Personally, it is not the caps I fear. I fear metered usage. When they decide to institute that is the day my home isp usage stops. Hopefully it will never come to that, but should it happen I will be disappointed.

[/quote]there are those users who eat up most of the traffic, thus penalizing the honest customers in the process.[/quote]

Are you saying that because I'd possibly use more than 150GB per month that I'm a dishonest internet user? Comeon, that's just Absurd. Gamers, netflix subscribers, ect generally use well over 5-10GB a day. So I guess that makes me dishonest, huh?
*Looks up* Kevin Parrish, great job at nothing.

Absolutely, I'd rather have anything but metering by itself.

It is pretty ridiculous that 5% of their customers use so much of their capacity though. The limits they mentioned did not sound too bad either. Remember, thats apparently 20GB for a normal user on one of the lower plans, not a power user.

I would think the perfect solution would be to just meter the bandwidth past the cap, as opposed to charging overages. So for example a power user exceeds say, 100gb in a month, and is then limited to a 768kbps symmetric pipe.

If you know what the limit is and your restriction level afterwards I think that is more than fair. No one will want to plain stop using the internet for the rest of the month and metering SURE beats overage charges.

I don't think they mean that kind of honest. I think the honest people are the ones who 'fit' into their business model. Nothing is unlimited.

If everyone on a landline phone switch picks up their phone at the same time, many of them will not a dial tone. Likewise...if the majority of products failed, no one would sell extended warranties. Everything is percentages and ratios, and most everything is sold on an oversaturated basis.

Internet service is no different. Acting like you are fighting the man here when an ISP is being up front about the fact that they don't like your definition of 'unlimited' is, well, naive.

Well, is this something our new, hip and tech savvy president going to tackle?

BTW, I love how the ISPs can charge you early termination fee if you “modify” the contract but they have no quarrel modifying the contract without consulting you. It is akin to ordering a McChicken sandwich and received a chicken nugget because they changed the contract.

I pay TWC/RoadRunner $36/month for no-limit-I'm-aware-of 8Mbps service, and if they screw with that I'll be looking to go elsewhere. All I'll need is an elsewhere that's worth going to, and that will be difficult...

Fuck you AT&T. Stop penalizing users for your inadequate infrastructure. If you have 10mbps download speeds, you should be able to utilize that 24/7/52 if you want. Stop selling people a service if you can't provide it. If you can't support more users on your existing hardware, then don't sign any new ones up until you upgrade. Don't just limit everyone because of your greed.

it's not illegal to use a lot of band width so stop crying you rich babies.

I think I read somewhere that the additional usage charge is $1/GB over the cap. Really, that's nothing. Here it's $150/GB for the cheap plans, or for the mainstream/"high end" plans (meaning 50GB for $100/month or so) you get slowed to 64/128/256k depending on the plan.

Worst case scenario (and totally real) example: I can get a 200MB/month (yes, MB) plan here for $29.95/month. If I was to download 1.2GB, I'd be paying $179.95 for that month. That is apparently legal and justifiable.

It's a shame to see that the infection of internet caps has finally spread to the US. It makes it all the more difficult to get Aus off our ridiculous caps if you start using them.

What does the BW cap bring to me? ATT is saving a LOAD of money if 50% of the traffic is reduced. Are we getting cheaper plans because of that? No. We're getting less for the same price. This is what pisses me the MOST!

I agree with Randomizer.. The speed and download limits in America are well above the rest of the world, especially considering the price you pay for that connection. For that 8 meg, all you can eat connection, instead of $36 a month, you'd be paying over $100 here in Australia.

We pay $59.95 a month for 20GB. If you go over that, you get throttled to 64kbps. Dial up speed.

So when you guys say 'oh no! a 150GB cap!' I'd be saying 'hell yes! a 150GB cap! Please give it to me!'

Australia has sh*te internet.

They have to upgrade the network at some point, simply capping individuals will only work as a band-aid, eventually you have to upgrade. Two people have said that this isn't that bad, but I'm pretty sure I remember hearing either here or else where that the US is actually drastically behind many other countries in the speed race, and yet the prices are only slightly lower. (sounds like Australia is really in the crapper though)

I think they have to be honest about what service they are providing. if it is unlimited then they'd better deliver. If they can offer another plan at a cheaper price then maybe it's worth it.

If only 5% of the people are actually making full use of the product being offered, then consider yourself lucky. If only 5% of people actually filled up their trash cans every week the trash company (whoever that is in your are) would be pretty excited, cause most charge a flat fee no matter how full your trash can or dumpster.

I've been trying to find a report I saw once which showed how the top countries ranked compared to each other. The idea was to show which counties had internet adequate for today's uses and which were adequate for the future. Only Japan passed the latter test, and the US just sqeezed past the former. Australia was somewhere down the back end

1 day 9 hours 50 minutes duration.
49,764,292 bytes sent, 512,271,043 bytes received.

Anyone care to convert this to tell me my usage in 1 day 10 hour time?
Id rate this as a light usage day.

Nvm i think i figured it out with the help of a friend.

5.24 GB's
do in a 30 day month id easily use 158GB's. Please note i use 3 computers and i have gaming systems also...1's light use tho. Im estimating my usage at 356GB's a month? Am i considered a hog?

That's about 10 days usage for me

For that duration it was mostly MMO gaming. No downloading at all.
Then add a a comp by family member gaming also, + the gaming systems and other computer that gets random use. Sigh.

Oh, I meant 10 days with 3 users (one fairly light though). We have to be stingy with the caps we get, or we'll get hit with the dreaded speed "shaping". Fortunately my online gaming doesn't involve the constant high-bandwidth usage of MMOs (mostly things like Battlefield and COD), and I also don't use Steam so I avoid the perpetual and insanely slow updates it gets for itself and games. File downloading is my main source of bandwidth use, and even that is kept to a minimum. I just go nuts at the end of the billing month to use up anything left over

49,764,292 bytes sent, 512,271,043 bytes received = 536MB not 5.24GB.

That said, I can't wait until the technology at CERN ("the grid") finally starts to trickle down to us. And if they start limiting, they better put that in their advertising. All the advertising I see for ISPs says unlimted. I have unlimited server from Charter, and if they start a limit (or already have one) they better tell me, and start advertising that.

any gaming or work done on your network through your local router contributes to that total but your isp does not see that...they only see stuff that is communicated from the ip address that they assign to you...

-c

Thank you Tindytim, you beat me to it

You people need to UNDERSTAND the difference between GB, gb, bytes, and bits, geez.

That's not the numbers your original post indicated, I think you're off by a factor of 10. Your original post indicated rougly 560 Megabytes of throughput (up+down) which is 0.56 GB. In a month you'd use about 16 GB... you are not a bandwidth hog.

I am occasionally a bandwidth hog (20GB over the last 4 days) but even so... averaged over a month my usage is in the 50GB-60GB neighborhood.

To the guy who seemed to think that netflix and gaming could use all that bandwidth:

Gaming bandwidth is typically under 20kbps... which means even if you played online 10 hours per day for 7 days per week you'd still use under 3GB of bandwidth. Online gaming will not make you a bandwidth hog.

Netflix uses 1-3 mbps of bandwidth... so if you watched netflix online 10 hours a day 7 days a week you'd use between 100 and 300GB of bandwidth. That would make you a bandwidth hog but it would also indicate a total lack of a life - a fraction of a fraction of a percent of folks could potentially fit this category. If you're that into watching movies and TV you in all likelihood have a much better quality way of getting your media (HD satellite or cable).

However... if you're downloading pirated uncompressed movies and games or running a torrent site hosting wares... you can and will use up a whole lot of bandwidth in a hurry. The percentage of online users doing this is several orders of magnitude higher I'd guess than the percentage of folks spending their whole life watching streaming netflix.

So congratulations if you're one of the "honest" users of 150gb/month in bandwidth... you're in a very select crowd relative to the other folks using that kind of bandwidth.

I find it pretty funny how little people understand about the tool that they're using... someone above exclaimed how he felt entitled to use 100% of his available bandwidth 24x7. Well you AREN'T. Go price a dedicated pipe and you'll find out how much a 24x7 10mbps connection will cost... I'll give you a hint: you can't afford it.

The entire industry is based on a shared pipe, you occasionally use a lot but often very little, other folks using that same pipe occasionally use a lot but often little. When you need it you get it so it FEELS like a dedicated line, but it aint. If you hog your connection 100% 24x7 you're denying your neighbors access and violating the basic functioning premise. ISP's can and should make sure that paying customers aren't being denied access because some other customer is abusing his/her connection.

Having said that, there needs to be a reasonable buffer that will allow VALID uses of the technology to be carried out without risk of throttling or bandwidth caps. Netflix streaming at reasonable levels should not run you the risk of hitting the cap. Online gaming should not run you the risk... IMO that means caps should be in the 100GB range. 20gb, 50gb ... not enough to support valid uses of the technology and they smack of a marketing ploy to force folks to pay more for their connection.

I pay 60 bucks a month for cable internet; approximately 4.5 Mb/s unlimited service. My provider had better not even dare cap me. Then again I live in a rural area and DSL isn't available. It's either them or Hughes Net, which means no Xbox live. I guess I am just screwed.

This is just a way to increase profits. Piss off 5% of customers and save 50% of bandwidth to sell off to more regular use customers without having to add more equipment or run more fiber; This equals greater return of operating expenses and equipment. It's business. It's the way good business stay in business. Sucks for the consumers that it affects Though.

However, I don't see how 5% affect the other 95%, unless they are paying a higher price for bandwidth because some users are hogging it and they have to add more equipment. If that is the case they should reduce the cost of High Speed when the cap is implemented. Yeah right!, when 's the last time the phone company lowered the cost of anything.

The cap brings average people better speeds due to less bw saturation. Mega users will try to flee (good luck, the cap will follow you, until there are no "unlimited services") or they moderate. Gamers don't use 150GB a month. At under 2GB per movie, that's 75 movies a month. If you have the time to spare watching 75 movies then...................

DFGum, a little over 500MB a day is nothing. That's like 15GB a month. Now if you want to share your connection with 10 neighbors, you might almost hit the limit.

Not all, but many of the people who use 150+ GB a month are people who pirate shows and movies. It's like a drug for them, they're constantly downloading and uploading video even if they don't watch it. They remember'd they like some movie and download it because they can. Imagine all the DVD's you have sitting there... these people will DL whole libraries. It causes a problem for others because of the bandwidth hit. Back in the day's when it was just MP3's it wasn't a huge bandwidth problem. MP3's are smaller.

Now these people are re-pirating their collection in 1080i.

I dont have to understand it, i was showed a online site by a friend, and entered my numbers in and it showd me a table conversion to every other format, bits bytes of mega giga and tera size.

[citation][nom]D_Kuhn[/nom]That's not the numbers your original post indicated, I think you're off by a factor of 10. Your original post indicated rougly 560 Megabytes of throughput (up+down) which is 0.56 GB. In a month you'd use about 16 GB... you are not a bandwidth hog.

You might be right i brought up my history and found i entered a extra 0 into the calculator. (Also i rounded) which is why i entered 0's instead of less confuseable 349458ish stuff. Either way its a light day that was.

Gamers do use a ton of bandwidth... the more modern the game the more bandwidth used.

With my isp i can hit 150 a month i get limited status till end of month i called and complained and thats when i found this out. 1st question they asked me was are you a gamer? I said yes and they said i shoudl move my package up to a gamer level package with im at 1.5up 768down due to funds but the gamer was 2x as much but was 6up 1.5down no caps.

WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN WHEN MORE COMPANYS START OFFERING HIGHER BANDWIDTH CONTENT. What is netflix supposed to do? Might as well not ever offer to buy a HD movie and download it 3 movies you will cap out.