In Japan, a 900 Gigabyte Upload Cap, Downloads Uncapped

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."

30 gigs up is way more than I could ever send.

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.

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!

I feel so sorry for the Japanese

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

Re:Seriously?

Note to all future submitters and to the editors.

From now on, please add *lt;SARCASM> tags for the sarcasm-impaired.

Thank you.

Re:Seriously?

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.

Re:Seriously?

The submitter is making fun of the US.... is that so hard to understand? Back in the day when broadband was introduced in the country I live, it was 256kbps/64kbps down no caps.... Compared to other countries (with and without caps) that was pretty much just above dialup. I mean, I had ISDN before that which could do 128kbps/128kbps. The difference? Flatrate... ISDN was per minute for ADSL, I paid one fix price per month. A 900GB cap would do nothing to me because the always-on aspect to me is the most important part of broadband to me.

Re:Seriously?

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:Seriously?

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: :)

Re:Seriously?

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 :)

Re:might be someting else

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:Download caps

900G a month should be enough for everyone.

Re:Download caps

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:Download caps

You say that now, but in a few years when you want to stream HD with actual fidelity - not the compressed to hell crap we have today - you'll change your tune. We are quickly approaching an era of ubiquitous streaming. If network operators institute caps and then continue resisting investments in their networks, a lot of innovation will never happen.

Re:Download caps

I am also not sure who would want to download those wedding movies :-)

And what about wedding night movies?

Re:Bandwidth cap? Not here

Agreed, Finland is a great country for file-sharing. And I've heard rumours that the network of HOAS (the Helsinki student housing association), managed by Sonera, is actually that firm's test network, where you can upload and download all the live-long day with the company's (tacit) blessing because all that activity is only going to helping them better calibrate their main network.

Re:Bandwidth cap? Not here

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:Bandwidth cap? Not here

Same as in most of Europe: The company that owns the lines is required to offer equal access to any broadband provider at cost + a reasonable margin to allow them to recoup their investments and make a profit.

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.

Re:Bandwidth cap? Not here

It's what sane government regulation gets you.

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.

Re:There is no need for this for ordinary users

Youtube in HD.

You lose.

Re:There is no need for this for ordinary users

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.

Re:There is no need for this for ordinary users

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.

Re:PLANNED: February 2009 HD laws in the US

what HD? they're moving to SD transmitted digitally.

Re:Japan VS. US Infrastructure.

I have my doubts that they were laying fiber after WWII.

Well when did it get layed then?

Before? :)

Slashdot users not so good at math?

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.