The UK is not alone in this interesting statistic either. Last year here in Australia, too, it was announced that there were now more active mobile phone numbers, than people in Australia (~21 million). See: http://www.acma.gov.au/WEB/STANDARD/pc=PC_311135
And yeah, most of this is because in the corporate world, your employer gives you a business mobile, which is separate from your personal mobile. Dual-SIM phones are handy for this situation since you can carry a single handset but have it respond to two numbers.
Mod parent up. I'm usually in here vigorously defending Australia and its way of doing things. It's a wonderful country.
BUT when it comes to the media - TV in particular - sadly the parent is right. It's a mess here and the Americans are light years ahead when it comes to things like HD multicasting etc. What's even worse is that my home in Australia is defined as 'regional'... even though it's Canberra (the national frickin capital!). So we get the lame regional stations (Prime instead of 7, WIN instead of 9 etc) that show almost nothing in HD and can't seem to start a program on time for the life of them.
I spend a good part of my year in the US and the rest in Australia... and I can comfortably say that the Australian TV regulatory landscape sucks, although I reckon the actual programming is somewhat better - ABC and SBS are a godsend.
Ah I see. Good point - virtually ALL countries refer to their cabinet members as Ministers (or some word translated into English as 'ministers' at least). Including a lot of 'bad' ones:)
One of the ones I mentioned (NZ) is in fact equal first on this years index (least corrupt countries in the world). The others are mostly in the yellow (good), or orange (fairly good) shading on the map (excepting South Africa). Not too bad on the whole. Now of course one might argue that their methods of coming up with this index are flawed, but there's an extensive FAQ that explains how they do it in good detail. It's rather shocking how few countries get that yellow or orange colour when you look at the map though.
Huh? A 'minister' is just the name for the head of a government department in any Westminster-style Parliamentary democracy (i.e. UK, Canada, NZ, South Africa, Australia...). They are elected members of Parliament.
Their role is roughly equivalent to your Secretaries in the US (Secretary of Defence, Secretary of Education, etc.). I'm a little confused as to what you think they are, but I assure you it's nothing unusual:)
May I point out we didn't need guns to obtain our freedom in the first place, and most of us never had even the slightest desire to own one. Our histories are different, but we both have a very strong democratic tradition that allows us to solve these problems via the ballot box, rather than with force.
There's no way this will ever get past the planning stage. The entire telecomms industry would be up in arms (heh... pardon the pun) about it and public opinion would stamp this out before it ever got through Parliament.
...simply because, as we all know, it's completely infeasible. The Internet is simply too large to have a hope of maintaining an even vaguely accurate list of 'bad' sites. You would have to employ literally an army of public servants to surf around and maintain it. And anyone with even the slightest bit of technical knowledge can get around it in a flash (encryption, Tor, proxy, obtain from non-filtered mediums such as IRC/P2P, etc).
I strongly suspect what will happen is that the Rudd Govt. will ooo and ahh about it for a while so it appears that they haven't neglected their election promise re net filtering. But soon as they see how completely useless any proposed filtering scheme will be, it will quietly fade away into obscurity. Particuarly as they have bigger fish to fry right now (economic collapse and all).
Our politicians do have some very stupid ideas, but I'd bet pretty good money this will never actually get off the ground (in its current form at least) in Australia. Most of the public, and every single person in the ISP/telecomms industry is against it (for good reason - it costs money to implement, will slow down net access due to the need to run every request through the IP blacklist, and it shifts responsibility for content from users, to ISPs).
So it's scary in theory, but I'm not worried... it won't get past the planning stage.
I don't. I live in Wisconsin half the year. I assure you there's plenty of snow to shovel there. But even in places in Australia where snow is an issue (say, Thredbo Village), it's not done by the land owners, generally. That was just the comparison I was making vis a vis the US.
Well they aren't really in the same category. I was just using it as an example that in the US you guys are a lot more community minded than here.
Here, if snow clearing had to be done, the local government would do it. It wouldn't be a homeowner's responsibility. Just the way things work under two different legal systems I guess.
Sigh...I'm aware of the nature of snow. Why does everyone think snow doesn't exist here? (Not to mention that I spend plenty of time in the US and Europe where it snows too).
In Australia, snow clearing would be the responsibility of the city authorities. Your property boundary ends at 2 metres from the side of the road here. The sidewalk is public land and would be thus maintained/cleared by local government. Whereas in some countries, I believe your property includes the sidewalk. So it makes sense that you would have to clear it yourself then.
Well I was saying that laws LIKE that would never exist here. Not that exact law.
But since you mentioned it, there is plenty of snow in Australia in the mountains. Snowdepths only 50 miles away or so from where I am are over 6 feet (it's the end of winter here ATM).
Not all Australians live in the tropics/on the beach;)
The post you are replying to is an awful, racist troll to be sure.
But only a vanishingly small proportion of Australian settlers were convicts. There were a couple of convict shipments in the 1780s (immediately following American independence because they couldn't send convicts to America anymore). But the bulk of the population is decended from free settlers who came here, particularly during the gold rush periods in the 1800s.
The whole 'decended from criminals' thing is a popular American stereotype of Australians, but it's a bit of a misnomer. Far more British convicts were sent to the New World than were ever sent down under.
You probably already knew this. But many of us get... irritated... when American's say time after time the same old thing;)
Yes indeed. Public/socialised health care is far from free. Countries with such a system (like my own, Australia) just make up for it with higher income tax.
Disadvantages: higher income tax than the US.
Advantages: free/very cheap medicare care when you need it, for everyone, including those that can't afford it.
There's no magic to either system... nothing in life is free. You either pay for it now (by taxes), or later when you need it (medical bills). The difference is in how the system treats poor people. For the average Joe with a decent income, it works out about the same under either system.
Move to Internode if you can. I'm on Internode ADSL2+ in Canberra and I never get anything other than the full sync speed of my modem. Not sure who you are with now (sorta sounds like iinet?), but if you're less than 1km from the exchange you should be able to get some insane speeds (better than me, I'm about 2 km away).
Internet in the US 'feels' fast cause the ping times are so much less than what we are used to in Australia (since most content is close by, not the other side of the world). You can really feel the difference when web browsing in particular. But actual throughput is no better than in Australia, for the most part.
Well it depends on your needs. There tends to be a tradeoff between speed and download cap here. So for someone like you that downloads a lot, but doesn't mind waiting a bit for it to arrive, you can get a similar connection to what you have now, (large multi-hundred GB cap, but slower speeds).
Here's why I like 'faster speeds' over a higher cap:
a) When I download something, it's usually something I decide to get on the spur of the moment. Like "oops I missed an episode of that TV show a few hours ago... I'll just download it from usenet". Then I can go and pull down that 500 MB in just a few minutes, and play it on my home theatre PC (connected to TV) straight away. But I don't download things that often. Maybe every 2-3 days I might grab a movie or TV show.
b) I like streaming HD video (an Australian TV station allows you to do this right from their site, and it requres at least 6 mbps to perform acceptably)
c) Even if I hit the cap, I CAN still download fast from the ISPs own mirror sites. About a third of what I download is unmetered (internal network traffic). Having a 700 MB Linux ISO come in in a few minutes is nice (and isn't counted towards my cap).
d) Gaming and web surfing benefit from faster connections (although admittedly the difference between 4 Mbps and 20 Mbps is minimal for these things).
e) Uploads aren't counted towards your cap. I do a lot of remote desktop/remote FTP access to my home from work which benefits from a fast connection. And I seed torrents all the time (again, uploads don't count against my quota, so I try to get a good ratio on all torrents).
BUT - it's totally dependant on how you use the net. I have friends like you who download huge amounts of content (torrents etc) but don't mind letting large downloads go overnight. As a consumer, buy the kind of service that suits you.
PS. 100mbps both ways, nice! Europe really has the best connections by far. I'd love that:)
Actually, the US does seem to have a much stronger sense of 'keep your local suburb/community respectable looking' than other countries I've lived in. (Lived in Australia, US, UK and Japan for various periods in my life)
I'm Australian by birth and the lawns here (Canberra) are mostly awful. Full of weeds, some are never mowed, most are dying because of the drought anyway.
In the US though (or at least in suburban Wisconsin and Illinois where I have been), everyone's lawn is immaculate. It's sorta freaky actually... house after house of perfectly cut, beautifully lush green grass. First time I went there I actually said "omg, I thought it only looked like this in movies - it's actually like this??".
Whereas in Australia you can guarantee every 3rd or so house is a complete dump, old rusting cars parked out the front and piles of weeds and dirt.
This responsibility to your community extends into winter. I was interested to learn that homeowners have a ~legal obligation~ to clear snow from the sidewalk in front of their house within x hours of a snowfall, in the US. That kind of law would never, ever exist in Australia. Half of us just don't care about our yard or what it looks like.
But interestingly, in every other respect though, Australia is WAY more regulated than the US. Americans just love their lawns, I guess (and they have the climate to support growing a great one).
Well in a way, a lot of 'national' bandwidth is uncapped. Generally traffic within the ISPs own network is free (not counted against your cap). MOst ISPs have massive mirrors that host a LOT of stuff (e.g. full Tucows/Sourceforge/etc mirrors, debian and ubuntu repositories, etc). As an example, last month I used 17 GB 'metered' downloads, and around 10 GB unmetered/free. Generally about a third of my traffic is unmetered (mostly linux updates/ISOs).
I know that's not what you meant exactly, but it's on the same track. Traffic within your ISPs own network (which is usually a nation-wide network) doesn't cost them a cent, and thus it doesn't cost the customer a cent either.
Oh I fully agree. Preferably having 'neither' would be best, absolutely. But realistically, there's not much incentive for ISPs to do that. They like to oversell their bandwidth to make maximum profit.
So it's a false dichotomy, but a realistic one, given the business pressures on ISPs (here at least, I don't necessarily speak for everywhere). No ISP actually has enough backhaul capacity for everyone to max their connection out all the time (or even most of the time).
If the ISPs here suddenly removed their caps and allowed everyone unlimited downloads, performance would go to hell. I doubt they could physically upgrade the links fast enough, and demand will always outstrip supply. You give people more and they will take it, and then some.
Yes well, Telstra does have a crippling effect on our internet industry, no doubt about that. It's not ~corruption~, per se, though. It's just the fact they have such a huge segment of the market, as they used to be the monopoly providers. Anti-competitive, yes - corrupt, not really.
Actually, Telstra HATE the government, cause it was the government regulators that forced it to open its network to competition in the first place;) The same competition that has increased caps ten-fold in about 3 years. In another decade I imagine Australia might be able to sustainably offer unlimited connections too, the way things are going.
Anyway good luck in your fight against caps there. I agree that it does seem like a backward step. Hopefully they won't catch on across the board in the US (it affects me too, cause I do live there half the year and may be there permanently in around 3 years time). Also, I hope Verizon gets around to rolling out FiOS in IL/WI by that time.
No I honestly don't think so (re collusion/corruption). Australia is one of the least corrupt countries in the world (very little corporate-government interaction or influence compared to most other places, although Scandinavia and NZ have us beat on that front).
The caps are there simply because of the peering/transit costs mentioned, as well as the fact that the last mile copper phone lines are owned by ex-government monopoly telco Telstra (think AT&T, but worse), which charges other ISPs a fair bit to use 'their' lines.
There have been ISPs offering true unlimited here. They all went bankrupt within 18 months. It just can't be done here on a sustainable and economic basis. The US is a different kettle of fish though and I do agree with you that caps aren't necessary there.
Other than the 'Telstra issue' though, ISP competition here seems to be working well and is leading to constantly increasing caps. Average caps for home connections have gone from 5 GB to 100s of GB in just a few years.
Keep in mind my 25 GB quota is small! Most of my friends have 100+ GB quotas, and they are affordable. I just chose 'faster' over 'more data'.
But yeah, I'm not fundamentally disagreeing with you. The US market needs more competition and can support unlimited internet. I was simply drawing the distinction between the two places, and saying that life with a cap isn't bad at all. But I'm not saying you shouldn't fight against them in the US.
I think it sucks that they are considering extra fees for going over the cap. They figured out in Australia a long time ago that just produced angry customers who didn't understand why their bill was so huge (usually their kid on P2P all day or something they didn't understand).
ISPs here all just shape your traffic once you go over the cap (i.e. reduce your speed). No extra charges. That way you don't get any nasty surprises come the end of the month;)
Hang on - are they actually changing the service for EXISTING customers?
I don't know about the US admittedly, but here in Australia, ISPs can't change your plan once you're signed up. They can only make changes that affect people signing up for NEW plans.
Case in point, my parents are on an ancient plan that is no longer offered by their ISP that has unlimited downloads midnight-8am. It was sending the ISP bankrupt so they got rid of that plan. But they can't force people already ON that plan, to change to a new plan, and contractually they can't alter the existing plan's conditions and services in any way either.
So my parents can stay grandfathered on that old plan forever. And I have advised them to do so, cause it's better value than any newer plans out there.
If Comcast in the US can legally change the conditions for existing customers, then yeah, I'd be pissed off too. And I'd vote with my feet, and switch ISPs.
It takes a good 10-15 years to recover the cost actually. But the ISPs aren't shafting us, I don't think. A decent sized download allowance is very affordable (which wasn't the case 5 years ago, but things are a lot better now).
Also we literally can't build international links quick enough to keep up with the rapid increase in traffic over the last few years (youtube etc.). In the long term, they will pay for themselves but it DOES take a long time.
Remember, you are building a 10,000 km long cable to service an Australian population less than a single large US city.
With respect, I was just stating my opinion. But if a cap is unsuitable for your needs, then hell yes, vote with your feet and leave that company for one that suits your needs more. I'm all for that.
I'm not saying 'live with it' and I'm certainly not congratulating you. I'm just saying its not as bad as you think.
Also, I was saying I kind of prefer the situation here, not that I live in ISP hell. No evil traffic tampering and a choice of 20+ highly competitive ISPs in most places (e.g. I can pay for large caps like 200GB+ if I wanted, I simply don't need that much though).
I agree that the situation in the US seems amazingly anti-competitive though. As stated, I can choose from 20+ ISPs where I am. But it seems in the US there's usually only 3-4 per area. In some areas, only 1 DSL and 1 cable option.
Disclaimer: I spend half my year in Australia and half my year in the US (Chicago area). My comments on the state of US broadband reflect what I have experienced in that area.
Hi all. My first post on Slashdot even though I've been reading it since the late 90s. Finally got around to signing up. I'm Australian and as most Slashdotters know, Australian ISPs all impose caps.
Personally, I'm on a 25 GB per month cap (after which my speed is slowed, but I am not charged more). My monthly usage generally ends up at around 18-22 GB, without me needing to monitor my usage or worry about it. My connection supports 2 people who are both heavy browsers. Plenty of youtube, streaming radio etc. Perhaps a TV show from a torrent every second day. Skype on the weekends to call my family overseas.
Basically, unless you are a MAJOR torrent leecher, you will find that you won't have any problems whatsoever staying under 250 GB (Comcast). I have one tenth of that cap, download movies/TV shows every other day, surf heavily, run a home FTP server, but I have no issues staying under 25 GB. Keep in mind that my uploads are not capped (not sure if Comcast's 250 GB includes uploads or not).
A poster above mentioned the issue of people launching attacks on your connection that flood you with unrequested packets. Yes this would be counted against your usage. But I've never heard of it being an issue...certainly hasn't happened to me in my 8+ years of using capped broadband. In the very unlikely circumstance that it did happen, call the ISP and they will be able to see the attack in their logs, and here, they would be reasonable and not charge you for it.
Now onto the subject of why I think caps, provided they are clearly stated, are generally a good thing!
Contrary to some people's knee-jerk reaction however, the reason Australia has caps is not because it's a technology backwater. Far from it actually - DSL speeds here are generally faster than in most parts of the US (although I admit, FiOS rocks, where it's available).
Australian bandwidth caps basically exist because:
a) most English speaking content comes from the US (i.e. most traffic is international, vs mostly domestic in the US); and
b) we are an island a long way from anywhere. Those undersea cables don't pay for themselves. Peering and transit costs here a an order of magnitude higher than in the US. ISPs thus have to impose monthly download caps to stop a few high volume users sending them bankrupt.
But on the plus side, because we pay for what we use, there are a number of advantages. My ISP, like most in Australia:
- Is far less contended than most US ISPs. Download speeds are always meet my connected speed. I have an 8/1 Mbps connection, and I get that speed, all the time (~850 kb/s downstream and slightly over 100 kb/s up). Whereas some US ISPs, when I've used them, seem sluggish in peak hours.
- Never fiddles with my traffic. No bittorrent deprioritising, no deep packet inspection, no random throttling or any of that nonsense. In the US though, well you know all about the shenanigans some of your ISPs have been up to.
- Allows me to run anything whatsoever on my connection. Whereas most US DSL providers I have read the AUP for have 20 clauses about how you cant run servers etc.
The other thing to note is that because we get charged for what we use, ISPs can allow us faster speeds here, without worrying that we will completely trash their network by leeching 24/7. In the US, your DSL connections mostly seem to be 3 or 6 Mbps, with maybe 768kbps up. In Australia, DSL is generally from 8, up to 24 Mbps down (ADSL2+), and if you have Annex M support on your modem/ISP, you can get up to 2.5 Mbps upload. Personally, I'd rather faster speeds with a cap, than slow speeds but unlimited downloads and annoying packet tampering.
The final thing to note is that virtually all ISPs here have massive download mirrors which aren't counted against your quota. For instance, my ISP has full Sourceforge, MajorGeeks etc. mirrors that contain most large things I would ever want to download anyway.
So yeah - don't fear your (very generous!) download caps over there. It's good news for you. Get the 0.1% of people off the network that abuse the hell out of it, and speeds will be faster for the rest of you.
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The UK is not alone in this interesting statistic either. Last year here in Australia, too, it was announced that there were now more active mobile phone numbers, than people in Australia (~21 million). See: http://www.acma.gov.au/WEB/STANDARD/pc=PC_311135
And yeah, most of this is because in the corporate world, your employer gives you a business mobile, which is separate from your personal mobile. Dual-SIM phones are handy for this situation since you can carry a single handset but have it respond to two numbers.
Mod parent up. I'm usually in here vigorously defending Australia and its way of doing things. It's a wonderful country.
BUT when it comes to the media - TV in particular - sadly the parent is right. It's a mess here and the Americans are light years ahead when it comes to things like HD multicasting etc. What's even worse is that my home in Australia is defined as 'regional' ... even though it's Canberra (the national frickin capital!). So we get the lame regional stations (Prime instead of 7, WIN instead of 9 etc) that show almost nothing in HD and can't seem to start a program on time for the life of them.
I spend a good part of my year in the US and the rest in Australia ... and I can comfortably say that the Australian TV regulatory landscape sucks, although I reckon the actual programming is somewhat better - ABC and SBS are a godsend.
Ah I see. Good point - virtually ALL countries refer to their cabinet members as Ministers (or some word translated into English as 'ministers' at least). Including a lot of 'bad' ones :)
One interesting thing though - check this out http://www.transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/cpi/2008
One of the ones I mentioned (NZ) is in fact equal first on this years index (least corrupt countries in the world). The others are mostly in the yellow (good), or orange (fairly good) shading on the map (excepting South Africa). Not too bad on the whole. Now of course one might argue that their methods of coming up with this index are flawed, but there's an extensive FAQ that explains how they do it in good detail. It's rather shocking how few countries get that yellow or orange colour when you look at the map though.
Huh? A 'minister' is just the name for the head of a government department in any Westminster-style Parliamentary democracy (i.e. UK, Canada, NZ, South Africa, Australia...). They are elected members of Parliament.
Their role is roughly equivalent to your Secretaries in the US (Secretary of Defence, Secretary of Education, etc.). I'm a little confused as to what you think they are, but I assure you it's nothing unusual :)
May I point out we didn't need guns to obtain our freedom in the first place, and most of us never had even the slightest desire to own one. Our histories are different, but we both have a very strong democratic tradition that allows us to solve these problems via the ballot box, rather than with force.
There's no way this will ever get past the planning stage. The entire telecomms industry would be up in arms (heh ... pardon the pun) about it and public opinion would stamp this out before it ever got through Parliament.
...simply because, as we all know, it's completely infeasible. The Internet is simply too large to have a hope of maintaining an even vaguely accurate list of 'bad' sites. You would have to employ literally an army of public servants to surf around and maintain it. And anyone with even the slightest bit of technical knowledge can get around it in a flash (encryption, Tor, proxy, obtain from non-filtered mediums such as IRC/P2P, etc).
I strongly suspect what will happen is that the Rudd Govt. will ooo and ahh about it for a while so it appears that they haven't neglected their election promise re net filtering. But soon as they see how completely useless any proposed filtering scheme will be, it will quietly fade away into obscurity. Particuarly as they have bigger fish to fry right now (economic collapse and all).
Our politicians do have some very stupid ideas, but I'd bet pretty good money this will never actually get off the ground (in its current form at least) in Australia. Most of the public, and every single person in the ISP/telecomms industry is against it (for good reason - it costs money to implement, will slow down net access due to the need to run every request through the IP blacklist, and it shifts responsibility for content from users, to ISPs).
So it's scary in theory, but I'm not worried ... it won't get past the planning stage.
I don't. I live in Wisconsin half the year. I assure you there's plenty of snow to shovel there. But even in places in Australia where snow is an issue (say, Thredbo Village), it's not done by the land owners, generally. That was just the comparison I was making vis a vis the US.
Well they aren't really in the same category. I was just using it as an example that in the US you guys are a lot more community minded than here.
Here, if snow clearing had to be done, the local government would do it. It wouldn't be a homeowner's responsibility. Just the way things work under two different legal systems I guess.
Sigh...I'm aware of the nature of snow. Why does everyone think snow doesn't exist here? (Not to mention that I spend plenty of time in the US and Europe where it snows too).
In Australia, snow clearing would be the responsibility of the city authorities. Your property boundary ends at 2 metres from the side of the road here. The sidewalk is public land and would be thus maintained/cleared by local government. Whereas in some countries, I believe your property includes the sidewalk. So it makes sense that you would have to clear it yourself then.
Well I was saying that laws LIKE that would never exist here. Not that exact law.
But since you mentioned it, there is plenty of snow in Australia in the mountains. Snowdepths only 50 miles away or so from where I am are over 6 feet (it's the end of winter here ATM).
Not all Australians live in the tropics/on the beach ;)
The post you are replying to is an awful, racist troll to be sure.
But only a vanishingly small proportion of Australian settlers were convicts. There were a couple of convict shipments in the 1780s (immediately following American independence because they couldn't send convicts to America anymore). But the bulk of the population is decended from free settlers who came here, particularly during the gold rush periods in the 1800s.
The whole 'decended from criminals' thing is a popular American stereotype of Australians, but it's a bit of a misnomer. Far more British convicts were sent to the New World than were ever sent down under.
You probably already knew this. But many of us get ... irritated ... when American's say time after time the same old thing ;)
Yes indeed. Public/socialised health care is far from free. Countries with such a system (like my own, Australia) just make up for it with higher income tax.
Disadvantages: higher income tax than the US.
Advantages: free/very cheap medicare care when you need it, for everyone, including those that can't afford it.
There's no magic to either system ... nothing in life is free. You either pay for it now (by taxes), or later when you need it (medical bills). The difference is in how the system treats poor people. For the average Joe with a decent income, it works out about the same under either system.
Move to Internode if you can. I'm on Internode ADSL2+ in Canberra and I never get anything other than the full sync speed of my modem. Not sure who you are with now (sorta sounds like iinet?), but if you're less than 1km from the exchange you should be able to get some insane speeds (better than me, I'm about 2 km away).
Internet in the US 'feels' fast cause the ping times are so much less than what we are used to in Australia (since most content is close by, not the other side of the world). You can really feel the difference when web browsing in particular. But actual throughput is no better than in Australia, for the most part.
Well it depends on your needs. There tends to be a tradeoff between speed and download cap here. So for someone like you that downloads a lot, but doesn't mind waiting a bit for it to arrive, you can get a similar connection to what you have now, (large multi-hundred GB cap, but slower speeds).
Here's why I like 'faster speeds' over a higher cap:
a) When I download something, it's usually something I decide to get on the spur of the moment. Like "oops I missed an episode of that TV show a few hours ago ... I'll just download it from usenet". Then I can go and pull down that 500 MB in just a few minutes, and play it on my home theatre PC (connected to TV) straight away. But I don't download things that often. Maybe every 2-3 days I might grab a movie or TV show.
b) I like streaming HD video (an Australian TV station allows you to do this right from their site, and it requres at least 6 mbps to perform acceptably)
c) Even if I hit the cap, I CAN still download fast from the ISPs own mirror sites. About a third of what I download is unmetered (internal network traffic). Having a 700 MB Linux ISO come in in a few minutes is nice (and isn't counted towards my cap).
d) Gaming and web surfing benefit from faster connections (although admittedly the difference between 4 Mbps and 20 Mbps is minimal for these things).
e) Uploads aren't counted towards your cap. I do a lot of remote desktop/remote FTP access to my home from work which benefits from a fast connection. And I seed torrents all the time (again, uploads don't count against my quota, so I try to get a good ratio on all torrents).
BUT - it's totally dependant on how you use the net. I have friends like you who download huge amounts of content (torrents etc) but don't mind letting large downloads go overnight. As a consumer, buy the kind of service that suits you.
PS. 100mbps both ways, nice! Europe really has the best connections by far. I'd love that :)
Actually, the US does seem to have a much stronger sense of 'keep your local suburb/community respectable looking' than other countries I've lived in. (Lived in Australia, US, UK and Japan for various periods in my life)
I'm Australian by birth and the lawns here (Canberra) are mostly awful. Full of weeds, some are never mowed, most are dying because of the drought anyway.
In the US though (or at least in suburban Wisconsin and Illinois where I have been), everyone's lawn is immaculate. It's sorta freaky actually ... house after house of perfectly cut, beautifully lush green grass. First time I went there I actually said "omg, I thought it only looked like this in movies - it's actually like this??".
Whereas in Australia you can guarantee every 3rd or so house is a complete dump, old rusting cars parked out the front and piles of weeds and dirt.
This responsibility to your community extends into winter. I was interested to learn that homeowners have a ~legal obligation~ to clear snow from the sidewalk in front of their house within x hours of a snowfall, in the US. That kind of law would never, ever exist in Australia. Half of us just don't care about our yard or what it looks like.
But interestingly, in every other respect though, Australia is WAY more regulated than the US. Americans just love their lawns, I guess (and they have the climate to support growing a great one).
Well in a way, a lot of 'national' bandwidth is uncapped. Generally traffic within the ISPs own network is free (not counted against your cap). MOst ISPs have massive mirrors that host a LOT of stuff (e.g. full Tucows/Sourceforge/etc mirrors, debian and ubuntu repositories, etc). As an example, last month I used 17 GB 'metered' downloads, and around 10 GB unmetered/free. Generally about a third of my traffic is unmetered (mostly linux updates/ISOs).
I know that's not what you meant exactly, but it's on the same track. Traffic within your ISPs own network (which is usually a nation-wide network) doesn't cost them a cent, and thus it doesn't cost the customer a cent either.
Oh I fully agree. Preferably having 'neither' would be best, absolutely. But realistically, there's not much incentive for ISPs to do that. They like to oversell their bandwidth to make maximum profit.
So it's a false dichotomy, but a realistic one, given the business pressures on ISPs (here at least, I don't necessarily speak for everywhere). No ISP actually has enough backhaul capacity for everyone to max their connection out all the time (or even most of the time).
If the ISPs here suddenly removed their caps and allowed everyone unlimited downloads, performance would go to hell. I doubt they could physically upgrade the links fast enough, and demand will always outstrip supply. You give people more and they will take it, and then some.
Yes well, Telstra does have a crippling effect on our internet industry, no doubt about that. It's not ~corruption~, per se, though. It's just the fact they have such a huge segment of the market, as they used to be the monopoly providers. Anti-competitive, yes - corrupt, not really.
Actually, Telstra HATE the government, cause it was the government regulators that forced it to open its network to competition in the first place ;) The same competition that has increased caps ten-fold in about 3 years. In another decade I imagine Australia might be able to sustainably offer unlimited connections too, the way things are going.
Anyway good luck in your fight against caps there. I agree that it does seem like a backward step. Hopefully they won't catch on across the board in the US (it affects me too, cause I do live there half the year and may be there permanently in around 3 years time). Also, I hope Verizon gets around to rolling out FiOS in IL/WI by that time.
No I honestly don't think so (re collusion/corruption). Australia is one of the least corrupt countries in the world (very little corporate-government interaction or influence compared to most other places, although Scandinavia and NZ have us beat on that front).
The caps are there simply because of the peering/transit costs mentioned, as well as the fact that the last mile copper phone lines are owned by ex-government monopoly telco Telstra (think AT&T, but worse), which charges other ISPs a fair bit to use 'their' lines.
There have been ISPs offering true unlimited here. They all went bankrupt within 18 months. It just can't be done here on a sustainable and economic basis. The US is a different kettle of fish though and I do agree with you that caps aren't necessary there.
Other than the 'Telstra issue' though, ISP competition here seems to be working well and is leading to constantly increasing caps. Average caps for home connections have gone from 5 GB to 100s of GB in just a few years.
Keep in mind my 25 GB quota is small! Most of my friends have 100+ GB quotas, and they are affordable. I just chose 'faster' over 'more data'.
But yeah, I'm not fundamentally disagreeing with you. The US market needs more competition and can support unlimited internet. I was simply drawing the distinction between the two places, and saying that life with a cap isn't bad at all. But I'm not saying you shouldn't fight against them in the US.
I think it sucks that they are considering extra fees for going over the cap. They figured out in Australia a long time ago that just produced angry customers who didn't understand why their bill was so huge (usually their kid on P2P all day or something they didn't understand).
ISPs here all just shape your traffic once you go over the cap (i.e. reduce your speed). No extra charges. That way you don't get any nasty surprises come the end of the month ;)
Hang on - are they actually changing the service for EXISTING customers?
I don't know about the US admittedly, but here in Australia, ISPs can't change your plan once you're signed up. They can only make changes that affect people signing up for NEW plans.
Case in point, my parents are on an ancient plan that is no longer offered by their ISP that has unlimited downloads midnight-8am. It was sending the ISP bankrupt so they got rid of that plan. But they can't force people already ON that plan, to change to a new plan, and contractually they can't alter the existing plan's conditions and services in any way either.
So my parents can stay grandfathered on that old plan forever. And I have advised them to do so, cause it's better value than any newer plans out there.
If Comcast in the US can legally change the conditions for existing customers, then yeah, I'd be pissed off too. And I'd vote with my feet, and switch ISPs.
I agree (wrote a big rant about it just above actually: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=949503&cid=24827765)
My ISP has a cap, but it's blazing fast and uncongested, doesn't throttle or prioritise my traffic, and allows me to run servers. I like it that way.
It takes a good 10-15 years to recover the cost actually. But the ISPs aren't shafting us, I don't think. A decent sized download allowance is very affordable (which wasn't the case 5 years ago, but things are a lot better now).
Also we literally can't build international links quick enough to keep up with the rapid increase in traffic over the last few years (youtube etc.). In the long term, they will pay for themselves but it DOES take a long time.
Remember, you are building a 10,000 km long cable to service an Australian population less than a single large US city.
With respect, I was just stating my opinion. But if a cap is unsuitable for your needs, then hell yes, vote with your feet and leave that company for one that suits your needs more. I'm all for that.
I'm not saying 'live with it' and I'm certainly not congratulating you. I'm just saying its not as bad as you think.
Also, I was saying I kind of prefer the situation here, not that I live in ISP hell. No evil traffic tampering and a choice of 20+ highly competitive ISPs in most places (e.g. I can pay for large caps like 200GB+ if I wanted, I simply don't need that much though).
I agree that the situation in the US seems amazingly anti-competitive though. As stated, I can choose from 20+ ISPs where I am. But it seems in the US there's usually only 3-4 per area. In some areas, only 1 DSL and 1 cable option.
Disclaimer: I spend half my year in Australia and half my year in the US (Chicago area). My comments on the state of US broadband reflect what I have experienced in that area.
Hi all. My first post on Slashdot even though I've been reading it since the late 90s. Finally got around to signing up. I'm Australian and as most Slashdotters know, Australian ISPs all impose caps.
Personally, I'm on a 25 GB per month cap (after which my speed is slowed, but I am not charged more). My monthly usage generally ends up at around 18-22 GB, without me needing to monitor my usage or worry about it. My connection supports 2 people who are both heavy browsers. Plenty of youtube, streaming radio etc. Perhaps a TV show from a torrent every second day. Skype on the weekends to call my family overseas.
Basically, unless you are a MAJOR torrent leecher, you will find that you won't have any problems whatsoever staying under 250 GB (Comcast). I have one tenth of that cap, download movies/TV shows every other day, surf heavily, run a home FTP server, but I have no issues staying under 25 GB. Keep in mind that my uploads are not capped (not sure if Comcast's 250 GB includes uploads or not).
A poster above mentioned the issue of people launching attacks on your connection that flood you with unrequested packets. Yes this would be counted against your usage. But I've never heard of it being an issue...certainly hasn't happened to me in my 8+ years of using capped broadband. In the very unlikely circumstance that it did happen, call the ISP and they will be able to see the attack in their logs, and here, they would be reasonable and not charge you for it.
Now onto the subject of why I think caps, provided they are clearly stated, are generally a good thing!
Contrary to some people's knee-jerk reaction however, the reason Australia has caps is not because it's a technology backwater. Far from it actually - DSL speeds here are generally faster than in most parts of the US (although I admit, FiOS rocks, where it's available).
Australian bandwidth caps basically exist because:
a) most English speaking content comes from the US (i.e. most traffic is international, vs mostly domestic in the US); and
b) we are an island a long way from anywhere. Those undersea cables don't pay for themselves. Peering and transit costs here a an order of magnitude higher than in the US. ISPs thus have to impose monthly download caps to stop a few high volume users sending them bankrupt.
But on the plus side, because we pay for what we use, there are a number of advantages. My ISP, like most in Australia:
- Is far less contended than most US ISPs. Download speeds are always meet my connected speed. I have an 8/1 Mbps connection, and I get that speed, all the time (~850 kb/s downstream and slightly over 100 kb/s up). Whereas some US ISPs, when I've used them, seem sluggish in peak hours.
- Never fiddles with my traffic. No bittorrent deprioritising, no deep packet inspection, no random throttling or any of that nonsense. In the US though, well you know all about the shenanigans some of your ISPs have been up to.
- Allows me to run anything whatsoever on my connection. Whereas most US DSL providers I have read the AUP for have 20 clauses about how you cant run servers etc.
The other thing to note is that because we get charged for what we use, ISPs can allow us faster speeds here, without worrying that we will completely trash their network by leeching 24/7. In the US, your DSL connections mostly seem to be 3 or 6 Mbps, with maybe 768kbps up. In Australia, DSL is generally from 8, up to 24 Mbps down (ADSL2+), and if you have Annex M support on your modem/ISP, you can get up to 2.5 Mbps upload. Personally, I'd rather faster speeds with a cap, than slow speeds but unlimited downloads and annoying packet tampering.
The final thing to note is that virtually all ISPs here have massive download mirrors which aren't counted against your quota. For instance, my ISP has full Sourceforge, MajorGeeks etc. mirrors that contain most large things I would ever want to download anyway.
So yeah - don't fear your (very generous!) download caps over there. It's good news for you. Get the 0.1% of people off the network that abuse the hell out of it, and speeds will be faster for the rest of you.