Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Belgian ISP Claims One Customer Downloads 2.7TB

Posted by timothy on from the and-he-was-just-a-tiny-guy dept.

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.'"

32 of 276 comments (clear)

  1. Human nature by Colin+Smith · · Score: 2, Insightful

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

     

    --
    Deleted
    1. Re:Human nature by ultranova · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

      --

      Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.

    2. Re:Human nature by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      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...

    3. Re:Human nature by mysidia · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re:Human nature by jsebrech · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

  2. Who cares? by McTickles · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Who cares? by _KiTA_ · · Score: 1, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Who cares? by MoonBuggy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:Who cares? by Dan541 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
    4. Re:Who cares? by foniksonik · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
    5. Re:Who cares? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      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.

  3. Download caps? by loufoque · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

  4. the article by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    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.

  5. All you can eat by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  6. so what? by yyxx · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  7. Re:What is the actual cost to the ISP? by Jah-Wren+Ryel · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    When information is power, privacy is freedom.
  8. Re:Its possible by TheRaven64 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  9. Re:Its possible by yyxx · · Score: 2, Insightful

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

  10. Consumption by Mr_Silver · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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?

    --
    Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
  11. Digital Download games by Hadlock · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

    --
    moox. for a new generation.
    1. Re:Digital Download games by grumbel · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

  12. Re:What is the actual cost to the ISP? by Rich0 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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...

  13. Amount downloaded isn't very interesting by rawler · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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?

  14. Re:What is the actual cost to the ISP? by mobby_6kl · · Score: 2, Insightful

    > 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.

  15. Hogs? by Dan541 · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    --
    An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
    1. Re:Hogs? by sycodon · · Score: 2, Insightful

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

      --
      When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
    2. Re:Hogs? by wagnerrp · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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'.

    3. Re:Hogs? by wagnerrp · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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!"

    4. Re:Hogs? by mysidia · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

    5. Re:Hogs? by XnavxeMiyyep · · Score: 2, Insightful
      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.

      --
      I put the 't' in electrical engineering.
    6. Re:Hogs? by vux984 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    7. Re:Hogs? by XnavxeMiyyep · · Score: 2, Insightful
      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.

      --
      I put the 't' in electrical engineering.