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

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?

[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?

[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.

Windows Update

[Anonymous Coward]

Poor guy just left Windows Update set to automatic.

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.

Download caps?

[loufoque]

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

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: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.

Hogs?

[Dan541]

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