The_Librarian

The recent incident where users of Afrihost's uncapped offerings moaned about being capped, refers.

First, I view the download of 1Tb of data as abuse of the system, nothing else. You can whitewash it, you can gloss it over, but a download of 1Tb is just too much, and this have a negative impact on honest, regular users.

Being a packrat gains nothing - you download files which you probably won't be using, or look at.

Now...

In my opinion, an uncapped account can be used in by companies and SOHO environments - where they simply cannot afford to be capped at all. Having said that, the same companies probably can also use a second ADSL line with a normal capped account for general staff use - so if the staff does not respect company policies and download what they want, then, of course they'll be capped - but the email will not be capped.

In my experience as sysadmin, I found that, in general, with fair use, a company with between 50 and 80 employees can comfortably do 60Gb's on average. Data was obtained from the ISP which shows that the lowest usage was between 50 and 60Gb's, whilst high usage was between 60 and 70Gb's.

This include, but is not limited to the following :

1. Emails
2. Virus updates (Mcafee and Microsoft Security Essentials)
3. Skype IM (and in some cases, Skype VoIP)
4. PPTP VPN and OpenVPN with Remote Desktop/UltraVNC/telnet/SSH to onsite servers
5. Internet Radio
6. Youtube etc
7. Facebook
8. General Internet use

Furthermore, we have another ADSL line with an capped account - and we frequently manage to hit 10Gb of use. This is for use for the financial department only - they VPN and Remote Desktop in to the mother company to do their financial statements.

All in all, we can easily do up to 70 to 80Gb of data usage per month.

So, I'm sitting here tonight, asking myself how the dickens is anybody able to download up to 1Terabyte (1000Gigabytes) of content from the Internet. Unless they were sharing their uncapped accounts with their friends and buddies, I just cannot see how that is possible.

Anyway... we still have a lot to learn - and one of these is to stop being greedy after the long drought of bandwidth - and use only what you really need, and not to guzzle what you can just because you can do so.

Looking forward to the next round of price decreases, speed increases and other goodies from my side.

Libs.