Bandwidth Caps Can Cause Risky Decisions and Uncertainty

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Raidur

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I'm no fan of bandwidth of data caps, however...

If people are streaming music or downloading a new game/app over security updates, they need only one thing.

Education. Forced (a bad experience) or taught common sense.

Silly that people do that, yet I'm not surprised.
 

mcvf

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@Raidur: But, if the only thing they can afford to download would be updates, what is the point of updates? I can imagine that with 1GB cap to update or not update is a decision to take. I have found myself once in that position already (mobile data plans) and I decided not to update my phone and applications and postphone it. Granted, it was not security update, but still, I tried avoid to waist my month cap. If I can do that, I am sure many others will too if cornered with too limited plans.
 

alidan

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sense windows xp, and sense i gained common sense, i havent had a single computer get screwed due to virus or malware.

i dont think blindly "i have to upgrade because newer is better" is the right mentality to have.

take a video game i have, disgaea 3, i have an older version of the core game because of this.
there is a world with a 1/3 chance of spawning a clone
you use an item with a 1/10 chance of duping the clone item
so this adds length to the game artificially,
keep in mind this is very end game maxing characters im talking about.
a patch came out, and made that 1/3 chance to a every round there is a clone.
a patch after that took that away.
so i never "upgraded"
again, keep in mind this is very end game character maxing, something that can take up to 30 hours for each character. the difference that made is just speeding the process up.

there is also software i use, acdsee, that doesn't play nice with amd cards... every few amd driver versions it breaks panning speed, every few versions it fixes it. so what do i do? i find a version that works, and unless something is broken, i don't upgrade, in one case for over a year.

blindly upgrading can land you with a downgrade and a hell of a hard time getting the old version back.
 

djgamex

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i Live in South Africa and the internet is just so dam expensive then the windows wants 100MB For updates and the Av wants 50 Mb for updates and so forth 1Gb costs about R150 to R300 depending on the isp that is about $20 USA PER GB. The ISPs are the culprits in forcing us into this way of using the net we cant afford to waste those precious MBs.
 

killerclick

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Download (not bandwidth) caps are ridiculous. In Europe, pretty much every ISP offers unlimited downloads as a base package. If my ISP tried to impose any kind of download limitation, I would drop them the same day.

Networks should invest in capacity or be punished by the consumers.
 

Pherule

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[citation][nom]killerclick[/nom]Download (not bandwidth) caps are ridiculous. In Europe, pretty much every ISP offers unlimited downloads as a base package. If my ISP tried to impose any kind of download limitation, I would drop them the same day.Networks should invest in capacity or be punished by the consumers.[/citation]
So what happens when every single ISP in the country imposes caps, as it is still in many countries? What happens if the ISP covering your area is the ONLY ISP that covers your area? You can't always just drop an ISP. (Oh and they ARE called 'bandwidth' caps in preference to 'download' caps, despite the fact that it's referring to the cap limit, not speed limit)

It's not just the caps that are the limiting factor however. While Europeans enjoy 100Mbits up/down, there are some countries still stuck with 384Kbit ADSL. You try downloading Netlimiter and limiting your connection speed to 384Kbits/sec and then try browsing the web and a few downloads. Suddenly 50MB becomes a 'big' download, not something you click on a whim.

I've heard people say "move to another country then". Oh sure, like anyone's going to move to another country JUST for Internet.
 

spookie

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[citation][nom]djgamex[/nom]i Live in South Africa and the internet is just so dam expensive then the windows wants 100MB For updates and the Av wants 50 Mb for updates and so forth 1Gb costs about R150 to R300 depending on the isp that is about $20 USA PER GB. The ISPs are the culprits in forcing us into this way of using the net we cant afford to waste those precious MBs.[/citation]


Sorry mate but it is really not always that expensive in South Africa. I only pay R199 ($25 for 10Gb (and it's wireless, not adsl) go get yourself a contract from 8ta, you really won't regret it.
 

frostmachine

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I live in a download capped world. Software updates are disabled for all except essential stuff. AV n the like. Ads are aggressively blocked. N I try to avoid ads/flash heavy sites. Also I use Opera in Turbo mode to compress sites.
 

djgamex

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8Ta doe's not work in the area I'm living and telkom is still in the stone age so i'm stuck with MTN as they are the only one with a decent speed.
 

hardcore_gamer

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My Cap is 75GB per month. But I use it up in 2 weeks. ISPs really need to stop this bandwidth cap BS. They are too lazy to upgrade their cables/hardware to increase their BW as the demand increases.
 

redemptionse

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I wish had your internet connections. The only viable broadband option for me is wireless, 3g/4g and the like. I'm paying $90/month for a 10 GB cap. With daily browsing I reach 8-9 GB easily by the end of the month. I haven't been able to install windows updates yet because they're like 2 GB. To download bigger files I either use my smartphone (which has unlimited data and I use around 30 GB per month for watching tv shows) or I take my laptop to somewhere with a real connection. My life sucks
 

angryfingertips

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Caps to me mean that the telco and cable companies are just trying to raise their rates in a backdoor sort of way and a way to save the cable TV from internet streaming If you are really wanting to base it on use, you would charge for how much is used, like electric companies do. I fear that one day in the future we will all be paying per byte we d/l. Which is really awful since programs get bigger and bigger over time.
 

demonhorde665

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"A solution may be to provide customers better tools that analyze bandwidth usage, Chetty suggested."

BULLSHIT, A solution ? the only solution is for corporate communication companies to stop being blood sucking butt f---king leeches, that try to shake every dollar they can out of consumers. I swear i respect criminals more than these guys . at least criminals honestly stick a gun in your face when they rob you instead smiling at you, acting chummy and telling you thank you for servicing my d---,m in ever so clearly disguised words.
 

techguy911

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Some isp's trick customers into buying faster connection but fail to mention that your monthly cap is half, happened to me upped my bandwidth to 30mbps and my download cap dropped to half and since there are 6 people using the internet that cap didn't take long to go over.
The bill was double what i was paying for before and told them to change it back to what it was before.
This type of marketing is just crooked sure you can download much faster but not as much.
 

hoofhearted

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I would think that caps would hurt the advertising industry the most. Especially when it comes to wireless in the US that has similar caps. I use Adaway for android which even block ad traffic within apps.
 
G

Guest

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lol this news is about a month or more old.. but ya bandwidth caps. to heck with them!
 

dukenukem

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these capacity caps are ridiculous, in the world of ever increasing speeds. the faster the speed you get, the faster you burn through your monthly cap. simple as that.

ever use your brain, ISPs?
 
[citation][nom]mrpijey[/nom]9GB cap... wow... it takes me about two minutes to use that up. Sure sucks to live there if you're an Internet user...[/citation]

9GB in two minutes? That's an average of 600Mb/s. That's one heck of an internet connection you have there... At least 750Mb or 1Gb. I envy your internet a little.

[citation][nom]angryfingertips[/nom]Caps to me mean that the telco and cable companies are just trying to raise their rates in a backdoor sort of way and a way to save the cable TV from internet streaming If you are really wanting to base it on use, you would charge for how much is used, like electric companies do. I fear that one day in the future we will all be paying per byte we d/l. Which is really awful since programs get bigger and bigger over time.[/citation]

We just need to then implement incredible compression algorithms much more into our internet. With CPU performance increasing and GPUs getting more general-purpose, the computers can more than handle decompressing lots of data quickly enough (you just need to have storage that can keep up and all that takes is having two hard drives, one to download to and one to decompress too, so you can just have a spare hard drive that can write a download to and then read it to be decompressed to your main drive. Or, a single SSD or RAM drive can do the same job).

Websites need to compress communications to client devices (especially updates and other downloads, big and small) and such. That could reduce the impact of ISPs doing something as *heinous* as capping our internet even more than they do now (for those of us who are already capped) greatly. Opera Turbo is a step in the right direction for this. This would also help people who share an internet connection with several or even many other people so that they can afford a fast connection (not a too uncommon thing to do) because each person would be far less taxing on the internet connection.

A problem with this would be that it increases performance requirements for both the client and server side, but for the most part, that can probably be alleviated in a multitude of ways.

Of course, if ISPs would update their service regularly, then this would be much less of a problem, but both upgrading and doing this would reduce load on the ISPs and would mean that people get much more out of their connections, so it could be a win-win. We already know that GPUs can be ridiculously fast (especially for the amount ofpower that they use) for this type of thing, so why not make greater use of it? Even lower end GPUs, such as HD 4000 and Llano, could do the trick well enough (although probably not at the same time as gaming, unless dedicated compression hardware is added, like how we are moving towards dedicated hardware for encoding/transcoding, such as Intel's Quick-Sync, Nvidia's NVENC, and hopefully soon, AMD's VCE) and chances are than even weaker GPUs, such as HD 2500, can do it, albeit maybe not as quickly.

Point is, there are ways to both have the ISPs (assholes some of them may be) and the users happy. Problem is, it would take a lot of work. However, many things that take a lot of work are all the more worth doing because of it, yes? Does anyone have any thoughts about any of this?
 

leakingpaint

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I'm in South Africa,

I'm not sure what other countries pay but i can tell you that I spend $136 (R950) a month on a 4gb uncapped connection. Sometimes it's ok, other times I have to unplug my router every couple of hours :( Where I work we have around 60 pcs all fighting over a 1024k connection and a 12gb cap. Our exchange doesn't support anything over 1mb...

There are no other options! It's so bad when you move you have to first phone the terrible company that controls EVERYTHING to ask if where you are moving supports anything over 1mb...(ahem Telkom)

For an uncapped connection running at 10mb its about $337 per month.
 

Snow_Patrol

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I'm a South African, and for the most part capped internet is a part of our lives. However, our uncapped alternatives are just as capable as those in the US, but we're a country that is still moving up in the world from a third-world outlook on things. Internet connectivity isn't as rife as I'd like it to be, but we're certainly getting what we need from cellular companies and lower data and line rental costs as more international cabling, Blackberry handsets and bandwidth lands on our shores.

But shutting off updates isn't such a bad thing in retrospect and many users are actually savvy enough to stay away from dodgy websites if its a home or personal connection. Morons at workplaces with uncapped DSL are the ones to blame for the majority of virus issues as are the leechers at LANs who never check their AV anyway.
 
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