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In Japan, a 900 Gigabyte Upload Cap, Downloads Uncapped
Posted by
timothy
on Sat Jul 05, 2008 03:45 PM
from the no-such-luck-in-tennessee dept.
from the no-such-luck-in-tennessee dept.
Raindeer writes "While the Broadband Bandits of the US are contemplating bandwidth caps between 5 gigabyte and 40 gigabyte per month, the largest telco in Japan has gone ahead and laid down some heavy caps for Japan's broadband addicts. From now on, if you upload more than 30 gigabyte per day, your network connection may be disconnected. Just think of it ... if you're in Japan and want to upload the HD movie you shot of yesterday's wedding, you soon might hit the limit. The downloaders do not face similar problems."
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Bandwidth cap? Not here (Score:3, Informative)
No such thing in Finland. I can upload and download 24/7 without any restrictions, and I've never heard of any ISP enforcing a cap.
Re:Bandwidth cap? Not here (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Agreed, Finland is a great country for file-sharing.
Yeah, if you forget about Lex Karpela, the local implementation of Euro-DMCA. And the Finreactor case [wikipedia.org].
Re:Bandwidth cap? Not here (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, of course: you can get broadband from any ISP you want, no matter who owns the phone line, so there's no monopoly problems like in the US.
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Re:Bandwidth cap? Not here (Score:5, Interesting)
The customer can then sign up with whichever ISP they want.
In some countries (such as the UK) the ISPs are also guaranteed access at "cost plus" basis to the local exchanges, so that some ISPs actually offer faster DSL connections than the company that owns the lines (BT, who owns the lines in the UK offer max 8Mbps for example, while many ISPs offer 24Mbps DSL by placing their own equipment in the exchanges).
It's what sane government regulation gets you.
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Re:Bandwidth cap? Not here (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, but you don't see the dark side of what that regulation gets you - universal healthcare, decent public transportation (compared to most of the US), lots of vacation time. Your wealthy people probably don't get anything like the tax cuts ours do. Practically the third world, that.
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How? (Score:3, Funny)
There is no need for this for ordinary users (Score:4, Insightful)
Thats an insane amount. I can't even vaguely imagine how I would use more than 30 gig a month downloads. And 90% of that is me using the BBC iplayer because I don't own a video player or DVD recorder. Without those, it's probably under 5 gig a month tops, and thats mostly web surfing, the odd youtube vid and multiplayer gaming.
Fuck it, with so many 'triple A' games abandoning the PC, there aren't even any stupidly big demos to download anymore.
Unless you are some kid who thinks he is 'sticking it to the man' by downloading every single hollywood movie in HD (presumably so can watch it whilst snorting about how much it sucks and that the producers business model is flawed) from dodgy torrent sites, I don't see how anyone has any serious need for this.
I'm sure some smug slashdotters will equate this to the 640k quote, but tell me exactly how my need for digital data downloaded to my PC is going to go much higher in the next ten years?
Re:There is no need for this for ordinary users (Score:5, Funny)
Youtube in HD.
You lose.
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Re:There is no need for this for ordinary users (Score:4, Informative)
But even if someone watches youtube for more than 4 hours in a row it wouldn't matter, because TFA mentions that it only affects upload, so one would have to upload 2.8 movies of average length a day.
BTW: Bluray supports MPEG-2 exactly for the reason that it wastes so much space. Otherwise people would start to wonder why we need 50 GB optical discs for HD videos...
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Re:There is no need for this for ordinary users (Score:4, Informative)
I probably use about ~40gb a month, which I believe is below COX's limit of 60gb/month. I have a decent torrent ratio so I'm probably uploading 20gb a month as well
~5gb movies streamed from 360
~3gb movies streamed from netflix. I have no idea what the netflix size-per-movie is, but my wife watches about 5 of them per month.
~30gb porn
~10gb tv shows
~2gb checking email, web surfing, youtube, downloading linux distros, etc.
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Re: (Score:3)
Tell me anything about technology in the next 10 years. It is you that is being smug. Your argument boils down to, I don't want bandwidth why should anyone else.
There it is smug emissions. Fuck you.
Re:There is no need for this for ordinary users (Score:5, Interesting)
The.X-Files.COMPLETE.MULTiSUBS.PAL.DVDR-MULTiGRP 253.91GB
Sure, downloading that is against the law in most countries, but if the bandwidth was there, the legal services providing similar products would come.
Unless you are some kid who thinks he is 'sticking it to the man' by downloading every single hollywood movie in HD
spider-man.3.wvc1.1080p.bluray.nlsubs.rabomil.wmv 13GB
That would make 2-3 hollywood movies per month I guess then.
And the rest of your comment shows that you have no idea of who pirates. Sure, the 15-29 group is overrepresented, but that has more to do with the fact that they are more savage with computers and the internet, and not with their age or political agenda. (Ah well, that they are more savage with computers and the internet does have to do with their age statistically)
from dodgy torrent sites
Dodgy torrent sites? I admit that I am careful when download applications via bittorrent. On the other hand, I am equally careful when downloading it from any other site, because the malware industry is huge. Trust is the only thing you have to go on due to crappy operating systems (and this is not limited to windows) that don't automatically install all applications in a sandbox. If I wanted an application to write to any files (including my data files) outside of its own configuration/program directory I would want to give it specific permission to do so. Of course, selecting a file in an operating system open/save file dialog should count as giving permission.
Ok, that got a little off topic, so let's get back to it.
I'm sure some smug slashdotters will equate this to the 640k quote, but tell me exactly how my need for digital data downloaded to my PC is going to go much higher in the next ten years?
It probably won't be. The majority of the old generation always stays with what the already have. Frontrunners in technology is and will always be young people, With a few older here and there.
Parent
Re:There is no need for this for ordinary users (Score:5, Insightful)
When all I had were floppy disks, my first 5MB hard disk seemed so huge that I started wondering how I would fill it. Question was answered within weeks. Few years later I spent seveal thousands of dollars for a monstruous 5GB hard disk, assuming that would be the end of all my storage troubles.
Nowadays, in my medical practice, my backup volume is at present 25 GB. It grows by about 1GB per month. That is what I have to transfer every night to an offsite backup facility.
Images I receive from radiology can be several GB a day when they transfer MRI and CT images, and so forth
Plus, once you got the bandwidth, you can start doing some real video conferencing at a frame rate and resolution that actually makes it usable - and you will burn through many GB in no time.
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30 gigs up is way more than I could ever send. (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a 10megabit down, 1.5megabit up at home. This means it would take me 44 hours to upload 30 gigabytes with my 1.5mb/s upload speed.
Perhaps until the backbone in Japan is updated to uncap upload speeds, the right answer would be to throttle bit rates for anyone who has uploaded more than 20 gigabytes in a particular month? You could almost do it by just slowly ramping down rather than cutting people off--and it's a lot less antisocial than just pulling the customer's plug.
Hell, I have an effective 20gigabyte/month upload cap because that's the maximum capacity of my bandwidth; yet until I heard about Japan's bandwidth I wasn't complaining.
As a footnote, the quote of the day at the bottom of my page reads: "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes. -- Dr. Warren Jackson, Director, UTCS"
Seems appropriate somehow...
Re:30 gigs up is way more than I could ever send. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's pretty well just what I was going to post, my upload bandwidth is a tad under 100KB/s, so the most I can upload in a 24 hour period is 8GB. My download bandwidth comes in at about 500KB/s so with that I could get to 40GB down per day.
After working in a university for 15 years and regularly getting 1-10MB/s and now working in private industry where we employ Infiniband, Gige and 10Gige these limits are horrifyingly slow to me.
Fibre to the home. Now!
Parent
I feel so sorry for the Japanese (Score:5, Funny)
That clearly shows how bad their Internet infrastructure is compared to the US, where we have *unlimited* accounts!
900 GB cap is unacceptable in my opinion. (Score:3, Funny)
Life is great (Score:5, Interesting)
I hope this new cap does not pose any problems for me. I have 60mbit down / 20mbit up.. I live near Tokyo, Japan. The entire country has fibre up the ass here for the most part (I've heard about 80%) and this stems from a totally different corporate culture here. It is starting to change and become more weestern (god help them), but generally in Japan the company you work for takes care of you a lot more and for a lot longer, and as a CEO you would stay with the same company for probably the rest of your career a lot more often. Because of this, the long-term success of a company is treated as being much more important than the short term profit / how the stocks perform this quarter. As such, Japanese companies are more willing to invest HUGE sums of money up front in R&D and infrastructure that wont make them any money for years and sometimes decades (Look at Tokyo's public transit/subway/monorail system, I've heard that it wont cover the debts it made to be built for another decade or two still, and they're still building new subway lines). This difference in corporate thinking is what has put the Japanese at the forefront in terms of technology applied to everyday living. Going back home to the US feels like walking into a technologically primative country, and not because the Japanese have any great marvels of technology, they simply spend more money on finding applicable ways to have technology contribute to everyday life.
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Funny)
Note to all future submitters and to the editors.
From now on, please add *lt;SARCASM> tags for the sarcasm-impaired.
Thank you.
Parent
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Funny)
Catching the subtleties isn't really your thing, huh?
Personally, if I have to live with the connectivity options in the US for actually being able to see genitals in my porn, I'll consider it a fair trade.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Whatching? Is that some fiendish portmanteau of whacking and watching? You Japanese porn fans are weird in so very many ways...
Re:Seriously? (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Notice that the limit is 30GB PER DAY, making it 900GB per month UPLOAD limit.
There is no download limit, as mentioned in article and summary.
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Informative)
Australia. Debateably not a third-world backwater.
(Almost) All residential DSL/Cable data services in Australia have a cap. If you are daft enough to use the defacto monopoly provider's retail services then you get a small cap, high price, and both in- and outbound data count. Until recently, their cap was 1 or 3 GB with a ridiculous per MB charge for excess...they still sell grandma and grandpa (read sucker) accounts with 200 or 400 megabyte limits. I think haemorrhaging customers to the competition, and being forced to play nice by the ACCC, is starting to change their ways.
Bigpond's offerings [nyud.net]
Most everyone else counts only inbound traffic.
Parent
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Funny)
I moved from Australia to Sweden last year.
Me: "What's my bandwidth cap?"
Swedish ISP Tech Support Guy: "What's a 'bandwidth cap'?"
Me: :)
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Re:Seriously? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Funny)
I can't figure out what this CAP acronym is... anyone have any ideas?
CAP is a recursive acronym for "CAP Acronym? Please!". Hope that has enlightened you :)
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Re:might be someting else (Score:5, Informative)
I live in Japan, and recently my ISP told me specifically in a letter that they absolutely didn't track what I did and also didn't care - not to mention that there's a 20-year-old Japanese law that specifically bans spying on customers' communications that may actually cover this.
They did request that I try not to get caught doing anything illegal, though. They said the worst that could happen is that they would cancel my contract and I would be forced to go sign up with a different fiber internet provider (there are at least two others in Osaka).
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Re:might be someting else (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:might be someting else (Score:5, Insightful)
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If only there were a way (Score:3, Interesting)
To provide service to the broadband neglected in the US -- like, for example, allowing the public power districts that already have wires running to the homes do it.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You misunderstood me. I agree that broadband over powerline is dumb. Fiber is the way to go, and some PUDs are deploying it [gcpud.org]. Their customers get these awesome Taiwan broadband levels for about $50/month. Fiber does not have an RF signature.
Slashdot users not so good at math? (Score:5, Interesting)
If you run the math on the 100/100 Mbit (Japanese) connections in question, these caps are equal to only 3% of a user's upload 24/7. In Comcast's area, that would be 324 MB a day for 6/1 service, or 9.7 GB a month.
These caps are much, much worse for the service offered than Comcast's rumored 250 GB cap or the actual 400+ GB cap they currently use to remove excessive users from their network today.
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Re:Slashdot users not so good at math? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:First Post (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Download caps (Score:5, Funny)
900G a month should be enough for everyone.
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Re:Download caps (Score:5, Informative)
To hit the 900GB limit you'd have to upload at (if I did the math right) 364KB/sec nonstop every day for an entire month.
I don't know what the hell you're doing but that's a pretty generous cap, and something a typical family is unlikely to reach... even uploading 30GB HD home movies.
=Smidge=
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Right, which small law firm is that which produces 5TB of new or changed data *a month*? I am responsible for backup and storage at a large life sciences department at a UK university, and we don't produce 5TB of data from our microscopes a month. These produce data at a much higher rate than a small law firm could reasonably manage.
You need to invest in some better backup technology me thinks. Something that backs up files rather than filesystems.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Download caps (Score:4, Interesting)
I've produced 16 people for deposition in one month. All were plaintiffs in a Reduction In Force / Older Worker's Benefit Protection Act suit. Just last month (June) I had four depositions lasting longer than 8 hours. (FWIW I have a Masters in Endocrine Physiology (Masters only program) and I do understand lab data output though I was working on a PDP 11 when I took that Master's Degree).
IF what we were considering here was a reasonable path to off-site backups/disaster planning/remote access at high bandwidth - I could easily see how only 3-6 attorneys engaged in moderate litigation could generate 5T/mo.
What do bandwidth caps portend for small business - you don't have to be an attorney to create media - consider advertising firms, contractors, real estate - all could easily top the cap without being able to plan ahead. Market forces drive the demand. If you just created the Tesla vehicle and gas went to $20.00/gal - you had better have the bandwidth and data to feed your potential customers what they want.
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Re:Download caps (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Download caps (Score:5, Funny)
And what about wedding night movies?
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For you young folks... that was funny. (Score:3, Funny)
There was a time there when the Mars lander had faster network speeds than I had in my house in a populous region of the USA. Nobody was willing to bring cable or DSL to our town, but the damn lander had a 256K connection.
Re:PLANNED: February 2009 HD laws in the US (Score:5, Informative)
what HD? they're moving to SD transmitted digitally.
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Benefit of HD News? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Japan VS. US Infrastructure. (Score:5, Insightful)
I have my doubts that they were laying fiber after WWII.
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Well when did it get layed then? (Score:5, Funny)
Before? :)
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