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."
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.
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?
What about illegal (OMG TERRISTS!) file sharing? (Score:1, Insightful)
What's the attitude of Japanese govt. towards p2p copyrighted material filesharing?
I ask because, you know, 30GB/day aren't that easy fo fill if you eliminate that use of p2p networks. Unless people fall in love with ultra high definition videoconferencing, but I'd stay happily with plain cable if that was all I could do with so much bandwidth.
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!
Re:Download caps (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Download caps (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Japan VS. US Infrastructure. (Score:5, Insightful)
I have my doubts that they were laying fiber after WWII.
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.
Caps (Score:1, Insightful)
Well, 10 years ago when I got my internet account, it had a 10 gigabyte a month limit.
Seeing how I had a 3 gb harddisk, that sure seemed more then enough.
10 years later I've still got a 12 (yep, +2!) gb limit...
So think twice before you say "hey, that's a lot more then I can use each month!".
Re:Download caps (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:PLANNED: February 2009 HD laws in the US (Score:3, Insightful)
And I agree completely with every one of the points you just made, but none of this has anything to do with HD - except in so far as HD can be used for more effective mind-numbing propaganda. But that's as bad as blaming the gun instead of the guy who pulled the trigger.
The HD switchover has nothing to do with the Internet, unless you are really worried that HD will kill the free press online. Sorry, but you are making some very bizarre connections here.
I ask you again - how does the HD switchover, in any way whatsoever, limit people's ability to broadcast on the internet? They can broadcast at SD quality today. They will be able to broadcast at SD quality tomorrow, which will work just fine on future equipment. People will broadcast in whatever quality they can afford, and the quality of the content, not the picture, will decide whether anybody tunes in.
Oh, and by the way, nobody is being forced to upgrade their SD hardware to HD. That's why they are selling the converter boxes - so that nobody has to buy a new TV or VCR.
Re:There is no need for this for ordinary users (Score:1, Insightful)
You clearly missed the point where he said:
"Images I receive from radiology can be several GB a day when they transfer MRI and CT images, and so forth"
That means he's generating GB's of NEW data every day. Incremental backups don't help you at all with new data.
Re:Seriously? (Score:3, Insightful)
Having a known cap is better than having an unknown cap. Having a cap measured in the hundreds of megabytes per month is utter bullshit regardless of whether you know the number or not. Hell, I'll often download five gigs in a day when screwing around with a linux distro or something. With an automated system-wide backup service (Mozy) and a camera that takes 14MB shots at 6.5FPS I'll often saturate my upload for a day or two at a time getting things synced up (even a reasonably respectable 1Mbit upload by US standards takes a LONG time to push 5-6GB).
Point being that I simply couldn't function with a 10GB monthly cap, let alone 1GB. While I may be a fairly heavy bandwidth user, I'm really not doing anything unreasonable. Obviously my five bucks a month online backup service would be useless if it cost me fifty bucks in overage fees.
Re:Download caps (Score:3, Insightful)
If you give people the bandwidth they will find a way to use it. Hell, a professional photographer backing up his daily photo shoots could hit 30Gigs without much problem. Or cinematographers collaborating over the internet. Not everyone just surfs message boards and downloads an ISO once a month so that they can consider themselves a 'power user'.
I say open up the hardware and the software will follow.
Re:Slashdot users not so good at math? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:might be someting else (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:might be someting else (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Download caps (Score:3, Insightful)
How many people have substantially more than 3 Mbps of upstream bandwidth to play with at home? I'm on my service provider's fastest available connection [cox.com], and upstream bandwidth maxes out at 1 Mbps.