Heavy Internet users unplugged by US cable company

Originally posted by Harlequin
but downloading 80 gig a month is excessive - as to be honest , what teh heck are you downloading - 80 gig is a massive amount!

I don't know about 80 gigs, but music studios and video production studios do transfer up to 50GB a month here. How does that happen? Simple. They create a draft for an audio track or a video scene, then send it over to the clients or another studio. It gets looked at, comments are given, maybe edits are made, it gets sent back. Then the whole process repeats until all parties with a vested interest are satisfied.

At least that's how it works here. And the pre-released versions are in the highest quality formats possible. So chalking up 50GB a month isn't that far-fetched. I guess 80 gigs is possible too, it's not that far a difference from 50.

Edit: grammar

[edit on 9-9-2007 by Beachcoma]

Good thing I use DSL then.

Seriously this is false advertising. It's illegal, if I recall.

These people could sue.

Both my sons are networking or routing specialist for 2 different cable systems in the US midwest.

My oldest, who happens to be 29 today, is located in a college town. They are just now starting to enforce privacy rights and watch what is coming across the equipment Big users of torrents are being notified of band usage. I argued the privacy part and what privacy meant. His response was "it's our equipment, go buy your own". Man oh man, my boy is a company man....

My younger son works for a company in the KC metro. They have no plans for anything in the near future. They do watch nodes from time to time for heavy uploads. So, we have limited uploading on the 7 computer running in our house.

I can see the wild west daze of the internet starting to be handled. I don't agree with it, but then, I don't have my own equipment-gateway connection-and other internet stuff for direct access.

music studios and video labs - most certainly and there service contracts would specify large file transfer over VPN etc , but this is about home users - and no home user could justify transfering 80 gig a month - gaming isn`t near that.

Most companies advertised "unlimited" but then hide away some clause in the FUP that its not unlimited.

This has nothing to do with the effect on other users, its because they have to pay for bandwidth themselves and they dont want to make a loss on big users.

Luckily I am now on a 10mb connection and this company has their own backbone which means they dont pay a 3rd party for their bandwidth so I really can use as much as I want.

I can download 50 gb in a day if I want too.

In Canada we use Shaw Cable. They use to call me weekly about the amount of gig we uploaded. I stopped all that by upgrading my account to a SOHO account which is a Small Office Home Office account. Have not heard from them since. Cost a bit more but it came with free basic so in turn I ended up saving money.

I also do tech support for a major U.S. cable company. I do know that there is no contract to use High Speed with them and you automatically agree to their end user agreement when you go online with their service. Read your enduser agreement and you will see that they can and will disco you whenever they want if you are abusing their network. You pay to use their service but you don't own it. We have to tell customers regularily that they are paying for an entertainment line, heavy usage signifies servers or other business like use.

Originally posted by Fett Pinkus
Why are you people getting upset?

These people getting cut off are using BT quit heavily so what do you expect?

In the end its illegal so why complain, get another ISP who doesnt care that you are uploading/downloading day and night or put up with it!

Originally posted by Harlequin
music studios and video labs - most certainly and there service contracts would specify large file transfer over VPN etc , but this is about home users - and no home user could justify transfering 80 gig a month - gaming isn`t near that.

oh ya? and what about people who host websites from home? what about open source websites that host forums such as this one?

what about people that download archive footage from public domain sources like archive.org

what about people who watch legal videos on youtube, google video, etc all day?

What about those who use 3rd party devices that allow them to stream their cable over the internet in another country? that takes just as much bandwidth as anything a bittorrent could do.

[edit on 9-9-2007 by scientist]

Also add in listening to online radio, online TV is taking off too.

Saying that, nearly all my bandwidth is BT.

As well as I can testify from my days in the ISP and web industry... it is entirely within the realm of possibility to transfer upwards of 80gigs of porn in a month. But I suppose that would fall into the Business catagory.

It doesn't surprise me that the transfer of media data, relatively high quality audio and video, has become the bane of Internet Service Providers. It's not practical for them to cache the data as is done with web pages, so the load on their external links has gone up significantly.

It is however something they should adapt to and compensate for rather than eliminate. If they keep killing customers that transfer large amounts of data, eventually they won't have any left.

Im with Sky Broadband in the UK. It says here its "Unlimited" but "Subject to our Fair Use Policy", which basically says "We say how much is Unlimited, go over it and we will take action. P.s were not going to tell you how much it is "

However, I download quite a lot of rubbish and ive yet to have any action taken against me...

Originally posted by Fett Pinkus
Why are you people getting upset?

These people getting cut off are using BT quit heavily so what do you expect?

In the end its illegal so why complain, get another ISP who doesnt care that you are uploading/downloading day and night or put up with it!

Maybe you just have a limited ability to comprehend what usage is going on. Is that cause for you immediately and arrogantly assume that it's illegal content?

It's such people, with small mindedness, and limited exposure to the world that would limit our lives.

Yes, there are entirely LEGAL reasons to have high bandwidth, as the message following your slanderous diatribe describes.

Sometimes, instead of talking it might be helpful to stop and read and listen before shooting off one's 'opinions', don't you think?

Of course this -is- a discussion board and it's good to get these prejudices and wrong ideas out in the open.

I agree that getting another ISP is a good approach.

Good job!


[edit on 9-9-2007 by Badge01]

I should add that it is the uploading that is monitored most not the downloading. Uploading is always capped.

In the early days of the internet boom I had ISDN and static IPs so I could run servers. I paid dearly for it.

Now that I live in the sticks I get have a 56K dial up that is lucky to get 4 or 5kbs. Satellite is expensive and when you really need it, like storms, it won't work. We have sat tv and rainy days are a problem. ISDN out here now would be 100.00 plus a month. There is a fiber truck a mile away but the phone company has no interest in giving anything that resembles broadband to people out here.

The cheap DSL is steal even though some folks will complain one way or another. Just pay big bucks and get major throughput in a contract. The companies are in it to make money not keep the customer happy. I'd settle for anything better than crappy 56K for $20 to $30 a month.

I have to agree with those that say read the contract, you'll most likely be surprised whats in it.

I used to work for comcast doing residential and commercial internet installs. I can tell you this, they have huge problems with theyre internal network and often make paying customers take the grunt of it. They are still using ancient technology in the sub stations and never fix problems, they just do quick snoopy band-aid fixes. They care more about quantity then quality. From what Ive seen also they cater to the higher class areas more than anything even if it means screwing others. In the rich areas I seen they offer 16mb speeds at a cheaper price than people closer to the city only getting 4-8mb. Comcast is a really screwed up company.

Originally posted by Badge01


Maybe you just have a limited ability to comprehend what usage is going on. Is that cause for you immediately and arrogantly assume that it's illegal content?

It's such people, with small mindedness, and limited exposure to the world that would limit our lives.




[edit on 9-9-2007 by Badge01]

Ill put my money where my mouth is:

A recent analysis of the latest P2P trends wordwide shows that BitTorrent is still the most popular filesharing protocol. BitTorrent traffic is still on the rise and responsible for 50-75% of all P2P traffic and roughly 40% of all Internet traffic.

BitTorrent Continues to Dominate Internet Traffic

Ipoque reports in a preview of their 2007 P2P survey that BitTorrent is generating between 50-75% of all P2P traffic.P2P traffic is responsible for 50%-90% of all Internet traffic which means that BitTorrent traffic is generating somewhere between 25% and 65% of all Internet traffic.

And only for Germany alone:

According to Ipoque, the peer-to-peer network traffic
represents 30 percent of the total Internet traffic recorded every day and 70 percent of the night traffic.

Source

So if thats for Germany only what would that say for the rest of the world


So who is being smallminded now?

Originally posted by Fett Pinkus

So who is being smallminded now?

You, you still havent proved BT or P2P is illegal because its not and never was.

Its as about illegal as the postal services or email is.

My beef is the assumption that all BT traffic is illegal.

Nowhere have you proved that ALL BT traffic is illegal, thus summarily choosing to throttle down bandwidth to a user with whom you have a contract is illegal and deceptive.

It's in the industry's favor to make this assumption and because it's a popular scapegoat, they're allowed to do it.

My argument was NOT directed to the amount of traffic that any one 'net application was using; just that it's improper to assume that it's illegal.

Ex:
I have a video cam, and I make a video of my family picnic. It's about three 300meg segments.

I create a torrent and allow 50 family members to torrent it.

This is not illegal, though it is a high bandwidth use.

To further illustrate, it's not the individual users who are sapping the bandwidth, it's the big companies using it and getting free distribution of their news and stories.

You might notice that many commercial news sites are using this bandwidth to send you commercials AND to make money off the 'net,, while individuals are not sending unsolicited commercial content.

So in answer to the question - if one can't even debate the correct topic, figure it out...

I didnt mean to proove thats its illegal, anyone whose been in the p2p scene will know whats going on and where the high traffic arises from

Its just that people have been whining about their ISPs capping the speeds on a whole lot of P2P/Filesharing forums in the last half year, heck ive even had one ISP tell me to quit them as i was dling/upling 120 GB+ a month, this i gladly did and have been happy since then with T-online who couldnt care less what i do with my 3MB DSL line

Just because of this people have also started using Seedboxes to keep ratios and not having their ISPs cmplaining to them about BW usage.

reply to post by Badge01




I didnt say that ALL of it is due to illegal usage but most of it is

Not only BT, but check out those DDL sites like rapidshare und megaupload, checkout the music blogs with DDL links to all sorts of music and videos available.

We are the P2P download anything generation, otherwise why the need for 500GB HDDs or DSL lines with 16000kbps download capacity?

Originally posted by Fett Pinkus
These people getting cut off are using BT quit heavily so what do you expect?

In the end its illegal so why complain

Originally posted by Fett PinkusI didnt say that ALL of it is due to illegal usage but most of it is

You said its illegal, you made no mention of not saying any part was legal.

It was a blanket statement.

[edit on 9-9-2007 by Flyer]