Broadband caps: How much data is enough?

[milomak]

for me its quite simple. if you are going to sell an uncapped service, expect people to see it as such and download 24/7. otherwise cap the product. then there will be no issues.

 

[Knersus]

So, what I'm hearing is that because Telkom or whoever have you sharing a line or DSLAM or whatever at an exceptionally high contention ratio you choose to blame someone who is using their adsl as much as possible for your slow speeds?

Point proven then. Cheap ass telco provides creates a "scarcity" and you get upset with other users for using a service that they're paying for. This is not energy or water we're talking about here. Any scarcity is a result of lack of delivery.

I'm all for loads and loads of bandwidth and fast connections and all that, but everyone in the world has contention ratios on ANY internet connection. Even if you are browsing your companies internet connection and they have a massive line, you are still sharing it with everyone else in the company. I'm also against high contention ratios and believe it should be a reasonably fair/low number, but there is still a contention ratio, no matter what and there will always be one, so how do you explain that away? Even if you go to Hong Kong and use those massive 1gb/s lines or whatever, those guys have a contention ratio and if everyone on the block start downloading at full speed every one else will suffer.

As for your analogy to energy and water, I think that it is much like a water connection.. if everyone in your whole town open their water taps at full force, then you are going to get an extremely weak stream coming through... but in reality that will never happen - therefore contention ratio is ok. And for you to have a good "water service" if you open the tap you want a steady stream of water coming out right away.

 

[Polymathic]

20gb for low end users, 50gb for medium, 100gb for high, anything higher you should go for uncapped.

 

[Symbioxys]

20gb for low end users, 50gb for medium, 100gb for high, anything higher you should go for uncapped.

That sounds pretty reasonable.

I did get a bit of a fright looking at the prices though. We're coming back to SA after having lived in Germany for some years, and we're used to uncapped with speeds up to 16.000kbps at about 15 Euro per month.

http://tinyurl.com/33dhxhv

We actually took cable, we live in an older building and ADSL is slower as cable, with cable we have 32.000 kbps at about 30 Euro per month.

http://tinyurl.com/375dk22

With such "limitless" internet you use the internet quite differently we buy Skype Credits to call family all over the world, we use video calls on Skype too quite frequently.

Facebook is another one of those place we stay in touch, also with 720p HD movies we upload of our kid, etc.

Guess we'll have to calm down a little, but that's also a bit why we're coming back LOL

 

[Lightscribe]

I just want to know from all these people who download hundreds of GB per month....
1) how much hard drive space do you have? I know some of it goes to streaming etc that is never saved to disk, but still.. where do you put all this crap?
2) when do you get time to watch all these movies and tv series and if you ever get through it? If I download 50Gb of content it takes me forever to go through it which means for the next few months I wont download that much again..

Gamers eat gigs for breakfast. No space used, just tons of bandwidth. I want my tons of bandwidth.

On Secondlife, you used to be able to turn down your bandwidth usage, as low as 50k and as high as 1,5Megs. Now the lowest the client will go is 500k and up to 10Megs. I can't wait to game at 10Megs!

I want my speed and I want my tons of gigs needed to play, at the paid for, full speed, of my connection. What I use my bandwidth for is of no concern. As long as I pay for uncapped, I want it...for the speed. The "cap" or "amount" I wish to use is irrelevant.

20gb for low end users, 50gb for medium, 100gb for high, anything higher you should go for uncapped.

Yes, for some, the amount is of value. For others, irrelevant.

 

[Valerion]

On Secondlife, you used to be able to turn down your bandwidth usage, as low as 50k and as high as 1,5Megs. Now the lowest the client will go is 500k and up to 10Megs. I can't wait to game at 10Megs!

OFF-TOPIC: Haven't really used Viewer 2 yet, but you can still change between 50 kbps and 5000 kbps if you use Emerald (based on 1.23). Though I thought the sims still throttled each client down to 1,500 kbps, irrespective of the viewer setting?

 

[Nick333]

I'm all for loads and loads of bandwidth and fast connections and all that, but everyone in the world has contention ratios on ANY internet connection. Even if you are browsing your companies internet connection and they have a massive line, you are still sharing it with everyone else in the company. I'm also against high contention ratios and believe it should be a reasonably fair/low number, but there is still a contention ratio, no matter what and there will always be one, so how do you explain that away? Even if you go to Hong Kong and use those massive 1gb/s lines or whatever, those guys have a contention ratio and if everyone on the block start downloading at full speed every one else will suffer.

As for your analogy to energy and water, I think that it is much like a water connection.. if everyone in your whole town open their water taps at full force, then you are going to get an extremely weak stream coming through... but in reality that will never happen - therefore contention ratio is ok. And for you to have a good "water service" if you open the tap you want a steady stream of water coming out right away.

Well, I have a limited knowledge on this so anyone feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. Assuming that the the backhaul speed of the DSLAM is faster than the DSL lines contending on it, it's impossible for anyone user to hog the entire DSLAM's bandwidth. Since we all know that high-end users are pretty rare it seems very unlikely that you'd have a scenario where your average user's usage would be affected dramatically or even noticeably unless a significant amount of users of the DSLAM were trying to download at max speed all at once. This does seem to happen at the end of the month (or at least it did when I had DSL but that was in the days of caps). When you do get this scenario you can hardly blame the odd high-end user. It's a case of everyone's a high-end user when they have cap to use up before its gone.

Anyway, obviously the fewer users you have in contention and the more backhaul bandwidth you have the less chance there is of a worse case scenarion of too many people using their connection at full speed at the same time and degrading everyones speed.

Obviously it's a juggling act for the telco but can be solved by upgrading and expanding infrastructure to meet demand. I honestly don't know what the infrastructure is like right now but in my experience this has only really been a problem towards the end of the month and that only when we all had a "use it or lose it" mentality because of caps.

As for the water / internet as a resource analogy: water is a scarce resource if it weren't I'm pretty sure we'd all be demanding bigger pipes and higher pressure so we could use more. Actually, no we probably wouldn't be because unlike the internet there is a reasonable amount of water anyone person is likely to need. On the other hand there are always new, bandwidth hungry technologies and services being developed for the internet that people should be able to access.

 

[Lightscribe]

OFF-TOPIC: Haven't really used Viewer 2 yet, but you can still change between 50 kbps and 5000 kbps if you use Emerald (based on 1.23). Though I thought the sims still throttled each client down to 1,500 kbps, irrespective of the viewer setting?

I dislike Emerald. I did not like the new viewer either, so continued using the old one. I will shift to the new one as soon as I up my speed.

Secondlife slows down for everyone when there is a lot of strain on a simulator(server). When there are only 5 to 10 people however, we can wage virtual war at the full speed of our individual lines.

Many players have said I play well, even though I was handicapped with a 1600ms delay. One gets used to calculating where people would be 1600ms later, but I still cannot get the best position, without the decrease in delay.

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Help:Lag

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Statistics_Bar_Guide

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Typical_Frame_Rate_Performance_by_Graphics_Card/GPU

Edit: Misread sims for the Sims. Deleted relevant sentence. *Slaps self upside the head*

 

[Knersus]

Well, I have a limited knowledge on this so anyone feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. Assuming that the the backhaul speed of the DSLAM is faster than the DSL lines contending on it, it's impossible for anyone user to hog the entire DSLAM's bandwidth. Since we all know that high-end users are pretty rare it seems very unlikely that you'd have a scenario where your average user's usage would be affected dramatically or even noticeably unless a significant amount of users of the DSLAM were trying to download at max speed all at once. This does seem to happen at the end of the month (or at least it did when I had DSL but that was in the days of caps). When you do get this scenario you can hardly blame the odd high-end user. It's a case of everyone's a high-end user when they have cap to use up before its gone.
Anyway, obviously the fewer users you have in contention and the more backhaul bandwidth you have the less chance there is of a worse case scenarion of too many people using their connection at full speed at the same time and degrading everyones speed.

Yup, I agree... I think the idea of contention ratios is such that on a typical DSLAM you will see that there is one or two users who's downloading massive amounts at full speed, a few watching youtube vids or making a skype call and the rest are all just checking email or browsing the web for brownie recipes. In such a scenario everyone *should* (in theory) have an acceptable experience because they are not pulling the whole line flat. However if EVERYone stopped browsing for brownie recipes and just downloaded the crap out of whatever, then everyone will suffer.

Obviously it's a juggling act for the telco but can be solved by upgrading and expanding infrastructure to meet demand. I honestly don't know what the infrastructure is like right now but in my experience this has only really been a problem towards the end of the month and that only when we all had a "use it or lose it" mentality because of caps.

That's a good point and one more reason why I hate caps. It was just a bad idea all the way.

As for the water / internet as a resource analogy: water is a scarce resource if it weren't I'm pretty sure we'd all be demanding bigger pipes and higher pressure so we could use more. Actually, no we probably wouldn't be because unlike the internet there is a reasonable amount of water anyone person is likely to need. On the other hand there are always new, bandwidth hungry technologies and services being developed for the internet that people should be able to access.

Ja I like the water analogy because in many ways it works the same on a physics level, however like you say our use of internet bandwidth will just ALWAYS increase and that is why it will be a never ending job for the network operators to keep on upgrading the network.

 

[EchoZA]

Standard browsing (including e-mail, Facebook and YouTUBE) I would say +-1Gb a day