Implementing such throttling mechanism must be expensive: development, QA, deployment, maintenance, support staff,... If you disconnect your users because of a bug in the throttling system, that would be counter productive.
But it is still cheaper and less risky than improving the network? Is that really an investment in the right direction?
There is not enough discussion about the network usage projection for the next few years. If throttling is already needed today, what about in 5 years?
Today, from home (2 adults, 2 kids) we have hard time staying under the 5gb Verizon limit (wireless broadband): - Running OS updates (the last linux-loaded laptop update took 500mb) and all the app updates; - Watching your friends pictures, videos (I have to tell my wife to restrain YouTube usage to just few clip a month); - Watching/Reading the news (more and more multimedia stuff on the different sites); - Gaming (My kids love Webkinz that seems to draw quite some bandwith); - Weekend Skype video conf with remote relatives (I have to enforce a 15 minute limit); - Downloading Podcasts; - And simply working from home (exchanging docs, files, web search...).
I monitor our network usage such that we stay under 5gb. But that's tight. We were in the 2 to 3 gb a month a year ago. We are now near 4gb. But we are not even streaming music (Pandora, Last.fm) or using systems like Hulu. We might be an above average consumer type today, but that's just going to continue growing. What about Video on demand (Netflix, AppleTV)?
If throttling is needed today, that's scary for the near term future.
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Implementing such throttling mechanism must be expensive: development, QA, deployment, maintenance, support staff,... If you disconnect your users because of a bug in the throttling system, that would be counter productive.
But it is still cheaper and less risky than improving the network? Is that really an investment in the right direction?
There is not enough discussion about the network usage projection for the next few years. If throttling is already needed today, what about in 5 years?
Today, from home (2 adults, 2 kids) we have hard time staying under the 5gb Verizon limit (wireless broadband):
- Running OS updates (the last linux-loaded laptop update took 500mb) and all the app updates;
- Watching your friends pictures, videos (I have to tell my wife to restrain YouTube usage to just few clip a month);
- Watching/Reading the news (more and more multimedia stuff on the different sites);
- Gaming (My kids love Webkinz that seems to draw quite some bandwith);
- Weekend Skype video conf with remote relatives (I have to enforce a 15 minute limit);
- Downloading Podcasts;
- And simply working from home (exchanging docs, files, web search...).
I monitor our network usage such that we stay under 5gb. But that's tight. We were in the 2 to 3 gb a month a year ago. We are now near 4gb. But we are not even streaming music (Pandora, Last.fm) or using systems like Hulu. We might be an above average consumer type today, but that's just going to continue growing. What about Video on demand (Netflix, AppleTV)?
If throttling is needed today, that's scary for the near term future.
TT