In Japan, a 900 Gigabyte Upload Cap, Downloads Uncapped 368
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."
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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=
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.
Re:Seriously? (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:PLANNED: February 2009 HD laws in the US (Score:5, Informative)
what HD? they're moving to SD transmitted digitally.
And what's about the third world. (Score:2, Informative)
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.
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...
Re:Bandwidth cap? Not here (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:Download caps (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:If only there were a way (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.
Re:Seriously? (Score:4, Informative)
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).
Re:Japan VS. US Infrastructure. (Score:3, Informative)
So what's the excuse again? That we simply suck when it comes to doing things the right way?
I don't know what your excuse is, but the reason is due to crappy regulation that's resulted in monopolies that aren't serving the public interest. When the infrastructure provider is necessarily the same as the service provider, you have a problem (since the infrastructure is inherently a monopoly; nobody's fond of lots of streets being dug up to put in new capacity). There used to be exactly the same problem in the UK; the regulator here was very close to BT (who had the market sewn up just as thoroughly as Ma Bell ever did in the US). But the government/regulator (I forget which) decided to force BT to allow competition for the service part, and that's prompted both reduced prices and greatly improved levels of service. The former monopoly is still a big player, sure, but they're a competitive big player now, and I believe that having a free market in ISP services is what you need too.
If not, ask for yourselves (and your politicians) why the FCC hates capitalism and the free market, and goes instead for crypto-communist corporatism. Yeah, I know that's logically inconsistent, of course, but language like that is usually a good way to slant the argument the way you want.
Re:Download caps (Score:2, Informative)
A legit home user would have a tough time reaching 900GB - speed is ultimately irrelevant as long as it's fast enough to actually reach the limit. It's all about volume, and what would you be uploading, and to who, that would amount to over 900GB in a month on a domestic connection?
Torrents...that's what does it for me.
Now, you may say something about this not being "legit", but the only thing I torrent is TV shows that my recording failed on, and truly free stuff (Linux distros, etc.). If you are nice to the swarm and seed back for a while, you can get some massive upload amounts.
I'm still only about 300GB/month upload (see here [slashdot.org] for calculation), but I'm sure that number is still larger than you thought you'd see from a "legit" user.
South Africa for the loss. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Slashdot users not so good at math? (Score:3, Informative)
Ummm, no. Text in Japanese is usually done as either Shift-JIS or EUC and occasionally as Unicode. 2-3 bytes per character. Graphics are used about as much as on English web pages.