Lourdes

Comcast to limit customers' broadband usage | Technology | Internet | Reuters

Kinda saw this coming eventually. Then it occured to me zOMG how much bandwidth does WoW, SL and Ventrilo use.

I've been told wow between 5-20 mb per hour.

Anyone know how much SL can use per hour at max?

__________________


LourdesDenimore.com
My Flickr Stream
About Me

Aodhan McDunnough

Unless you move around way too much SL won't hit 250GB.

ZATZAi

This will kill HD movie rentals, GigaOm surmized this is the real reason for the limit and I agree.

__________________
- ZATZAi

Aodhan McDunnough

Comcast says only 1% of their users will be affected. That probably means the heavy torrent users or very heavy movie viewers. 250GB would translate to perhaps 1 HD movie per day so that's still a pretty generous volume.

Walker

I measured SL's bandwidth usage when my old ISP started limiting monthly data transfer, and the most damaging activities were teleporting to different sims (I'd often get a 20-25MB hit each time), and listening to music or video feeds (which is a bad idea anyway if you only have so much bandwidth available).

I was quite a heavy user back then but I rarely consumed more than 40GB a month.

The limit just made me switch to a genuinely unlimited LLU ISP.

Disgustingly, the ISP with the bandwidth limitation was advertised as unlimited, and that wasn't particularly unusual then (not sure about now, I think the ASA may have closed the loophole that allowed them to mislead like that).

ZATZAi

I watch a lot of HD shows on Xbox Live. I just fired up the box to check, but a 27 minute show is 1.2GBs, so one could expect a movie to be 5.4GB. Which translates to about 46 movies a month which would be fine if that was all you were doing. If you weren't also downloading music, playing games and etc. And of course this leaves out the biggest thing that I just mentioned, which is not HD movies that people watch maybe a couple times a week at most. But HD Television which people watch several episodes of a day.

Brenda Connolly

I'd be pressed to use 250 GB in 6 months let alone 1.

__________________

Malachi

This is probably closer to the reason behind quotas; Comcast is a cable TV and HDTV provider first and foremost and internet video hurts their primary products.

So while Network Neutrality decisions languish in the government, Comcast goes ahead and becomes non-neutral. Not really surprising.

Eirik

Second Life usually costs me between 300 and 900 MB bandwith a day.

That is for about 5-6 hours online. The huge variability is dependant on how often I teleport, and on whether I play streaming media.

All in all, I use 30 GB a month just surfing, streaming and Second Life. Anything I actually download (torrents etc) is on top of that.

My internet subscription used to be 30 GB included in subscription + 5€/5GB above the limit.

But it's been upped to 60 GB now + 5€/5GB extra.

I hate internet usage in this country. The entire infrastructure is owned by a duopoly - one company owns every cable line in the country, the other owns every telephone/DSL line in the country. And for years they've been ensuring that internet here is about the most expensive and the most worthless in Europe. If it wasn't for our state secretary of technology threatening to cut funding, the limit on bandwith usage would probably still be 10 GB a month. Luckily we currently have a good guy in that department - let's hope he stays here for a while.

Aodhan McDunnough

The main reason is not necessarily their programming services, Comcast and other ISPs are having problems with very high levels of P2P traffic.

Walker

Strange that the P2P problems are only hitting over there now.

In the UK, I'd say the problems peaked around 2004/2005, with users getting throttled or their contracts being terminated for excessive use -- mainly due to P2P.

Just as BT Wholesale and the ISP sector in general got their acts together, BBC launched iPlayer, and news entities like Sky decided to concentrate more on video content, and now those services are being blamed for the looming bandwidth crisis.

Lordfly Digeridoo

Comcast has been doing this for months, if not years. There's been an "unofficial" cap of 200gb that if you passed it you'd get either throttled down to peanuts or get a very nice letter telling them you're rocking too hard.

I'm a heavy, heavy downloader and I'm hard pressed to downlaod 100 gb in a month.

__________________
http://www.lordfly.com/

Aodhan McDunnough

I'm sure it's been around in the US for some time, it's just that I think the traffic is more spread out and the bandwidth of the hardware is higher so it became a noisy problem only more recently.

Matty Luminos

There is currently only one genuinely unlimited provider in the UK, and that's AOL. All others advertise unlimited, but have clauses in the small print about "fair use" and they are actually capped at some value they refuse to disclose. That's why I'm on AOL.

__________________
meow.

Richie Waves

Ive 5gb a day limit.. I would only get a warning if I totally took the piss day after day..

Walker

Wrong!

Be* have never, not once, invoked their Fair Use Policy, which only exists to cover their backs should severe network problems occur, and heavy users add to the problems. I'm aware of a handful of users who have tested the constraints and downloaded in excess of 700GB in a month without any comeback whatsoever.

Also, AOL in the UK absolutely DO have bandwidth limitations, and throttle heavy users. This is only to be expected from any ISP reselling the BT Wholesale product (which they do).

And straight from the horse's mouth:

How will it be managed specifically? - AOL Help

I believe the 'speed restriction' takes you down to ISDN speeds for a month, so you effectively don't have broadband until it's lifted.

If you ask AOL's tech support, you'll find that the download limits are 20GB/m for AOL Silver, 40GB/m for AOL Gold, and 60GB for AOL Platinum.

They never publish these figures (Demon are the same), because that would really land them in the shit with the ASA.

Joshua Nightshade

Ugh AOL.

__________________

Walker

Can you still only connect to the internet via their stupid client?

I remember trialling it in 1999, and being unable to connect to the internet with Linux because there was only a Windows client.

Joshua Nightshade

I dunno. Last time I used AOL was in 2002 and it took me three hours of phone calls to cancel my account.

Walker

Is that all? It took me three months of faux legal threats to escape Demon's clutches after I discovered their 60GB/m bandwidth limit.

Walker

Oh heck, that ISDN speed restriction was a bit optimistic.

Apparently AOL throttle you down to 50kb/s between 5pm and midnight if you exceed their unpublished limits.

I guess their "peak hours" aren't as ridiculous as other companies though. With Demon I think the period was 9am til 1am, so you really were stuffed for a month if they decided to throttle the connection.

Brenda Connolly

You can cancel online now, I did a couple of years ago.

WarKirby Magojiro

Thankfully not. My grandmother has AOL (and swears it's the best ISP in the world -_-) And I managed to use firefox just fine while on there. But the AOL browser makes itself the default, and seems to repeatedly launch itself every now and then while you're connected, like it expects to be used.

__________________

WarKirby Magojiro

Protip. There are NO unlimited providers, ANYWHERE. All resources in the world are limited, and no ISP can defy the laws of physics and pull more cabling out of their ass.

Walker

Yes there are unlimited providers Warkirby, in the sense they'll let you download all you possibly can at a certain speed within a set time-frame. I think you're confusing "unlimited" with "infinite".

It is quite true though that some providers are more unlimited than others.

Demon, AOL, Tiscali, etc., have been throttling users for years and continue to do so because they have to pay BT for all bandwidth used. They all have different "unpublished" limits though, no doubt because some are more oversubscribed than others. (Ie. They're not buying enough bandwidth from BT to support their userbases.)

I've already told you about one genuinely unlimited ISP. They have a proven track record so far, and they differ from all the above ISPs in that they cut BT out of the equation altogether (beyond using their exchanges to house their equipment), and manage/maintain their own national network.