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The Internet

In Japan, a 900 Gigabyte Upload Cap, Downloads Uncapped 368

Posted by timothy 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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In Japan, a 900 Gigabyte Upload Cap, Downloads Uncapped More

In Japan, a 900 Gigabyte Upload Cap, Downloads Uncapped

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  • Bandwidth cap? Not here (Score:3, Informative)

    by abstract daddy ( 1307763 ) on Saturday July 05, 2008 @04:52PM (#24069345)

    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)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday July 05, 2008 @04:57PM (#24069411)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by TeknoHog ( 164938 )

        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)

      by ultranova ( 717540 ) on Saturday July 05, 2008 @05:06PM (#24069485)

      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.

      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.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by empaler ( 130732 )
        In Denmark, there's a similar situation-that is, any ISP can a DSL connection over the copper owned by a former state-monopoly.
        The thing is, the ISPs make next to nothing on the leased lines. I'd bet that if you just call them once per month (question about a bill, complaint about speed or packet loss, other errors), those subscribers are producing red numbers.
        Of course, I don't know if the market is similar in Finland.

        Disclaimer: I have worked for one of the largest Danish ISPs, specifically with DSL.

  • How? (Score:3, Funny)

    by jadedoto ( 1242580 ) on Saturday July 05, 2008 @05:00PM (#24069435)
    The next step is figuring out how to upload that much each day.

  • There is no need for this for ordinary users (Score:4, Insightful)

    by cliffski ( 65094 ) on Saturday July 05, 2008 @05:09PM (#24069505) Homepage

    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)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 05, 2008 @05:11PM (#24069533)

      Youtube in HD.

      You lose.

      • Re:There is no need for this for ordinary users (Score:4, Informative)

        by nbert ( 785663 ) on Saturday July 05, 2008 @05:57PM (#24069911) Homepage Journal
        Even with HD content one would have to deliberately break the limit. Let's assume youtube would implement full HD based on H.264 aka MPEG-4 AVC. I don't have any material on my computer but a quick look here [apple.com] tells me that 3 minutes require about 360 MB, so you get about 250 minutes for 30 GB, which is a little more than 4 hours.

        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:There is no need for this for ordinary users (Score:4, Informative)

      by Nightspirit ( 846159 ) on Saturday July 05, 2008 @05:19PM (#24069613)

      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.

    • 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?

      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.

      Unless you are some kid who thinks he is 'sticking it to the man' by downloading every single hollywood movie in HD

      There it is smug emissions. Fuck you.

    • Re:There is no need for this for ordinary users (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Wildclaw ( 15718 ) on Saturday July 05, 2008 @06:18PM (#24070073)

      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.

    • 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.

      • Don't suppose you've ever heard of advanced technologies like differential or incremental backups. Or if those are out of your reach, rsync would work well provided the mentioned backups are not encrypted.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      You clearly don't have a internet porn addiction

  • 30 gigs up is way more than I could ever send. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by w3woody ( 44457 ) on Saturday July 05, 2008 @05:10PM (#24069523) Homepage

    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)

      by blackjackshellac ( 849713 ) on Saturday July 05, 2008 @05:15PM (#24069583)

      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: (Score:2)

      by PCM2 ( 4486 )

      This means it would take me 44 hours to upload 30 gigabytes with my 1.5mb/s upload speed.

      ...

      Hell, I have an effective 20gigabyte/month upload cap because that's the maximum capacity of my bandwidth

      Huh??

  • I feel so sorry for the Japanese (Score:5, Funny)

    by rrohbeck ( 944847 ) on Saturday July 05, 2008 @05:22PM (#24069639)

    That clearly shows how bad their Internet infrastructure is compared to the US, where we have *unlimited* accounts!

  • In my country (Uruguay), the residential upload capacity varies between 128kbps and 256kbps, that means we have an upload limit between 0.9GB daily and 1.8GB if we consider that only two thirds of the supposed kbps are really available.

  • 900 GB cap is unacceptable in my opinion. (Score:3, Funny)

    by Xizer ( 794030 ) on Saturday July 05, 2008 @05:48PM (#24069835)
    I regularly upload more than 900 GB in a month on a residential connection and I live in the United States. I thought Japan was supposed to be some kind of broadband utopia? I must say, I am disappointed.
  • Good Lord, we should all be so lucky to have a cap that high.

  • What is "suck luck" and why do Tennesseans want it?

  • With my current TWC Road Runner connection, if I ran at max upload speed nonstop for every single second in an entire month, according to my calculations I'd be at almost 1/4 of that limit. That's nuts to even put that kind of limit on it. I don't know what kind of connection they have there but to hit that limit with just 6 hours a day at max speed for 30 days, it'd need to be over 41 megabits up. If you skip a few days or only go to like 3 hours, and you're not talking about multi-target uploads like p

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Shados ( 741919 )

      In many asian countries, multi-douzen megabit connections for the equivalent of 30$ a month is the norm (and thats based on several years old info, I didn't check recently, so its probably even more).

      Japan's population density is a LOT higher than the US, so having fiber in every house is quite simple to do.

  • No more hand held, blurry, shaky, home movies of yesterday's wedding.

  • 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

    If you are shooting and uploading a wedding video every day, which implies that you probably do that for a living, then I would assume you can afford a professional connection to go along with the professional components of the trade. If you are uploading a wedding video a week, at normal speeds, then there is not issue.

    For those us with regular c

  • While the largest telco (NTT) is indeed the owner of the ISP (OCN) in question, but OCN is only a large ISP and do not have a monopoly in the market. Broadband service in Japan is mostly unbundled so you can get the physical line from NTT and internet service from a large number of ISPs, so the impact is limited at the moment.

    What is actually important is that most ISPs have already started to experiment with traffic control, but they don't tell you what their policies are (e.g. what limit they use, what

    • you're missing the point.

      it's 900GB per month!

      granted, they probably have only a tenth of the subscribers that comcast has.

      That still begs the question, why aren't ISPs and telcos and network owners investing in infrastructure? Are profits so precious that they can't invest in their future?

  • Life is great (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 05, 2008 @10:49PM (#24072037)

    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: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by fullmetal55 ( 698310 )
      one thing about Japan and infrastructure... Japan is a small high population density country, which means that for a company to upgrade it's entire infrastructure, it's highly condensed... different issues in the US, Canada, Australia.. etc. where to upgrade the infrastructure, you have to deal with a consumer base that's spread out far and wide. sure the cities could be upgraded faster, but then the smaller markets would feel left out or discriminated against. the networks we get are a small price to pa

  • Blu-Ray (Score:3, Funny)

    by CopaceticOpus ( 965603 ) on Sunday July 06, 2008 @12:46AM (#24072561)

    Time Warner's highest level tier for their experiment with usage-based pricing is 40 GB/month. This is less than the capacity of a single Blu-Ray disc. Sony must be doing a happy dance.

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