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Australian Man Uses 1TB of Mobile Data in a Single Day (stuff.co.nz)
An anonymous reader cites an amusing article on Stuff: When Telstra offered its mobile customers unlimited data for two separate days this year as compensation for network outages, some customers took it as a challenge to download as much as they possibly could in one day. On Sunday, 27-year-old Sydney resident John Szaszvari outdid himself and everyone else by ploughing through almost a whole terabyte of data. That's more than double what he managed during the first free data day in February -- an already mammoth 425GB.
From the article...
And then the downloads began: 14 seasons of MythBusters; 24 seasons of The Simpsons; the entire Wikipedia database; Microsoft software for his job; updates for his Xbox games; and "a lot of random other stuff". He also synced all his Spotify playlists offline..."It's always movie/TV night at my house at the moment."
With all that binge-watching, when does he ever has any time to do his job?
1. Download the list of users.
2. Sort by the usage
3. Select the top user
For the selected user publicly start shaming, start puffing cheeks and rolling eyes.
Well, that is statistics... You will always have a percentile that uses more service than others. The question is why this is a surprise.
Mr Vilfredo Pareto discovered this phenomena 120 years ago.
>> To stop morons from you from using wireless
> Why is it always just when you insult someone that your proof-reading skills disappear into the abyss... Now you just look plain silly, AC. ;)
Yeah, but that's not the core point here. He can insult others if that makes him feel some kind of weird satisfaction.
The one thing he can't do is say BS -- and that's pretty much what he has managed to accomplish. Because he has been brainwashed into believing bandwidth is some scarce thing, I had to endure a dial-up connection recently (at a road, where cell phones should be pretty good!). Two weeks ago on a holiday I had to do with 2 Mbps while last year I had 6 Mbps with the same operator on the same spot.
That's artificial scarcity, no doubt, created to make money on us -- and all the monkeys will beat the newbie who wants more speed.
If you don't know what you're talking about, you might as well just stop talking.
The air only has so much bandwidth, the tower is only fed with so much bandwidth.
Yes, mobile providers oversubscribe. There's no getting around the fact that it makes sense to do.
If you want every customer of a mobile provider to have their own time division slot in the air in the available frequency bands, then each sector (oversimplified to hell) can support somewhere around 250 concurrent customers. (I forget the exact number, someone please correct me)
At about 1000 customers per base station, and a total install cost over 10 years (including maintenance, install, and some light upgrades) of $22mil, total cost per customer is around... $180/month.
That's not including actual bandwidth costs (which are actually fairly trivial) but that tower is only going to be fed with maybe a 1gbps line (really high balling here..) So each customer gets 1/1Mbps.
A heavy user may raise costs because of increased bandwidth usage, but the only thing more expensive than that is to not have the heavy user. The lost income paying for the expensive infrastructure is more detrimental than the heavy user using an "unfair" share of the bandwidth. For any large ISP with proper peering contracts, bandwidth is the cheapest part of being an ISP. Customer service is the single most expensive cost, but I don't heavy people complaining about heavy complaint customers. It's cheaper to add more bandwidth than to add more customer care representatives to handle complaints about not having enough bandwidth.
This 1 TB/day threshold rang a bell as I remembered a BSD trumpeting a similar record, albeit in the opposite direction, in the late 1990s... and sure enough, Slashdot covered it back then:
Wcarchive Does 1.39tb In 24 Hours
Back then people had serious discussions about what sort of storage controller, network interface, and upstream connectivity was needed to achieve this result. Nowadays we can stuff that same performance in a trouser pocket. What an age to live in.
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"