Typical Home Bandwidth Usage? 656
Broadband writes "With a growing number of internet service providers imposing hard bandwidth caps, I too will soon find myself with a limit. In typical Slashdot fashion I use the Internet for everything from movie streaming to online backup and just realized I have no idea how much data traverses my pipes on a monthly basis. While I have wised up and installed a bandwidth monitoring solution, it'll be some time until I have a normalized average. So my question is: What is the average monthly data usage in your household? How many people share the connection and is there anything you've found essential yet bandwidth intensive that you couldn't live without? (E.g. VOIP, movie downloads, streaming audio, etc.)"
Re:first proust! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I have true unlimited (Score:4, Insightful)
Another issue is all the traffic generated by break-in attempts, spam and a lot of other junk traffic.
Or if I happen to have a small web server for personal amusement and it happens to get slashdotted...
Those are really going to blow the bandwidth cap.
It works fine with a bandwidth cap for plain surfing, but the net is more than that. And if I have my phone completely over VoIP, then they will cut the emergency call possibility by having a cap.
Not an issue for a typical home. (Score:3, Insightful)
Here in BC we've always had caps. I think they've doubled more recently from 30 to 60gb.
With lots of web usage and many large files I haven't had a problem. If you are on cable and are uploading at max speed 24/7 you'll pass your limit, but otherwise most homes should be fine with the smallest of caps.
People complaining about comcast's 250gb limit must be doing it out of principle because that is an extreme amount to use for non business.
I would actually say that mine(adsl with telus) doesn't offer enough bandwidth to realistically reach the cap. One big download seems to clog the pipes these days.
Voip should not be the problem. (Score:2, Insightful)
Simple answer: don't tolerate caps, jump ship! (Score:3, Insightful)
Every area covered by cable is also covered by DSL and satellite.
Don't tolerate bandwidth caps.. when your ISP imposes them, jump ship!
Even if the other ISP has caps it impacts the bottom line on your original.
Enough people do this and they won't dare try that crap.
Also, FYI, my bandwidth usage annually is rather spiky .. i'll use minimal browsing 2 months, then fill up a 300 gig drive the next.
I wont tolerate comcast pulling this cap crap, and neither should you.
Re:Download caps are not as bad as they are made o (Score:2, Insightful)
"Those undersea cables don't pay for themselves."
They only get laid once. Then they get used repeatedly. I'm sure they pay for themselves & then some.
Paying to view ads (Score:5, Insightful)
Those, plus 5-10MB animated .gif's that you don't expect can really eat into your bandwidth. Best solution is Firefox with Adblocker and NoScript.
When your usage is caped, you start to realize that you are _PAYING_ to view those annoying banners.
Re:UK ISP transfer limits (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, I caught on to PlusNet's tech-heavy staff very early on (back when they were just dial-up). They have the most tech-savvy staff I've spoken to at an ISP and all their policies are backed up with real data, technical explanations and no holding back on "we can't make a profit if we do X" explanations.
Because I got on their broadband early, for £20 a month (with some £0.50p more refunded because I referred a few people to them), I get to keep my old "Premier" account which let you do nearly 50Gb a month before anyone complains. And I have the same "non-peak traffic doesn't count" set-up as everyone else, so I can leave stuff downloading overnight quite happily.
And because they explain WHY they have these policies, because they are open with their traffic usage graphs (the amount of iPlayer traffic is quite astounding, to be honest), because they tell you exactly what size pipes they've got coming in and going out and when they add more, it makes me very reluctant to place any more burden on their poor tech's and overloaded pipes at peak hours. So they get their exisiting pipes made more use of doing the night (when they are just paying for them to do sod all) and they get less peak-time traffic so they don't have to buy new pipes to keep new customers.
And I get a decent peak-time allowance if I want, I get whatever speed broadband is available in my area, and I get to talk to people who know what they are doing first time. I had a complaint once about the latency of SSH changing - I got a very technical reply in seconds, a "sorry, it's something we switched on because most people don't need that low a latency" and an hour before it was fixed without me having to do anything. And when I phone them up or submit a technical issue, there is a 99% probability that the person who reads it understands it and a 100% probability that it gets passed on to a knowledgeable person who can fix it fast enough that I don't have to complain.
I can't possibly give up PlusNet because you can't even get the Premier accounts from them anymore. They even let me move house and keep the Premier account with it's high-cap and low price. Oh, and the wonderful ideas of "this is a local-rate dial-up number in case your broadband doesn't work or you're on holiday and you get the same static IP as your broadband when you use it" is fantastic.
Re:I have true unlimited (Score:1, Insightful)
That's nice, but unless you host a huge file which gets slashdotted, you're still not going to hit a 250GB limit. The slashdot-effect is feared because we see so many sites go down, but that is almost always due to CPU load, not bandwidth congestion. A web server in default configuration doesn't handle high throughput. Throw an uncached content management system on top and the server can't even saturate 8Mbps. I've been through one of those peak traffic events with a properly configured server, an optimized site and consequently no slowdowns, yet the whole thing burned just 60GB.
Re:I have true unlimited (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh for fucks sake. Comcast is putting a 250GB cap on it. I, in Canada have a Shaw business account with the X-Treem or whatever it is option that gives me a grand total of 130GB a month transfer. I run a web server at home, I also run a backup server that backs up no less than 3 remote sites to my place twice a week just for geographical distribution (house is about 35 miles from downtown). I also download a bunch of things including audiovisual entertainments, and other things, surf the web, have people try and break in to my webserver, and a hundred other things. And I never exceed my cap. Ever. Once, with 5 days to go, and Shaw's customer service site reporting that my monthly usage was only 30GB that month, I thought to myself just for fun, I should see how much I can download in 5 days, after all that's 100GB going to waste, right :). Didn't put more than a moderate dent in it.
You, if you are doing what you describe above will NEVER "blow the bandwidth cap". Especially if it's twice what I can't use up.
The only way this will inconvenience anyone is if they are not a "moderate or heavy surfer" and are in fact running torrent downloads 24/7/365 pulling a constant load of 100kBps or more.
Think about this. Comcast's cap is 250GB, yes? There is 2,592,000 seconds in 30 days. 250,000 MB / 2,592,000 = .096451. That means to exceed your cap, you must have a constant network load of .096 megabytes PER SECOND all month. I SERIOUSLY doubt that's the case if you are using it as described.
Re:first proust! (Score:3, Insightful)
To pre-empt the "what about those that work from home" argument: they should pay for business class if they're doing business.
Heh. And you should pay for "standard geek pursuits" if you're doing standard geek pursuits? I work from home occasionally, and my traffic is limited to polling the Exchange server every 30 seconds or so, sporadic IM traffic, and Subversion commits and updates. Oh, and looking up info on the web, but then I do that anyway. I'd estimate my total daily bandwidth usage at well under a gig when I'm working.
Re:I have true unlimited (Score:2, Insightful)
If you are using an internet based service to backup or restore a mostly filled 500G drive over a residential internet service, you need to have your head examined.
Those backup services are fine for moderate amounts of critical data, but until we all have 100M/100M connections, they are USELESS for backing up a 500G drive. Even then, just drop in an external 500G drive that you can backup to.
By the way, the bandwidth caps do not apply towards business service.
Re:first proust! (Score:1, Insightful)
640k should be enough for anyone (Score:4, Insightful)
I have two choices with my ISP:
Low Latency 100GB Cap
High Latency Unlimited
I chose the low latency with cap. And I come close.
Most of the major ISPs are imposing a 60GB cap.
The point is that this is damn short sighted. The ISPs are doing this because they know whats coming. High Def streaming. If you don't get near 250GB now, you may soon enough.
Re:Paying to view ads (Score:3, Insightful)
Have fun with all of our overage charges!
that's perfectly fair, the ISP shouldn't be landed with the cost of someone providing public service, altho I would have though the existence of packet sniffers should be reason enough.
Re:Does it really matter if you ISP is worse? (Score:3, Insightful)
I see it as largely irrelevant.
Every phone company customer cannot pick up their phones at the same time and make a call. But the phone company does not limit people that make a lot of phone calls.
At some time if people routinely cannot make a phone call because the infrastructure is not robust enough, people will scream loud enough that the gov't will be forced to prod the telco into building more infrastructure.
It should be no different for ISPs.
But here that is not the case. As explained above, Comcast has ulterior motives and does not want people using their 'net connections to the max -- it's a financial conflict of interest with their primary business which is selling cable TV.
Re:I have true unlimited (Score:3, Insightful)
Here's something to try on a dare. just TRY backing up that 500GB drive in a month on a standard cable connection. My guess is with the average upstream it'll take you over 2.5 months to transmit that much data. I had to back up 100 GB of a client's data from their office in Edmonton to Vancouver, and they were on a standard cable connection. Their maximum upload settled in around 64 KB/s - 80 KB/s. The most efficient way to do it was to transmit the 3 GB or so of critical accounting data overnight the first day, and then courier a portable hard drive of the rest.
So IMHO, backing up 500GB to an online service at this point in time isn't really feasible. Maybe if we were in Japan and had 100Mbit fiber to the house that would be feasible.
Re:I have true unlimited (Score:3, Insightful)
You can find stuff at Best Buy for less than Tiger Direct, NCIX, and other such places?
You're obviously not looking very hard. BB around here has been, on occasion, up to 700% more than even the small mom-n-pop shops. And the major online retailers usually crush the little guys for prices. More often than not, the mom-n-pop shops crush BB, too, but people can't see past the low price guarantee.
Re:I have true unlimited (Score:4, Insightful)
So you're saying that not only were you paying speakeasy late, you were also considerably behind on your power bill as well (no utility is going to shut you off without warning and not just because you're 15 days late on a single payment). Can I assume you were also very late (read: months) on other bills as well?
I've had what you mention happen to me before: you go to the bank and fill out an affidavit of unauthorized withdrawal. As you say, it is a federal crime and the bank will investigate and you'll most likely get your money back. Since you didn't mention anything like this I'll assume you didn't. Is it possible that you had an agreement with speakeasy that gave them permission to debit the account if you were significantly late with payment? Read the fine print on your contract: most corporations aren't that stupid. You probably agreed to it somewhere whether you realize it or not.
As far as the calls from the credit department goes: you may not have asked for credit, but by allowing you to pay late, they were certainly extending it to you. When BB took them over, somebody in Finance probably noticed that a lot of customers were paying late and they were told to get their Receivables aging down to improve cashflow. You're a business, you should understand this.
Sorry, no cookie!
NOT FUSKING BANDWIDTH! (Score:3, Insightful)
This is nothing to do with "bandwidth".
This is "Data Traffic".
Jebus Chribt on a Fusking Pony! Isn't this supposed to be a tech site?
Re:Download caps are not as bad as they are made o (Score:3, Insightful)
Biggest problem with the internet in AU, peering between any two points in Australia cost pennies in the dollar, connecting to anywhere else in the world costs a lot. Infrastructure between cites is not an issue (between remote towns is still an issue but not as bad as 6 years ago), even the bandwidth available on the last mile is still greater than that of the international links.
Some ISP's aren't trying to shaft us. Some like iinet and Telstra are doing a very good job of bending us Aussies over a barrel and giving us a good Rodgering. Fortunately the ACCC wont let them get away with the kind of crap that the US telco's can. They can cap but and limit bandwidth but they cant stop usage entirely, they cannot interfere with connections nor limit connection types, wholesale prices are set which is preventing Telstra from leveraging its monopoly on the copper.
I'm looking to move away from iishaft (iinet) as they are giving you less allotted GB's in the peak time than in the off peak time (12am to 7am) by a ratio of 1:2. As in 2 thirds of my cap is only available to me in 1 third of my day (the bit of the day when I'm fucking asleep as I have a 9 to 5 job to pay their exorbitant fees for this connection), this to me is pretty fucking stupid but stupidity seems to be a common problem with the larger ISP's in Australia.
Australia have only three undersea links to other nations. A consortium of companies (including Singtel and Google I think) is working to build a forth link to Guam at the cost of A$200bn, an undertaking like this takes a decade to make profit not counting for maintenance. This is not because ISP's don't want to upgrade, its because they cant afford it, only the largest Australian ISP's would even be worth A$200bn let alone have that kind of change lying around.