Ok just my 2cents, are you arguing LEGAL CONTENT or NETWORK HOGGING? This is 2 different issues. There's no denying there are plenty of ways to clog up the network with legal content, the real issue is, how many people actually do said legal activity.Just because it's legal does NOT make it any less "network hogging" . If you upload your 50GB database backup every day, when you live 2 blocks from the office, seriously..that is network hogging.
In fact the only way something is not "network hogging" is when the ISP have infinite capacity available and/or YOU have a dedicated line [no contention ratio] . Since this is NOT the case with any of these uncapped offerings, i can pretty much tell you now, if you're using extensive bandwidth you are network hogging...does not matter what you do.
Necuno said:
steam - anything from 500 meg up to 10 gig per game title legally bought.
ign - patches, demos, previews and clips of mostly games. also can get quite huge thinking of nowadays demos weighing in at least 1gig+. not to forget HD streams and so on from them.
direct 2 drive - mostly same idea as steam. buy a game and download it directly, aslo anything from 500 meg up to 10 gig.
beta testing of games - yep online testing of coming mmos and even some other non mmo developers does this. anything from 2 to 5+ gig a shot. then there will also be the constant patches and content being added to the beta testing.
test clients (mmo) - some of us likes to play around on the test clients of mmos and that too can get a lot to download at times. the test client which normally equals the non-test client (5+ gig) and as well as the patches and content being added and removed on a more than normal basis.
Voicy -
game development videos - 60-100mb each
This is not the average user type of activity though. This is a very specific PC-gamer type, of which i don't believe there are that many (compare to the SA internet community at large). Even buying more than 1 game a month from Steam/D2D is not what i'd consider "average". Beta'ing MMOs, even rarer. I think this forum attracts alot more internet-savvy types so it sounds like this would be a "normal everyday" activity, but it isn't.
Now i don't deny this activity/hobby DOES take alot of bandwidth and it is all legal as well. But admittedly if you actually play these games fully, [i.e. playing WoW] you won't use this much bandwidth every month either unless you're a serial-game-hopper and thus changing games every few days.
Necuno said:
vpn to work - just add a normal day of network traffic, documents you might work on and everything else that needs to be seen and worked on to complete an 8 hour day of work or less. also throw in some server administration and maybe some reporting on the side too, not to mention if you have to pull and push large files over the vpn.
upload of work - try doing some digital painting and design for someone in a foreign country, trust me uploading each set of raws can get really huge
Again, not your average user activity unless you work from home and then one can debate whether it makes sense to use this much bandwidth -out of your own pocket- for work without some sort of compensation. I don't deny this can take alot ob bandwidth, but sometimes copying that 80GB database backup on a hard-drive and driving over to the office seems more economical than using your consumer-based uncapped account for it. So i'd say this can be construed as "network hogging" to some people. So it depends on what exactly you're doing here, i don't think everyone would do this and especially not internationally to the extend that they NEED a consumer uncapped product just to do their job....
Now on the positive side, i do the following activities almost daily:
1. Stream Music from Last.FM/Pandora [this is legal] : +- 50-100MB an hour . [this service is basically like a radio station, which plays music based on how you rate the songs...kind of like a "personalised" radio station ]
2. Stream TV [episodic content] : +- 200-300 MB an hour [normal quality] . I don't do HD quality, since my 4 MB/s line can't handle it, nothing to do with uncapped, just pure international speed that is poor and inconsistent.
Now above 2 points i'd say is what alot of average people would most likely WANT to do if they have infinite bandwidth+speed . They don't want to use Usenet, or Torrents or look on dodgy spam-filled websites for content. It's nice to have a buddy to download all the stuff for you and you just copy it, but ultimately the copyright owners of said content would prefer you stream it since they have control over the content then.
I mean why are you going to download the ENTIRE Smallville collection, if you can just watch the episodes "on demand" ? This is what is happening. People want to see "The OC" , so instead of just going on a site and starting to watch, they load up Series 1-10 in their download managers and let it rip....100GB later they realise they don't actually like "The OC" all that much and now they want the Stargate SG-1 Collection ..again they download Series 1-10 ....another 100GB right there. Yet they can't even watch the content in the given month anyway......
And your precious 'legit' bandwidth hogs that actually use it for site testing, etc etc, are in the extreme minority. You know that as well as I.
our data centre is in the UK 
