App To Keep ISPs Honest About Bandwidth Caps 172
alphadogg writes "A browser-based app developed by Georgia Tech researchers is designed to help Internet users make better use of their bandwidth – and to make sure ISPs are holding up their end of the bandwidth bargain. The Kermit app, which is being shown off Wednesday (PDF) at the CHI 2011 Conference on Human Factors in Computing in Vancouver, emerges at a time when service providers are starting to place bandwidth caps not just on wireless services, but on wireline services, too. AT&T, for example, is putting such caps in place this month for its DSL and U-verse customers. At least initially, such caps aren't expected to affect all but the very heaviest bandwidth users."
Browser based? (Score:5, Insightful)
How is a browser based app going to keep track of all TCP/IP traffic?
Also, Kermit is a terminal emulator. Pick a different name.
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The display is browser based, you can be sure it is using the router for the data and any throttling.
Re:Browser based? (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~marshini/files/kermit.pdf
That's the actual paper on it. You have to read it to get the info as to how they really did it - via DD-WRT with RFLOW. Your suspicions are correct though - they can't do it with just a browser.
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That's the actual paper on it. You have to read it to get the info as to how they really did it - via DD-WRT with RFLOW
That seems like an awful lot of work to reinvent the wheel.
SNMP has all the information I need, and is built-in to pretty much every router I've ever seen.
% snmpget -v 1 -c notpublic mygateway IF-MIB::ifInOctets.13 MIB::ifOutOctets.13
IF-MIB::ifInOctets.13 = Counter32: 2469428683
IF-MIB::ifOutOctets.13 = Counter32: 200923139
Re:Browser based? (Score:5, Funny)
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Also, Kermit is a terminal emulator. Pick a different name.
It's a lot more than that, for those of us who suffered using it to transfer files across 9k6 baud. It really sucked being off campus home for the holidays in the early 90s. (cue real oldies and their suffering stories...), at least it was an improvement on ZMODEM.
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>>>Kermit was an improvement on ZMODEM.
Ahhh, nope. Kermit was one of the EARLY transfer protocols (early 80s), and because it was basically junk, was quickly replaced by later formats like Ymodem1K, Ymodem-g, and Zmodem (late 80s).
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I was still using the kermit app for terminal emulation and file transfer in '92. But I remember using ZMODEM within it earlier, and I thought that was then superceded by the kermit file transfer. I recall something about "ZMODEM=..." in escaped mode.
Somebody refresh me - anybody got a link to a kermit session screencap?
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I never really saw Z Modem used outside of the BBS scene. If you were using VMS or a UNIX variant Kermit was the method of choice -- though I can't remember why. Maybe because it was usually installed on any system but Z Modem rarely was.
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Also, Kermit is a terminal emulator. Pick a different name.
They just have to hold their breath for eight more weeks [columbia.edu].
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Mod parent informative. Young whippersnapper's probably never used an acoustic modem either. And get off my lawn!
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don't you mean "agetty off my lawn"?
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You have a terminal on your lawn? That's odd.
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It uses a cereal link!
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I'm getting visuals of a line of Cheerios(tm) being carried by ants from the front porch to the WYSE terminal in the front yard.
This cold medicine works wonders for the imagination. The doctor said take the cough syrup "as needed". I'm through three bottles just today.
Vote with your wallet! (Score:2)
Instead of using such app, just choose a provider that doesn't cap you.
Or al least just slows down the connection speed if you are over the cap, but doesn't charge you extra.
I can't forget the times my internet access was metered, back in dial-up days. Don't want that nightmare again for any price and any cap.
Re:Vote with your wallet! (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't have a choice in voting. Sure there's the "option" of moving and going to a location that has choices for broadband internet access but my wallet doesn't have that kind of voting power.
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. . . and when you are limited to a choice of only one or two providers, both of whom have bandwidth caps (published or unlimited*) what do you propose as the solution?
*("unlimited*" = !unlimited)
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I have 1 provider available.
You have more than one place to live available.
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Yes, because most people can afford to just pick up and move so they can switch ISPs.
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most people can but most wont
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Bullshit. There are 2 providers here, and they cover the entire state as far as I can tell. In order to change to somebody else I'd literally have to find a new job out of state or commute 8 hours both ways to work.
I doubt very much that most people are going to be in a situation where they would do that or have a shorter commute in order to make that happen.
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I meant most people can move and change jobs but most won't do it for an issue as seemingly trivial as internet access
Re:Vote with your wallet! (Score:4)
And that seems reasonable? For all intents and purposes if you have to move out of state to change ISPs it means that it's impossible. Very few people would argue that it's a functioning market if the only way to imagine competition is to have people competing nationally. I could also move to Korea or Sweden, both of which apparently have better connections than I do, I'm not sure that it would be reasonable to suggest that I therefore have the option of getting the fastest speeds on the planet, just because I could move to where ever that is at the time.
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Hehe, he mispelled "for all intensive purposes".
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That's his point. You can move if it was such a hardship that you felt it necessary to correct.
Your Internet connection isn't usually such a hardship that you would move to resolve it. I have lived in places with horrible service. When practical, I moved. But if you lived somewhere that did not have cell phone nor land line service, you would move if your job required you to be able to answer the phone. If you no longer had access to food or drinking water, you would move. If your ho
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You essentially can't live in a place without wireline telephone service, thanks to the universal service mandate. We decided as early as 1934 that it was vital to provide all people with communications services at a reasonable price. Why that mandate hasn't been extended to modern Internet service yet is beyond me.
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I can think of a few places that may not have phone service. I'd call them, but ... well, you get it. :) It's kind of like when you drive out beyond what you thought was the last city on some back county road that looks like it goes nowhere, and then hang a left on a side road, and then just keep going for 30+ miles... People forget that such places exist, but they do. Some places only electricity is generator power, and they bring in food and fuel by boat or plane, since it's easier t
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Anonymous Coward wrote:
I have 1 provider available.
You have more than one place to live available.
That's a very realistic option, thanks. "Well, honey, the reason we need to quit our jobs, sell our house and relocate is that, even though we selected this place to live because AT&T's ultra-fast u-verse was available here in the first place, they've now changed the contract on us and started to cap bandwidth usage."
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What's the difference? 250GB in 31 days is 783kbps. Sure, you might get higher burst speeds, but if you can't supply 6.4 terabytes of data every month, you shouldn't be allowed to advertise 20Mbps speeds.
Ehh (Score:2)
Sounds like a less useful version of the SamKnows white box [samknows.com] already out.
At least initially... (Score:5, Insightful)
"...such caps aren't expected to affect all but the very heaviest bandwidth users."
Last month, I used 350gb of traffic; all of which was legitimate, split between services like NetFlix for television and movies, Steam for gaming, iTunes for music and podcasts, and the rest of normal day-to-day traffic. I may be on the extreme end for most people at this point in time, but the point is that technology keeps moving, and eventually usage like mine will be the norm, not the exception.
What the bandwidth caps will do is stifle technological progress. To use the required car analogy, they are like putting a 40mph cap on the newly-invented automobile, simply because few, if any, people need to go that fast. At some point, people did need to drive 40mph, then 50mph, then 60mph, and so on and so forth. It will work the same way with internet usage, and that is why bandwidth caps are such a serious problem. A decade ago, most of the country was still on dial-up, and the ideas of streaming video, social media, and the proliferation of modern media over the internet were still in their infancy. 150gb then would have been, literally, an unreachable amount of data to consume in a month. However, times change, and today 150gb is next to nothing for someone who uses the internet to its current full potential.
So many people may look at these, if they notice them at all, and say, "Who cares? I don't use that much data." But the point is that they don't use that much data now, and this is an attempt to keep them from using that much data ever.
Because let's not mince words about this. Infrastructure is fairly expensive, but once it is in place bandwidth across it is extremely cheap (often approaching as low as 3 cents per gigabyte, according to several studies). Corporations like AT&T and Comcast aren't doing this because the bandwidth usage is expensive. They are doing it because they are terrified of a future where consumers don't need their multiple services anymore. If you can get your television, movies, music, games, e-mail, social contacts, phone service, etc. all through your internet connection, there will be zero incentive to pay for locked-down cable television and movie rentals, and highly priced telephone service. They are not about to let that happen, and this is a major salvo in their war on that.
That's what people need to be aware of with this. It's not about the cost, it's about controlling the flow of information and stifling technological progress to secure corporate profits. And nobody should stand for it.
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I know someone is going to say something about the steam updater, but last I checked when a patch for a game was released your option was to download the patch or play on unpatched servers. The latter tends to be lacking if a game is popular at the time.
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Not that it solves the problem, but you can, and probably should, keep a copy of the downloaded files, that way you just have to copy them to the correct directory and have Steam revalidate them.
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To use the required car analogy
Wrong analogy. The proper car analogy to 'bandwidth' is cars per lane per time unit. How much 'data' i.e. cars can you get through a fixed pipe, i.e. highway.
In the car world, as more people try to use the limited resource your speed goes down. The concept of 'caps' is to limit the amount of data being requested at any given time.
Unfortunately the ISPs concept is that they stop the congestion by limiting how many miles you can drive in a month which still lets everyone on the highway for the
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Which is inefficient and leads to wasted capacity at times of the day when people are sleeping or at work or otherwise not likely to be online.
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Re:At least initially... (Score:4, Interesting)
'round here, when we still had caps my ISP had a policy of limiting heavily (20GB/month) during the daytime, and not counting the traffic during the night (1 to 9 am).
Of course, everyone had their download managers and P2P apps (eMule, at the time, was the most used) scheduled to only transfer data during those hours.
It worked pretty well; the ISP had the lowest RTT of all during the day and you could transfer way more data per month.
Re:At least initially... (Score:5, Informative)
Last month, I used 350gb of traffic; all of which was legitimate, split between services like NetFlix for television and movies, Steam for gaming, iTunes for music and podcasts, and the rest of normal day-to-day traffic.
1 HD movie a day for a month from Netflix will top out at about 135 GB.
Buying one new AAA game a week on Steam for a month is 40-45 GB.
A 384kbps stream 24/7 for an entire month would only be 125 GB
I think the Internet turns everybody into hoarders, they download/stream things they have very little intention of ever watching just because it's there.
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Except for OTA with antenna, everything I watch on television is streaming, mostly from Netflix. Between me, my wife, and my 4-year-old, we watch 4-6 hours a day, and about half of that is in HD. It really doesn't take much.
My extreme likelihood of going over AT&T's 150GB cap caused me to move back to Time Warner's cable internet service, which for now, at least, doesn't have caps. I hate Time Warner, but since those are my only two broadband choices, it wasn't a tough choice.
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But the point is that they don't use that much data now, and this is an attempt to keep them from using that much data ever.
Exactly. And the author of TFA has already forgotten that caps aren't new -- Comcast implemented them back in Fall of '08. And to underscore your point, that was almost 3 years ago and they haven't raised them since, and certainly haven't scaled in proportion to the speeds of up to 100Mbit that they now offer.
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Actually, it will encourage the development of bandwidth-conserving technologies.
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If there's a good reason to stop at 50 MHz, then it might be better to innovate than to outlaw stopping at 50 MHz.
Similarly, if there's a good reason for bandwidth caps, then it might be better to innovate than to outlaw the caps.
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It bothers me that AT&T gives me a $15 200MB plan, but insists on locking the phone so I'm not able to write the host file to avoid annoying advertisement that it's wasting it.
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I would put you into the category of "heaviest bandwidth users".
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I have a 150GB cap (I live in Australia - we've lived with caps since the beginning). I CAN use that much if pushed, but generally don't. Steam? My ISP (Internode) provides official Steam content servers which if selected and used by the Steam client, allow downloads of games unquoted and hence not affecting total usage and endangering the cap. It's a common solution to the cap issue here and works reasonably well, except for the cases where the Internode servers don't mirror some game's content and instead
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On top of that: if you do find yourself exceeding your cap on a regular basis, you can always upgrade to a plan with a higher cap for not that much more per month. Off the top of my head Internode also offer 300 GB, 600 GB and 1 TB caps on their (Agile DSLAM'ed) plans.
This is why I honestly don't think caps in Australia and other like countries are much of a big deal anymore: there's a good choice of them so you can get heaps of data if you need it, or save money if you're a light user. On top of that you h
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That's what people need to be aware of with this. It's not about the cost, it's about controlling the flow of information and stifling technological progress to secure corporate profits. And nobody should stand for it.
Never thought I'd see the day when people thought being in front of the boob tube was progress.
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This, exactly.
Ten years ago, it would've been hardly conceivable that it would be possible to stream several seasons' worth of a TV show over a service like Netflix. Now, my wife does that routinely. And that's just one thing the net connection gets used for in a given month. I like to listen to streaming music. I download updates for console games via my Net connection. I periodically download a full distribution upgrade for one or more of my machines from it. I telecommute several days a month, and can pu
Lessons learned in Canada (Score:2)
Like a tax, once an ISP has implemented a cap, it will only get worse not better. Unless government rips the privilege from their cold dead hands, which will not happen as much like in the USA, the regulators are in bed with industry.
So it went from no caps, like 3 years ago, to caps, to tiered caps... So it used to be that everyone got the same cap. Then they figured we can make even more money of this and separated it into usually 3 tiers, light, regular, and Pro... Basically most Canadians can go with th
AT&T Customer (Score:2)
I'm an AT&T customer. So far I haven't been given any notification (outside of Slashdot) that my DSL account is about to receive a bandwidth cap. Moreover, I really have no idea how much bandwidth I use. I've read recent stories about methods to track my own use, but honestly, why should I? If they are going to charge me or punish me for exceeding an arbitrary limit, won't they be required to tell me how close I am to that limit?
I have no love for AT&T. I refuse to use their cellular service be
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I received an email, however they told me to check my usage on their site.
I went to their site and was told they didn't know my usage, so I didn't need to worry about it (it actually said that). I found that a bit disquieting.
I'm not heavy user. The most I do is go on occasional Netflix binges watching a bunch of TV episodes in a row. It's very unlikely I'd actually hit the cap. But if it's going to be enforced against me, I want to be able to see what I've used.
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If you want to be able to trust their figures, petition your state government. Gas pumps and other meters are governed by a state bureau of weights and measures to make sure it is accurate and well maintained. It's why your gallon of gas doesn't turn out a few ounces light.
Otherwise it comes down to "trust us, you need to pay us extra and it won't much matter if your own measurement says otherwise.
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I received an email on April 7th called "Updates to your AT&T Internet Terms of Service". The email lists 14 sections that have changed, with little summaries. The two that I expect would cover this are:
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Just noticed I didn't answer your question. It looks like it was sent to all member's att.net addresses, which I have setup to forward to my normal address (where they send billing reminders) for just these kind of reasons. If I didn't have the forwarder, I would never check the address. I don't think I'd opened the file on my computer with the account password in it for at least 3 years before I had to go look it up to try to check my usage.
I'd assume there was something in my paper statement too (since I
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You can't trust their accounting. I have an account with Clear and my monthly usage totals for one adapter seem to be different every time I look. And I'm talking about usage for months that are long closed. I've seen the total go from 130 gigs to over 500 gigs down to 460 gigs, then 380 gigs, and now 200 gigs. For the same month. It's ridiculous. Their inability to accurately track data usage is probably the reason they don't have a specified cap. Because people would pay more attention and notice t
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I got an email but there were not details on numbers or such. However being a DSL user with 150KB/s I don't think I'll be hitting any limits anytime soon.
An option for those who don't have ISP choice... (Score:3)
I can see the email now.
Is it just me that thinks that if Netflix, or ESPN, or whoever sells streaming subscriptions gets a few thousand emails like this that they wouldn't start putting pressure on the ISP's?
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What Netflix is doing is lowering the quality of the video they stream so people don't use as much data. They do this now for Canadians who face far stricter caps right now. Secondly, how exactly is Netflix going to put pressure on the ISPs? They are extremely tiny compared to the ISPs especially when it comes to political clout. Why exactly do you think AT&T, Time Warner, Comcast or Verizon are going to care that Netflix might lose customers to caps?
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in canada use velcom or teksavy
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True, streaming netflix is an extremely small market for a tiny number of bleeding edge customers who think they are average.
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They'll do it by sending lobbyist to counteract the ISP lobbyist.
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Of course they care, but they're powerless to do anything about it and ISPs (particularly cable providers, though any triple-play provider) would love nothing more than to see Netflix fail. So you're thinking completely in reverse: what you really need is half of Netflix customers threatening to cancel their ISP contracts.
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You can use Steam in the same way (non-metered). Also, they host repos for Linux distros, etc, so yum or whatever don't count against your quota, either and some of the nice ones even l
Block advertizing (Score:4, Insightful)
That expectation has changed significantly over the past decade, and not for the better. Now your choice of operating system or application is taken as an implicit invitation for it to use your network connection in ways that are not necessarily intended for your benefit at all. That's why it sometimes makes sense to configure a separate firewall device even for personal use. You can't, theoretically, prevent a proprietary protocol from tunnelling whatever data it likes, but you can at least perform a practical kind of triage over the traffic passing across your network.
As the Web becomes an increasingly general transport for applications, it becomes a network management exercise in its own right. And the concepts are similar to firewall management. Given that I'm paying for my system resources and my network bandwidth, I certainly don't want to waste them transporting and processing content that isn't valuable to me. Advertizing is not valuable to me. Therefore, I block it, just as I block any protocol that isn't valuable to me. As a consequence, I get very high signal-to-noise in my use of the network.
My ISP should be grateful.
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Advertizing is not valuable to me. Therefore, I block it, just as I block any protocol that isn't valuable to me.
You block slashdot then? How about any of the other sites you use that use advertising?
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I don't have to block Slashdot, because it offers the option itself. That's nice. It would be nice if all sites were like that. My site is.
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Advertizing is not valuable to me. Therefore, I block it, just as I block any protocol that isn't valuable to me.
You block slashdot then? How about any of the other sites you use that use advertising?
Slashdot isn't advertising (besides the occasional Slashvertisement). He's blocking the ads but still visiting the sites. Am I right to assume your post was a passive aggressive attempt to claim that he's stealing from the poor websites or something?
It's not going to keep any ISP honest (Score:2)
ISPs will simply put in their ToS that caps are based on the ISP's sole measurement of your bandwidth.
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Except that if I track all bandwidth and the numbers are way off, class action lawsuits can bring the ISPs in check.
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Not in America any more. It's not going to be long before ISPs have TOS that mean you agree to arbitration. As soon as they have that, you can't bring a class suit anymore.
"Bargain"? Not really. (Score:2)
From the summary:
>and to make sure ISPs are holding up their end of the bandwidth bargain.
It's hardly a bargain if it's a term forced on you from lack of ability to take your business elsewhere.
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Also from the summary: "The app is not publicly available, but the researchers are collecting input for future testing and possible commercialization"
This "announcement" amounts to a press release of a pre-beta commercial product. Woo-woo, stop the frickin' presses, we have a new winner of Slashvertisement of the year!
It's rflow for dummies... almost (Score:2)
All this is, is rflow for dummies... dummies who are smart enough to get a DD-WRT compatible router and flash it. That said, I just picked up a cheap Buffalo 802.11N router, and it came with DD-WRT preinstalled, so this may be more accessible than it once was.
Bandwidth caps (Score:2)
I have a rather good friend that runs a ISP. He has a rather simple solution to bandwidth hogs, he disconnects them. If they paid for the month he refunds them and sends them on their way. It just is not worth it to keep those problem customers.
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The problem is the assumptions that users will share the bandwidth. Turns out customers don't like to share; and it's especially likely that high bandwidth users are amazingly unlikely to share. Over time the users start using more and more bandwidth but the infrastructure doesn't keep up. If the usage goes up, the bandwidth stays the same and you can not increase it, then what solution is there but to have caps or get rid of the self-important hogs? You think ISPs just wave a magic wand to make the b
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The ISP I'm using not only does not have caps, but will increase the speed (from 200mbps up/down to Lithuania and 80mbps up/down to elsewhere to 300mbps up/down to anywhere) and at least I will pay less for the higher speed (there were four plans, after the change the most expensive plan (the one I have) will no longer be offered, but the cheaper plan will be 300mbps).
Currently I upload about 10TB/month. The ISP not only does not complain, but, when I complained about my connection being slow (for a time it
One more reason to secure your Wifi. (Score:2)
Track usage, Torrent the last days of the month (Score:2)
Track your usage (DDWRT has a nice bandwidth tracking feature built in), and at end of the month run a BitTorrent client and help FOSS by sharing the lastest distros, while at the same time forcing ISPs to upgrade their bandwidth. If everyone used every last bit of their cap down to the last hunderd MB or so, we'd see some traction.
Re:Exactly (Score:5, Insightful)
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Not to mention the MMO's and other applications now sending around their updates via Torrent protocols.
And the people who telecommute.
Or use Skype.
Or use a lot of Hulu Plus.
I don't torrent, and yet my "usage" always seems to be about 2/3 of my ISP's cap. Just wait till apps get even hungrier, in 2 years time everyone will be hitting cap and either getting PO'ed or start dropping those services... which is what the ISP monopolies want so they can force people back into cable TV, pay-channels, etc.
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Yeah! Outlaw the bittorrent protocol, that'll make everything on the net go smoother!
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Satellite and 3G ISPs still limit customers (Score:2)
Or get something faster then 28.8k
Satellite and 3G ISPs still limit customers to about 5 GB per month. Anyone approaching the cap gets throttled down to dial-up speed.
Did you check for virii
No, but I did check for viruses.
"Cable" means DOCSIS (Score:2)
Stick with "wired" or "cable" or "landline," please.
Wired is a magazine. "Cable" commonly means DOCSIS, as opposed to DSL or fiber to the curb. "Land line" commonly means POTS, as opposed to VoIP or cellular.
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Is that different than wire rope?
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I was thinking exactly the same thing. At least if they had called it Zmodem it would have been more relevant ;^)
owned (Score:2)
It is probably the bot running on your xp box that is using all the bandwidth.
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Does anybody know any good FREE programs to keep track of bandwidth usage? Something like NerWorx by SoftPerfect. I tried it and I liked it but for some reason it is tracking my usage incorrectly, I think by like a factor of 8 or 10. I couldn't figure out what the problem was.
Any advice is greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
There are two different units of measure at play here. Network bandwidth is measured in bits, or bits/second. PC storage is measured in bytes, where each byte is made up of 8 bits.
When your provider sells you a connection of, say, 1.544mb/sec - thats megaBITS not megabytes. You need to divide by 8 to come up with your connection speed in bytes.
Storage on a PC is based around a byte, which is 8 bits. The network usage captured is correct - it was simply displaying it in bits, not bytes.
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Dividing by 10 to calculate bytes is generally more accurate for net throughput numbers due to transport overhead (checksums, parity bits, packet headers, etc.).
It has gotten better over the years, overhead has gone down. The "divide by 10" was mostly during the dial-up age. Now it's probably only a 5-10% overhead.
But it's easier to ju
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I find that the divide by 10 thing is still pretty accurate, although YMMV of course. My sync speed according to my DSL modem is 7200 kbps and the max download speed I can achieve is around 730 - 740 kB/s. So pretty close! Depends on a bunch of stuff though like your MTU, how clean your line is (i.e. bit error rate), whether you're using PPPoE or PPPoA to connect blah blah blah.
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Isn't throttling a better solution than capping?
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Depends on your usage priorities I guess. I much prefer having a clear, transparent, usage cap, but knowing that my traffic is not being throttled, DPI'ed, or otherwise tampered with. If I need a higher cap, I upgrade my plan to one with a higher cap. OTOH I can understand some people simply want to get as much downloaded as possible without worrying about caps, and don't mind a bit of throttling where it's necessary.
It completely depends on what you use your connection for and what your priorities are (do