ARE YOU? I've never heard of you, nobody in Europe had ever heard of you! I would like to ask you, president, who voted for you? And what mechanism?... Oh, I know democracy is not popular with you. And what mechanism people of Europe have to remove you? Is this European democracy? Well I sense, I sense though, that you are competent and capable and dangerous. And I don't doubt that it is your intention to be the quiet assassin of European democracy and of European nation states. You appear to have a loathing for very concept of existing of nation states, perhaps that's because you come from Belgium, which of-course is pretty much a non-country. But since you took over we've seen Greece reduced to nothing more than a protectorate. Sir, you have no legitimacy in this job at all, and I can say with confidence that I can speak on behalf of the majority of the British people in saying: we don't know you, we don't want you and the sooner you are put out to grass, the better!

Of-course I like the way AutoTune The News did this better.

Here's a real funny observation...

[Eggplant62]

It's funny that ISPs can whine and cry over the biggest users of bandwidth but can't be arsed to shut down let alone locate and notify their customers about their malware-infected PCs that are blasting spam all over the net. Start working on that and we might not have to worry about bandwidth caps.

Re:Here's a real funny observation...

[Anonymous Coward]

In Canada the ISP Shaw DOES kick people off their network for having viruses/malware. My roommate had a virus and one day I got a call from Shaw saying that I was going to be disconnected if I didn't unplug the computer from my network and clean it. I did both and actually got a thank you call 2 days later. I appreciated this because I wouldn't have known that my roommate was sucking away at my bandwidth (limit 100gigs) without the call. He was you usual user that thought that computers just slowed down with age. A seemingly common misconception amongst less tech savy computer users.

Re:Here's a real funny observation...

[Anonymous Coward]

So of them can be arsed.

Virgin Media (in the UK) will begin matching known infected IPs against the IPs of its customers and send them letters, The Reg has an article on it.
There don't appear to be any plans to cut off peoples connections (unless someone uses the malware to download copyrighted media then you can kiss your connection good bye ;) )

Re:Here's a real funny observation...

[Anonymous Coward]

Good point, but that would mean ISPs notifying/shutting down 80% or more of their customers that use Windows. And then most would deny that their Windows machine is infected/infested!

I have personally found/cleaned many Windows macines that have litterally hundreds of infected files...and the owner only noticed that their computer was slower than it used to be. Most of these machines required a format and clean re-install.

I mostly run Linux here. I do have 3 machines that are dual boot, with XP PRO and sidux GNU/Linux. On these machines, XP is assigned an IP adress that is blocked at my router. Thus XP cannot access the internet. It is only there to play a few games anyway.

Re:Here's a real funny observation...

[hellop2]

So, you're against Net-Neuturality.

Re:Here's a real funny observation...

[Anonymous Coward]

Malware traffic is getting more and more indistingishable from general traffic. And privacy doesn't make things easier. Even after solving all of this, mistakes would happen, and people would get very pissed off.

Suppose you have a software company, you discover a security hole in your main product, and you e-mail to its 10.000 users. Any automatic spam filter on your ISP would detect this as spam, and punish you.

Re:Here's a real funny observation...

[Anonymous Coward]

Measuring how much bandwidth someone is using is a built in function of even the most basic of managed switches, let alone DSLAMs, BRAs or whatever else your ISP is using to provide you with service.

Detecting a malicious payload which is designed to be sneaky within multi-gigabit streams of traffic, and record it in a manner that can be verified by a human being while eliminating the many thousands of false-positives you'd get every few seconds is NOT something that is built into the equipment, and is incredibly difficult to engineer. And just like Bittorrent throttling has led to encrypted Bittorrent, will only make the malware-writers make their software even more difficult to detect.

God forbid people actually be forced to have a modicum of sense when they receive emails from their long-lost rich nigerian cousin who just needs them to open this PDF so they can get $13m dollars. Yes, just pile all the obligations on the ISP instead, while complaining about them using DPI (needed for what you want them to accomplish), net-neutrality (how can they be neutral if they have to inspect everything?) and so on.

some comments

[Seth024]

I'll post the same thing here that I posted on Digg yesterday. This was the first month Telenet was offering an Unlimited (fair use) subscription (the previous download cap was 100GB). I'm sure many people tried to download as much as possible just to see if there was a hidden download maximum and if they would get capped at a lower speed. The real mass downloaders are on different ISPs that have offered unlimited for many years now. And FTA: Telenet has not posted this information as a complaint of what they have to deal with, but to give us "a better picture of what exactly is possible with this new way of surfing." FYI Turbonet costs 61 per month for 30 Mbps download & 1,25 Mbps upload speed. Fibernet is a bit more expensive for 50Mbps

Re:belgium doesn't exist

[Anonymous Coward]

Take that from the people who brought us MindGuard.

All the rest must thank him

[houghi]

Telenet recently went from capped to "free" download where "free" means you can download 150% of the average user. It used to be 60GB. Nobody knows what the average is. Could be less then 60GB, could be more then 60GB.

But one thing is for sure, this person raised the average for everybody. Good job.

OTOH I can imagine Telenet just charging for this and the user could well be a professional user working in advertising or in any other type of business where a lot of data is transferred.

Re:All the rest must thank him

[stefaanh]

Indeed, but it is not that transparent anymore.
Telenet recently lowered/raised the bandwidth cap to an unknown level.
Before that I could check the bandwidth day per day, to monitor my household (2 adults and 2 teenagers). Now they employ an opaque policy that says:

• green = on average (good customer)
• orange = above average (try to keep it down, customer!)
• red = way above average (we will throttle you down to 512Kb/s!)

Whatever average means, only Telenet knows. I asked to see my bandwith use, but they do not give this information anymore.
Telenet explains it this way:
In dutch or french (might get "session expired") - Follow dutch "Online Support > Internet > Internetdiensten > Vrij downloaden":
http://onlinesupport.telenet.be/eCustomer/iq/telenet/request.do?session=%7B6eba0150-ad10-11df-e0fe-000000000000%7D&event=1&view()=c%7B55394320-8a7f-11df-cb0d-000000000000%7D&varset()=pobj:%7Bcf80cb00-843d-11df-71a8-000000000000%7D/

Re:All the rest must thank him

[CharlyFoxtrot]

Yeah there used to be a dashboard widget for mac ("Telemonitor") which showed your total traffic and since the latest changes it does nothing. It was really handy too. I wish they would make such information easy to get.

1.7 TB is not that much ;)

[Anonymous Coward]

1.7 TB is not that much. If you have a standard 100/100 MBit/s connection, you're getting more than that if you only use 10% of your connection on the average.
      month rx | tx | total |
    Oct '09 551.44 GiB | 2.43 TiB | 2.97 TiB |
    Nov '09 475.61 GiB | 2.00 TiB | 2.46 TiB |
    Dec '09 485.49 GiB | 2.17 TiB | 2.65 TiB |
    Jan '10 521.51 GiB | 1.93 TiB | 2.44 TiB |
    Feb '10 570.42 GiB | 2.40 TiB | 2.96 TiB |

Re:1.7 TB is not that much ;)

[rolfc]

I have a 100/100 unlimited and have no idea of the amount of traffic. I don't need to.

Re:1.7 TB is not that much ;)

[Vegemeister]

A 'standard' 100/100 Mb/s connection, eh? if Verizon ran fiber in my neighborhood, the fastest connection I would be able to get would be 50 Mb/s down, 20 Mb/s up. As it stands, the best that is offered is ADSL at 12 Mb/s down, 894 kb/s up.

Re:1.7 TB is not that much ;)

[Rising Ape]

In what universe is that "standard" for a home user?

Re:belgium doesn't exist

[Anonymous Coward]

American ISP propaganda detected...

Not that hard these days with hi-def!

[Anonymous Coward]

Not that hard if you download most of the hi-def video from a website like ztod.com that's almost 1TB itself.
I know I did it in like a 2 week period :)

Hogs?

[Dan541]

How are such people data-hogs? They are using what they have paid for.

Re:Hogs?

[sycodon]

Yep, If you sell something called an "Unlimited" account, then don't bitch when people use it in an Unlimited manner.

Re:Hogs?

[Anonymous Coward]

As has to be pointed out over and over again until it gets through the thick skulls of people like you "unlimited" meant that your connection was always on not that you could be saturating the upload/download stream 24/7.

Re:Hogs?

[wagnerrp]

No. All of the connections that company offers are 'always on'. They offer some cheaper subscriptions with bandwidth caps, and other more expensive ones with no stated cap, hence 'unlimited'.

Re:Hogs?

[wagnerrp]

For what its worth, the ISP was not bitching about those users. They were using it as an advertisement to people on their cheaper, capped subscriptions, "Look just how much you can download if you upgrade to our more expensive, uncapped subscriptions!"

Re:Hogs?

[iccaros]

As has to be pointed out over and over again until it gets through the thick skulls of people like you "unlimited" meant that you have unlimited data restricted by rate. I was offered 15mbs, that is 15 mega bits per second unlimited I asked if I would use my connection 24/7, which is different that just have access to your system 24/7 under any contract. . X seconds in a in an hour (3600) time hours in a day (24) times days in a year (356) = 461,376,000 Mb a year / 8 for MB = 57,672,000MB / 12 to get monthly limit = 4,806,000 MB / 1,048,576 to get TB = 4.5TB month time arguments come from people have no real clue, AOL and other used to charge us by the hour of connection. Users took up time on a single modem port blocking other users, and @ 28.8Kbs (later 56.6Kbs max unachievable by FCC rules) limited how much data someone could download in the time alloted. Then people started offering unlimited, but did not worry about caps because you were limited by modem speeds. This was the start of rated unlimited access with no caps. When broad band, my first was Road Runner, we had unlimited at a rate, as how much data could you possibility download, there was not much out there, plus they were competing with AOL. Today they keep the same type of contracts but complain because the ISP's never upgraded their back ends and now have problems providing what they offer. If we had true competition in Broad band internet we would not see this, it would be like the old AOL fight. We can do a car analogy, you have unlimited highway rights limited by rate. You can drive on the highway all you want, as long as you restrict yourself to posted speed limit.

Re:Hogs?

[commodore64_love]

>>>How are such people data-hogs? They are using what they have paid for.

Not really. Imagine if electricity worked like internet data. i.e. You pay $400 a month and get unlimited usage. Most of us would use around 1000 KWh per month, but then you'd have a few people that would run their AC at 50 degrees, while the whole house was lighted even in rooms that are not being used, and have an electric-powered pool in the back with an elaborate fountain running all day and night. i.e. Splurging.

They are not paying for the electricity they used. They are taking MORE (~$2000 worth) than what they paid for ($400), and that net loss must be covered by the rest of us (prices go up). Plus the environmental damage caused by the splurgers.

This is why pricing is (or should be) metered. It's a negative feedback loop that encourages people to limit themselves, or else pay a very high bill. It also benefits those that use very little, like grandmas, because their bills might only be $50 metered rather than $400 flat. Pricing tied to consumption is the "invisible hand" that regulates use.

Re:Hogs?

[digitalaudiorock]

Yea really...the nerve of people using what they paid for. This industry sell unlimited plans, and then the coins the term "data hogs"?? Last time I checked they don't make any attempt to limit their profits out the kindness of their hearts.

Re:Hogs?

[Dan541]

I pay per KWh and I suspect there is a reason for that. But if the electricity company did sell people as much power as they could use for a set price then people could run all sorts of power intensive applications from the connection they paid for.

If they paid for unlimited then they are not using more than they paid for so long as they keep it below infinity. This is of course why the electricity company bills by kilowatt hour.

Re:Hogs?

[Dan541]

I'm sure the RIAA is seething in a cave somewhere.

Re:Hogs?

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference between electricity and bandwidth is that electricity is tangible and has a cost of X per kilowatt, because the electric company is actually paying to produce the electricity. Bandwidth is not the same, all bandwidth is, is essentially transmission lines, the ISPs are creating magical GBs of data. So if you want to compare it to the electric company, compare it to what people pay for transmission, because thats all the ISPs are, they are the "power lines" to move data from point a to point b. With transmission your pay a static cost that doesnt increase/decrease with the amount of electricity you use, but transmission does cost different based on the requirements of how much you need to draw at a time. Thats really why your power analogy fails, because ISPs are not generating anything, they are simply providing the infrastructure to move data, and the cost is not dependent on how much data you consume, but how fast you want to consume the data

Re:Hogs?

[mysidia]

Nice try. Last I checked "Unlimited" and "Always On" were two different features, and always listed as different features.

"10 Megabits / 512k Download Unlimited"

Means you can download and achieve 10 megabits, and unlimited means you are allowed to download at 10 Megabits down and 512kbps up, continuously, 24/7. 720 hours a month, and that is what is included in the quoted price.

Re:Hogs?

[mysidia]

Not really. Imagine if electricity worked like internet data. i.e. You pay $400 a month and get unlimited usage.

Oh... stop right there.

Electricity is completely different from network capacity.

Electricity has to be generated, by consuming raw materials that produce an equivalent amount of electricity. Electricity is a finite scarce, consumable resource, generating it is expensive.

And once used it is gone, and must be replaced by using more resources to generate more electricity.

Usage of an ISP network, on the other hand, is not permanently consumed. When you download at 10 Megabits for 5 or 6 hours, the ISP does not permanently lose and have to replace anything, to give the next person 10 Megabits.

The moment you stop the download, all the transfer gets returned to the network.

More network bandwidth does not have to be generated by consuming more raw materials, for the next user. Network bandwidth is not a consumable good like electricity, as mentioned... it's more like a library book.

Adding network capacity is inexpensive, compared to generating electricity. It requires building more infrastructure, but once its built -- more work is not required as long as it can serve simultaneous data needs of the nodes on the network.

Bandwidth scarcity is about what nodes are trying to do simultaneously on the network, not about total bits transferred.

For example, if 10 million people want to watch a live video feed that starts at exactly 6:00 PM EST.

That causes a hell of a lot more network congestion, than if 20 million people want to download a Linux ISO over BitTorrent over a 5 day period.

Re:Hogs?

[mysidia]

Electricity is billed by the kWH, because there a certain number of pounds of coal, petro, or other fuel that must be burned to produce each kWH.

It turns out, that obtaining fuel and using it to generate electricity incurs a per-kWH cost on the producer. The cost of extracting coal, oil from the earth is high. The cost of catching solar radiation, hydro power, geo power, or operating any type of electricity production is also expensive and there is literally a cost for each kWH generated, based on the resources that have to be consumed to get a kWH.

What would be more like network bandwidth would be the transmission of electricity.

Suppose you could buy Electricity from whatever power plant you wanted, and you had to pay an Electricity grid operator to allow you to download that electricity from your chosen power plant.

Maybe the grid operator offers various plans, a '500 Watt plan' 'a 1000 Watt plan' and a '10000 Watt plan' for an electricity connection.

And they list it as "unlimited". The average user's assumption is you can download an unlimited amount of kWH, and you are restricted only by your transfer rate cap, the speed of your connection (e.g. there are no provider imposed "limits").

What some of the other posters suggest is that "unlimited" would mean "You can transfer some electricity 24/7 continuously", not "There is no kWH limit, other than your cap"

The thing is, the network operator doesn't have per-kWH or per-megabit costs.

They increase profit from selling people more, with the expectation they won't have to deliver everyone's full limit to everyone 24/7. And take advantage of statistical over-subscription, so they can sell resources multiple times, according to the fact that most people will use less than what they bought most of the time.

It's like web hosting providers that sell people 100gb of disk plans for $5 a month.

If 95% of their users will only use a small portion of what they have paid for, then they can oversubscribe 95% of the resources. The 5% that actually use the whole 100gb cost so little, that the oversubscription is worth it.

If they got too greedy for their own good, they could try to find reasons to suspend the accounts of the 5% or convince them to go away. This might increase the profit slightly, but would also put them at risk of having even consumers in the 95% to get angry with them.

On the other hand..... if they were a broadband provider in the US, they have essentially a monopoly. And customers have no easy methods of retaliation, because they obviously want the bandwidth, and there is no competition to switch to.

So why not take advantage of this situation, and use it as a chance to get more money?

Re:Hogs?

[Rising Ape]

Most of the cost of electricity is in the fixed infrastructure - power stations and the transmission lines, not the fuel (at least if you're somewhere which predominantly uses coal/nuclear, rather than gas), so the analogy isn't at all ridiculous.

Re:Hogs?

[XnavxeMiyyep]

Except if they paid $400/month for unlimited use at a specific rate, and then used it all, then they used $400 worth of [bandwidth/electricity]. If they did not want people to use their [bandwidth/electricity], they should not have advertised and sold their service as unlimited.

Incidentally, as stated in the article:

Telenet has not posted this information as a complaint of what they have to deal with, but to give us "a better picture of what exactly is possible with this new way of surfing."

the ISP is not complaining at all.

Re:Hogs?

[vux984]

Electricity has to be generated, by consuming raw materials that produce an equivalent amount of electricity. Electricity is a finite scarce, consumable resource, generating it is expensive.

Where I live electricity is generated by water falling out of the sky, collecting in a river, and eventually turning a turbine. Where other people live its generated by wind / solar. Where other people live its geothermal. Where other people live its by incinerating garbage.

And then yes, where some people live its gas, coal, nuclear. But in the former cases in particular, and even in the final case to a large degree the cost of electricity is primarily the cost of maintaining the infrastructure. The small army of people fixing power lines, replacing transformers, laying cable, replacing it, troubleshooting it, monitoring the system, customer service, billing, advertising, ... the cost of the actual 'fuel' ranges from zero to a small percentage of total operations. Running a nuclear plant costs far more in maintenance than in actual fuel.

The analagy is more apt than you think.

For example, if 10 million people want to watch a live video feed that starts at exactly 6:00 PM EST.

That causes a hell of a lot more network congestion, than if 20 million people want to download a Linux ISO over BitTorrent over a 5 day period.

Ironically this situation is also reflected in the electricity situation. The electrical system has a maximum load it can deliver as well. There is a huge spike in the morning as millions of people wake up and turn on the lights, the coffee maker, the electric razer, take a shower (triggering the hot water heater to step up), etc.

In less developed countries (and California during energy crises) they don't have the capacity to actually satisfy peak levels of demand, and we get rolling brown outs when too many people hit it at once.

In most cities, the city can actually deliver all the electricity anyone demands when they demand it. But this isn't a characteristic of electricity. This is the result of slower growth in demand, and metered pricing which has led to the development of such things as "energy star", and 'green' drives to consume less.

Re:Hogs?

[ArthurDA]

You're right - it *should* be metered, but the real issue here is that many ISPs advertise that they offer 'XXmbit per second' & do *not* mention a cap or any kind of actual tiered pricing or metering. Then, when you "over consume" (meaning use more than they think you should, more than some magic [invisible] number that they have come up with), they get upset.

I'm all for metered pricing - but only if it's actually what I'm buying. If I'm buying based on a XXmbit per second price structure & no metered structure (or cap) is advertised then I expect that I can use as much total bandwidth as I would like. The problem is that, as of late, no matter how a plan is advertised (and *very* few are advertised as metered, at least at a consumer level) they're usually imposing some sort of cap or metering system, even if that is *not* the way the product was originally marketed.

Re:Hogs?

[fafalone]

The problem with moving to metered pricing is that it will invariably be set up so that people can only pay more than they do now, not less. If it's $400/month now, it will become $400/month + usage*rate. You're also claiming that if a service is advertised as unlimited, average use constitutes a hard limit over which is abuse, which only telecom executives think is rational.

Re:Hogs?

[commodore64_love]

>>>If they paid for unlimited then they are not using more than they paid for

That's true for most people, but not for the splurgers. They'd be burning-up electricity that cost ~$2000 to generate, but only paying $400 each month. They are taking more than what they paid for, and incurring a loss for the company. It's equivalent to if I took 2000 gallons of gasoline, but only paid for 400 gallons. Great for me - sucks for everyone else that has to subsidize my greed.

.

Re:Hogs?

[commodore64_love]

>>>Electricity is completely different from network capacity. Electricity has to be generated, by consuming raw materials... Usage of an ISP network is not permanently consumed.

That's amazing. I didn't realize the servers ran on 0 Watt power, or that fiber optics magically planted themselves in the ground to expand network capacityt. I guess you learn something new everyday. /end sarcasm. Actually an internet network is just like a electricity network. The more you use it, the more power gets burned, and the more raw materials (coal, etc) must be consumed. Plus labor costs for maintenance and upgrades. So if everyone started taking advantage of their "unlimited" line to download 1 terabyte each, instead of the current average of ~0.1, there would indeed be increased consumption of natural resources and cost borne by the company.

Re:Hogs?

[commodore64_love]

>>>they should not have advertised and sold their service as unlimited.

Most don't. Most advertise the cap. Example: Comcast at 250GB.
- And yet you *still* bitch, and say the cap should not exist.
Basically no matter what they do, it's wrong in your (and other person's) eyes.

Re:Hogs?

[mysidia]

Ironically this situation is also reflected in the electricity situation. The electrical system has a maximum load it can deliver as well.

And the telephone system has a maximum load as well. If 40% of the people in a city try to pick up their handset at the same time, and make a local call, things will get messy very quickly.

Telco switches have a limited number of simultaneous calls that can be switched, and it's a small number (compared to the number of phones connected).

And yet i've never heard of a Telco cutting anyone off for using the phone too often, or trying to bill per-minute beyond a certain amount of local calling usage.

There are very few systems where capacity limits aren't a possible concern, aside from the number of listeners of a broadcast transmission.

The only real question is... how expensive to maintain capacity, and how expensive it is to expand/upgrade. And expanding broadband/ISP capacity turns out to be easy.

It's more expensive for an ISP to add new customers than to expand capacity to their aggregation points, which are usually in Telco COs and Datacenters, where obtaining more bandwidth and peering with other providers is inexpensive.

Their primary cost would be equipment upgrades. A drop in the bucket compared to what electric companies have to spend, however.

In the case of broadband providers, most of the infrastructure is already paid for, with other services. For example, if you have a Cable provider. Your monthly fee for cable TV already covered their costs of maintaining all that cabling. The monthly fees cover infrastructure.

Most infrastructure that would be subject to the elements is buried; unlike with power, transmission of communication signals is efficient enough underground, and infrastructure is rarely ever damaged.

Cable companies don't charge you metered TV access, no matter how much you watch, or how many TVs you have, the price is the same. I wonder what the average consumer thinks when they've bought such a service for 10 years, and the same cable co. comes out with an "unlimited" broadband service?

Infrastructure maintenance does not cost more based on usage (unlike with Electricity). There are no transformers to burn out, mass produced electronics: cable modems are cheap.

The ISP will not have to maintain more cabling to customers just because some people are buying internet services or using X Gigabytes/month; the additional infrastructure needed for IP connectivity is smaller in comparison.

The additional infrastructure required for broadband providers is backhaul, their own internet connectivity, per-port hardware and software licensing costs imposed by their head end manufacturers, and they don't pay much for this per customer, maybe a few bucks a month.

Where I live electricity is generated by water falling out of the sky, collecting in a river, and eventually turning a turbine.

Yes.. some people have a fuel supply that is in the public domain and easier to extract from, and it's difficult to determine the cost for resources like flow through a river which are paid for by someone other than the plant operator.

But that plant still has to be maintained. Those turbines are expensive, and every time they are turned, there is some amount of mechanical wear incurred.

It's not like an ISP's switch, which does not experience mechanical wear as it forwards each packet.

Electricity is scarce enough commodity, that there is a limited supply and a market for it, and it can be bought and sold easily.

Bandwidth cannot be bought and sold easily like a normal commidity, except in large datacenters.

If your ISP has a 3 Gigabit pipe to a node in your city, which is barely utilized, it is not like they can sell off the unused portion on the market to other providers, unless of course they can find someone who needs that kind of bandwidth, in or through your city.

Once all the river flow is used up, the plant operator cannot just build another river.

Re:Hogs?

[sjames]

Then they should have called it always on. Unlimited means without limits. Reasonable people would interpret that as meaning no limits beyond the natural limits of the connection speed and the efficiency of IP.

Re:Hogs?

[mysidia]

That's amazing. I didn't realize the servers ran on 0 Watt power

Your ISP doesn't run the webservers you are talking to. They only run the network infrastructure; switches and routers.

Of course these consume power, but the variations of ISP network equipment electricity usage are so small that they are irrelevent, even when multiplied by the number of customers.

There is a much larger quantity of electricity that is consumed by idle capacity. Every port that is lit up consumes electricity, regardless of whether a modulated signal is being transmitted over it or not.

Your "always on" connection uses electricity on ISP equipment even when the data rate is 0.

fiber optics magically planted themselves in the ground to expand network capacity.

Broadband ISPs don't need to plant the fiber. In most cases, additional fiber is not needed to meet their needs; the expensive connection is the one between the end user and the ISP's aggregation point.

Once the network media reaches the ISP's aggregation point, capacity is cheap.

The large broadband providers can expand capacity by adding more colors of light to their fiber (DWDM), and there are vast quantities of dark fiber in major facilities sitting idle.

Network capacity is not hard to add, and not scarce, some of them would just like you to think that it is.

Re:Hogs?

[sjames]

No, they were offered UNLIMITED use and they accepted the offer fair and square. The electric company might have been stupid enough to make an unsustainable offer or crooked enough to offer something they had no intention of actually providing, but that on them, not the customer.

Of course, to properly complete the analogy, the electric company's ads would show their happy customers with snowstorms in their living rooms and the heated pool with elaborate fountain out back.

Of course, if the ISPs were competent, they would implement fair queuing and sell a committed and burstable rate. Unlike electricity, it's not the total amount of traffic that kills a network connection, it's just the rate.

Re:Hogs?

[Anonymous Coward]

except that to a large extent, communication networks don't work that way.

Re:Hogs?

[XnavxeMiyyep]

What? Where have I bitched about such a thing? You explicitly stated that there would be a problem with someone making unlimited use of an unlimited service here:

They are not paying for the electricity they used

and I was pointing out that such a company should not have advertised unlimited usage if it did not intend to deliver such.

Although I don't recall making any Slashdot posts on the subject, the complaint about Comcast was that they previously did NOT disclose their caps. While bandwidth caps may be annoying, there's nothing unethical about them unless the company misrepresented what was being sold.

Re:Hogs?

[izomiac]

It reminds me a lot of how you'll hear about someone getting kicked out of an all-you-can-eat buffet for eating too much every now and then. Here in the US the trend is that if you're wasting food (e.g. kids) then the restaurant can do that, but if you're really eating it then they can't. It seems like broadband could be treated similarly.

Re:Hogs?

[vux984]

And yet i've never heard of a Telco cutting anyone off for using the phone too often, or trying to bill per-minute beyond a certain amount of local calling usage.

You've clearly never lived in region where there were serious limits on available telco access. When I grew up I had a party line with 6 other homes. We did indeed have terms of service that would have had us disconnected had we abused the line.

These days the telcos are basically ahead of demand for voice circuits and demand for circuits doesn't grow at an absurd rate (like bandwidth consumption has. the more capacity they build the more we consume. They haven't gotten ahead of us yet... maybe once we've reached the point where we can stream 3 HD movies simultaneously while gaming, then it won't be an issue, but they can't lay cable fast enough)

But that plant still has to be maintained. Those turbines are expensive, and every time they are turned, there is some amount of mechanical wear incurred. It's not like an ISP's switch, which does not experience mechanical wear as it forwards each packet.

Nonsense. Cooling fans die, power supplies burn out, lines are cut, capacitors leak, switches develop faults, old equipment needs to be replaced / upgraded. Yes, the scales are a bit different, but your fooling yourself if you think the internet doesn't need stupid amounts of maintenance.

Electricity is scarce enough commodity, that there is a limited supply and a market for it, and it can be bought and sold easily.

Not really. Its difficult to move where its needed, and doesn't really "store" at all, and in many respects is very much like bandwidth.

If your ISP has a 3 Gigabit pipe to a node in your city, which is barely utilized, it is not like they can sell off the unused portion on the market to other providers, unless of course they can find someone who needs that kind of bandwidth, in or through your city.

And if a power company in Quebec has extra electricity it can't just up and sell it to an Australian consumers... or even Mexican ones.

Once all the river flow is used up, the plant operator cannot just build another river.

He can however lay down more solar panels, or build a nuclear plant.

Re:Hogs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really. Imagine if electricity worked like internet data. i.e. You pay $400 a month and get unlimited usage. Most of us would use around 1000 KWh per month, but then you'd have a few people that would run their AC at 50 degrees, while the whole house was lighted even in rooms that are not being used, and have an electric-powered pool in the back with an elaborate fountain running all day and night. i.e. Splurging.

Bullshit. The cost I pay for electricity has absolutely nothing to do with how much I use it. I keep my AC at a comfortable temperature (68 degrees, even when it's 100+ outside. It's not lower than that, because then that'd be uncomfortably cold for me). I have multiple computers which I never turn off. If it suddenly cost less to use more, I wouldn't use more because there's nothing else I can think of to do with it.

You're ok with that, because I am paying for my usage. However, the thing with "unlimited" internet is that if you can't supply 2.7TB in a month, it's easy to handle the case so that you don't. Don't offer speeds fast enough that you can download 2.7TB in one month. If I'm paying for 6Mbit unlimited don't complain that I was downloading 24/7. It's your fault for selling 6Mbit unlimited, that's what I paid for. Raise the price, or offer 3Mbit unlimited, or whatever else you actually can afford to supply at the price you're selling it for.

Re:Hogs?

[RichiH]

Yes, and if internet data worked like apples, you could make juice out of it.

I work in the backbone management of an ISP; your arguments are bollocks.

If I sell unlimited, I provide unlimited.
If I sell 95/5, I provide 95/5.
If I sell X GB at 1 Gbits/s and cap at 100 Mbit/s after that, I provide X GB at 1 Gbits/s and cap at 100 Mbit/s after that.

Also, while you can certainly produce more load, it is technically impossible to deplete bandwidth. In the next second, you will have just the same bandwidth. And again, and again.

The argument "we sold X cause it sounds nice, but in truth, we did not sell X, we sold Y" is illegal. Breaking contracts usually is. And even with legal boilerplate it's still scum tactics & cheating. How you can defend that is beyond me.

Re:Hogs?

[RichiH]

In countries where the electricity grid Just Works, it is the result of careful planning and anticipation of future demand, over-provisioning and, sorry Ayn Rand, government oversight.

The same things that can ensure that the Internet Just Works.

Re:Hogs?

[lucian1900]

No. If the provider advertises "Unlimited", as a customer you're perfectly within your rights to use however much you want. If providers want to prevent this, all they have to do is move away from unlimited plans.

Re:Belgium? Pretty much a non-country.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, because that's really relevant.

And if you read the ORIGINAL story, they don't car

[SmallFurryCreature]

The ISP doesn't CARE. This is old news and the data has been used by the ISP to show data limits are useless AND they dropped them therefor.

So the ISP isn't complaining, it is advertising. Both making its competitors seem like cheapo's AND showing that you can download what you want with them as well as showing that overall, the average consumer doesn't even come close. Because the difference between 1 and 2 is already huge but number 10 barely counts.

Why else do you think some of the users agreed to have their username printed on the list?

Re:Belgium? Pretty much a non-country.

[roman_mir]

Relevant, if Belgium is a non-country then there is no story.

2.7 terabytes?

[Anonymous Coward]

2.7 terabytes? Great Scott!

Simple calcuations

[Anonymous Coward]

Assuming you have a 6kbits downstream line you can download in a month 30*24*60*60*6Mbps = 14.83 Tbits per second which are roughly 1.4 TB. On a 16Mbps line 4 TB. So it is theoretical possible. However, what can you download which is so big? HD-Movies. Hd-Movies are bigger than other stuff. So lets assume one hour movie would be approx 4GB. And assuming that a person has to sleep 8 hours a day and that it is highly unusual that you watch while you err. dump metabolism byproducts. You could say 9 hours a day are off. So there are 15 left. 15h*30d = 450h upper boundary of watch time. 450h would be 1800GB eg 1.8 TB of data.

So the real question would be what kinda nerd uses 2.7 TB in a month? 2700 GB as in 675h total watch time as in 22.5h movies a day. This is very unlikely.

However, if this is the connection of a flatshare with 2-5 students or other people living together for example a family, than 22.5/2 = 11.25 h movies a day for a 2 person flat which is still irresponsible movie consume. But for 5 persons, this would go down to 4.5 hours which is still high, but not very unusual.

So it can be concluded that the flatrate user with the 2.7TB is actually a group of people living together.

Re:Simple calcuations

[Anonymous Coward]

4 GB per hour is the lower bound for h.264 encoded 1080p movies. Some people prefer 1:1 copies of Blu-Ray discs which are usually 25-50 GB per movie.

Re:Simple calcuations

[Anonymous Coward]

You make too many assumptions here to be able to draw a conclusion.

There are bigger things than HD movies, for the matter I'm using my residential connection to backup a very important database from work that is about 25 Gb, the backup runs nightly so in a month this amounts to approx. 750 Gb of download, just for one database backup.

If and when that db reaches 100 Gb, I'd be actually using more bandwidth than the guy from TFA monthly, and without counting any HD video.

Early adopters will be average consumers in 5 yrs

[mykos]

Rather than shut down people who download a lot, they should prepare for people who download a lot.

Bandwidth hog!

[mutube]

You must run up at least 2.7TB a month with your unusual use of the letter S.

expensive connections

[matsuva]

Most people on that list pay 125 dollars per month for their connection, internet access is extremely expensive in Belgium because of an ISP monopoly.

That amount of data does not seem outrageous to me

[slaker]

I chose to switch to business class internet service after determining that my usage typically exceeds Comcast's monthly consumer bandwidth cap in a any normal five-day period. I was already paying for a faster connection, but they really wanted to penalize me for using it.

What's the point of a 25Mbps download speed if it means I just hit a cap that much faster?

At least for my ISP, business service is about $20/month more expensive, has no caps, restrictions on use, or throttling. If that's the cost to get the service I feel I need, I don't think that's unreasonable. Hopefully that will be an option for other heavy users going forward.

Re:Belgium? Pretty much a non-country.

[CharlyFoxtrot]

I think it's hilarious that the leader (and some of the most prominent members) of a party complaining about democracy in Europe is an hereditary peer. It also doesn't stop them from suckling at the teat of the EU at the taxpayers expense in the EU parliament but then as aristocrats I guess they're used to that.

Average Family TV over IP Usage?

[zotz]

How much data would the average family pull if they did all of their TV watching via IP and not regular cable/sat/broadcast?

They are pushing broadband aren't they? And the benefits of high speed access?

all the best,

drew

Air Hogs?

[zotz]

Are athletes air hogs? Should we encourage the couch potato lifestyle to reduce air usage and cut down on CO2 emissions?

~;-)

all the best,

drew

In other news, ISPs cannot do math.

[Cytlid]

If you read the ars technica coverage on this story, that same ISP offers connections up to 100mbps. If 100mb/sec is 12.5 Megabyte/second, and there's 86,400 seconds in a day, that's a little over 1TB a day. So if that customer has the top tier, let the bandwidth go full boar for less than three days, then disconnected it for the rest of the month, he could get just under 3TB. They should put more realistic constraints to their resources. This guy used less than 10% of what was possible (full bandwidth 24/7), if he's at the top tier. Granted, I understand the ISPs point of view. This is excessive. But their service offering was a factor. Why sell it then act surprised because it was used?

10 hours a day of high quality high definition ...

[Skapare]

... TV per day works out to 2.7TB per month. That's using 20Mb/s for high quality, a figure that broadcast TV cannot reach (in USA it is limited to 19.39MB/s ... and the cable/satellite companies are known to ruin the quality by over compressing).

At Comcast quality (definitely nowhere near high), that works out to about 24 hours a day. And given the choices on Comcast's channel lineup, one clearly must include internet video feeds in nearly all of that.

IMHO, internet services for year 2015 should be tiered at:

1. Basic plan, 25 mbps, 3TB/mo
2. Family plan, 100 mbps, 12TB/mo
3. Premium plan, 250 mbps, 30TB/mo
4. Bill Gates plan, 1gbps, 120TB/mo
5. Mark Cuban plan, 5gbps, 600TB/mo

no

[unity100]

they just would pay as much as they wanted to use. simple. now they are dling everything and hoarding, many content they dl actually dont even get used. just stored in hard disks.

Re:no

[John Hasler]

they just would pay as much as they wanted to use. simple. now they are dling everything and hoarding, many content they dl actually dont even get used. just stored in hard disks.

Oh, it would work fine. They'd still squeal at the suggestion, though.

Re:10 hours a day of high quality high definition

[DragonTHC]

I completely agree with your tiering choices.

However, the ISPs will look at that and think, 25mbps, $2000 a month.

100Mbps? $3500 a month.

I am a user of online services like onlive and xboxlive and netflix streaming, and steam games and hulu.

My ISP would love to disconnect me. They really want to subscribe grandmas who just check their email once a week.0

Cloned Cable modem MAC address?

[Sonny_Jimbod]

I'm not sure if it's possible with DOCSIS3 (or whether the ISP in question is using it, for that matter), but with DOCSIS2 it is possible for more than one cable modem to share a MAC address. This is quite common in people who want to get free internet, they simply clone the MAC address of a paying subscriber. This works fine as long as the two cable modems are on separate broadband router, so could it be possible it's just one guy selling 'cheap' internet access by method of cloned modems?

Only One

[JackSpratts]

easily done. probably a bunch of hardcore roommates sharing a connection. something along the lines of a frat house.

i did 100 gigs in ten days with 1250 down when oink had a free leach, by myself. i'm adsl 5000 down now so i could do 1.2TB/mo if i had a reason, and free leach at a good private tracker is a great one. with higher speed cable in a houseshare i could see this this happening occasionally, and unremarkably.

the minuscule totals of their least active customers never seem to garner headlines (or refunds), nor do isps offer rollover gigs when their breathless pr results in the inevitable capping. instead we get shocking press releases of gluttonous subscribers making life hell for hapless oligarchs.

please.

- js.

Fuck the greedy ISPs

[Anonymous Coward]

If you advertise that your connection is "unlimited" you will fucking provide unlimited. Not rocket science.

I live in Finland and lately changed my ISP to an el cheapo Saunalahti brand GPRS of (the) Elisa (telecom). I noticed that sometimes there was zero throughput and I couldn't "surf the web" at all. Then I took a long hard look at the agreement I had signed with this company. It stated in very small print that they can do this. Very annoying. 70 percent of the time it has worked decently albeit always slowly. I find the greed of the ISPs disgusting.

No surprise

[w00tsauce]

After watching peers from belgium download at often more then 5mb/sec (yes megabytes) from my eu seedboxes 2.7tb doesn't seem like much.

only about 9Mbps on average.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is an average of about 9Mbps. Not that bad. ((2700000 / (24 * 60 * 60 * 28)) * 8)

I'm with Telenet...

[KevinColyer]

I'm with Telenet in Belgium... I hope that isn't me they're talking about... I thought I had a life!

What is "excessive" use and why would it matter?

[grimJester]

Obviously the customer downloading the most per month will download quite a lot. Why should that matter and why would there be a question of how much is reasonable or excessive? The costumer using the most water in Belgium is probably not using it on showers and the customer using the most electricity probably uses quite a lot. Neither water nor electricity has any kind of "How much is excessive" numbers associated with them. If these were companies rather than persons or families, would anyone raise an eyebrow at a download of 2,7TB/month?

Re:10 hours a day of high quality high definition

[Skapare]

And if people want service from that ISP enough, they'll pay up. But, if there is no competition, then that's where either monopoly regulation or government subsidy of competition needs to come into being. This is the core infrastructure for a network economy much like the highway system, including interstate highways in the US, are for a transportation economy.

Obviously it wasn't a porn studio

[Anonymous Coward]

Porn studio, circa 2011:

Two shots per camera for 3-D effect. 6000x4000 pixels x 48 bits per pixel. 120 frames times two per second.

That's 288MiB per stereo frame, or 34.56 GiB/sec before compression.

Assuming they actually get 4 hours of usable video each day, that's 8.294 TiB/day to shuttle over the wire if they don't compress. Even with 90% efficient compression they'll hit 7.2TiB in less than 4 shooting days.

Folks, there's a reason why a [insert mode of transport here] full of [insert high-density media here] is generally better than [insert wire or radio medium here] for bulk data transport.

--

To be fair, if the 2.7 TB in a month was to many different locations going over the wire may be the way to go. After all, a torrent farm full of *cough*everylinuxdistroevermadenonotpiratedhollywoodmoviesnosiree*cough* distributing to millions of eager users around the world probably works better over a wire than by sending disks through the [insert postal service or other package-courier of your choice here].

Saving minutes

[Mogusha]

Rather than payI prefer to take a limited bandwidth plan and save my GBs for the next months. That way I can use them when I feel like. [insert GPL non-trademarked sarcmark here]

news flash!

[Anonymous Coward]

waddayaknow: next the government is going to collect
tax based the the amount of water pipes installed on
private property ...

Can't happen where I live

[Anonymous Coward]

This sort of behavior can't happen where I live. The average data rate is 8.3 megabits per second, every second for the month. Where I live, 320 kb/s is the maximum I get (and I pay a lot for it). Since their average data rate is 25.9 times as fast as mine, 2.7 TB is impossible. 104 GB is my maximum, and my ISP has a CAP at 60 GB. Its a soft cap, not a hard one. They don't stop you from downloading after 60GB, they just bill you extra. I'm happy with the "bill you extra after this amount" policy. Its hard to hit 60GB per month as it is.

again...

[hitmark]

it seems that people confuse limited resources (water, power) with unlimited (data).

basically, as long as there is something to transfer, the connection between the peers involved in the transfer will move towards what the connection can handle. This is the waterwork complaining that the pipes are filled to capacity, not that the well the water comes from is running dry.

The definition of unlimited

[Anonymous Coward]

adj.

      1. Having no restrictions or controls: an unlimited travel ticket.
      2. Having or seeming to have no boundaries; infinite: an unlimited horizon.
      3. Without qualification or exception; absolute: unlimited self-confidence.

Having no ends or limits: boundless, endless, illimitable, immeasurable, infinite, limitless, measureless, unbounded. See limited/unlimited.

read the fine print

[shnull]

on the telenet website please, if you don't speak dutch, i'll be happy to translate it for you. To me it just sounds like a nifty excuse about why they can't provide what they sell to more than half of their customers. They have silly data caps on most packs and their idea of unlimited downloading is a bit weird imo. If you download more than two times the average of what all customers with the same pack as you (that would be turbo- or fibernet) download then they got the right to shut or slow you down for the rest of the month. So whoever the guy is that succeeds in downloading almost 3TB with a connection that hardly ever gets above 512kbps. That's overhere, but their helpdesk keeps telling me its because im further away, the whole country is only 300 km wide ffs ! Nonetheless, even if they admit i never get the speed they promise 'cos i'm further away' (i always thought that was an adsl-company excuse) they never send me a bill that says 'hey, cos you never get what we sell, we deducted some of that ridiculous price we ask) Americans always tell me : get another ISP , well, we only have two really and the other is even worse, at least most telenet employees tend to be friendly, yet some of them should do better selling perfume and nail polish i think; Scandinavians think it's funny :) maybe cos they have a pirate party that works. I already did on Ars but i want to thank the guy again, keep it up man, according to the fine print, you are the one who keeps the cap on their 'unlimited' pack up high for the rest of us.

excuse me but ....

[Skal Tura]

I can't be the only one thinking 2.7Tb ain't really that much ...

Ok, in terms of Linux ISOs, it would be about 588 but in general.

2.7Tb is about 7Mbps 24/7 average usage, which is 1/3 of maximum for 24Mbps ADSL, or 50% in practical manners. So yes, it's not little but it's not that much neither.

That being said, a subgroup of our servers transfers almost 400gigs every single hour, or some 9-10tb a day.

1000 GB?

[antdude]

Dude, 1,024 GB. :)