Heavy Internet users unplugged by US cable company

reply to post by Flyer


ah you got me

lets just say the smallest part is legal,so small actually that its not important

Originally posted by Fett Pinkus
lets just say the smallest part is legal,so small actually that its not important

That sounds more like an opinion than fact. Most would agree that the illegal content outweighs the legit content but as to exactly what percentage thats difficult to assess. Please provide some stats to back up your claim.

brill

Originally posted by watch_the_rocks
I got sick of the main ISP here in Australia, Telstra Bigpond, so tommorow I'm submitting my payment info to TPG. I get double the downloads, increased speed, and it doesn't count uploads, all for $10 less a month.

Ahhh TPG, beware... years ago with diaup they were an awful ISP to deal with.. They may be ok now, but support was next to non-existent back a few years.

Im with iiNet these days, and on a 24Meg adsl plan (24MB down, 1MB up) with 20Gb On Peak and 40Gb off peak - on peak is 12pm to 2am and offpeak obviously 2am till 12pm - which works fine for me, as I rarely get close to either.

But if I do, as I did on my old 10/20 plan, then they simply rate limit me to 64kbps - Shockingly slow, worse than dialup from the way it is implemented, but that is the reason I upgraded. No uploads counted in any quota. A nice large selection of free zone data that doesnt count towards download quota either.

Sadly, Im 2.6k from my exchange, which means at best I sync around 12-13MB. So effectively, I download around 1.4Mb a second, if I hit a good server, download accelerators help for sites that are just slow, but most refuse more than 1 connection these days anyway, so it's getting harder to get good speeds outside of Aus.

As for bit torrent being illegal, I wish people would actually understand the technology involved.. It's like saying "You have a phone, therefore you are a criminal, because criminals sometimes use phones!" - MP3's were once used by people stealing music too, but the technology that created that niche, soon became how we listen to music today. Who doesn't have an MP3 player, or at the very least Winamp.

The same will happen bit torrent technology. It already is to a degree, large applications under gnu gpl are being offered via that method as a means to lessen the burden on servers.

I've been hammering Telstra relentlessly on the phone double checking that I won't be charged for switching providers, but there's bound to be some line hidden on Pg 242, Para 8, Line 2 that states I now owe then $800 or something. Bloody cheap bastards.

If you don't like your ISP, SWITCH! It's like those people that complain about improper advertising. If you don't like it, don't watch it, silly!

As long as you fulfilled your contractual obligations, and if tel$tra are (Im going to vomit) reasonable (:flame then they shouldnt penalise you anything - unless you're breaking contract, then it should simply be what was stipulated in the TOC ?

I've avoided them like the plague, since they ruined broadband here for so long, still are. Im just glad decent ISP's are moving away from telstra dslams and implementing their own hardware so as to not pay tel$tra for 1.5MB artificially limited BB.

This sounds more like a lack of competition than anything else, Cable broadband, telephone and DLS are monopolies, when is no competition in areas that they manipulate the loser is the consumer that has not choice but to depend on their business.

As monopolies they can pretty much do whatever they wish and you the consumer has only one choice, stop using their service and live without their INTERNET access, TV programing or telephones.

But they know that they have the consumer pretty much eating from their hands.

In my case, when I found out that the cable service monopoly in my neck of the wood was offering HDTV but they were lying about it, I got myself Satellite now I am working on changing the broadband also to satellite.

reply to post by Fett Pinkus


It should be known that using Bittorrent in it self is far from illegal. Why should I get my connection cut for seeding the latest Linux distribution? BT is just a protocol, much like FTP, HTTP and so forth. So, with that being said, don't single out BT to be the bad apple in the bunch. People can abuse the protocol just like any other file transfer protocol.

We had the same problem with an ISP (1und1)some time ago here in Germany.
But i think they made the Heavy-Use-Customers at least a fair offer, they
said we pay you 100,-EURO if you go to another ISP.
But it wasn't a must!
If you didn't change, you didn't get any reprisals.

i could see transfering that much a month...not every month but i could see others doing it.

i know use BT a lot.....a lot of it is on the up and up but i get my fair share of thinga i shouldn't.

for examle of how you can get a crazy amount of legal stuff though.

i am a big zappa fan. there is a site out there that has torrents of TONS of zappa stuff, NOT copyrighted...stuff is on the up and up and it is massive....
i downloaded 16 gigs in ONE day last seek from there with BT and i was getting insane speeds......these are live concerts....

i also do a lot of video editing and(random stuff. highlight video of my tattoo lady, my dog, etc.....) and upload them to youtube.......

i am no saint but it is by far not all 'illegal' activity...

now, we had adelphia that i loved, they were bought by comcast....i had a sick, unlimited 8megabit per month connection.....then time warner bought it. i still have unlimited but they cut me down to 6megabit connection....to get back up to 8 it's ten bucks more a month......they did that right away.


also, there are MANY bands out there, 'underground' type bands that distribute their stuff over the web.....

i could see hitting 80 gigs a month...

i am big on taking pictures....i take pictures of everything and edit crap together and put it here and there......

i would be major pissed if they cut my off cause i DL too much but i would not be able to do anything about it.....this is the fastest connection i can get around here and it is pretty solid.......i can go to dsl but i think it blows.....

reply to post by brill


Well you're never going to get reliable statistics on what percentage of torrent users use it illegally, because most people aren't going to admit to it.

But I know a lot of people who use torrent clients and other p2p clients like Limewire/Kazaa etc and I know that not one of them uses it legally. I used to live with a guy who left BitTorrent on all day and night downloading films, that's probably why NTL capped our connection.

blah story of my life. I only get about 5-6 days of unthrottled use a month because I am such a heavy user and afew times I have been up off for 2 weeks at a time its horrable but all you can do is get a new isp. It's a pitty Australia has no good isp's i pay for broad band but i get dial up....the interwebz suck.

Originally posted by malganis
reply to post by brill

 

Well you're never going to get reliable statistics on what percentage of torrent users use it illegally, because most people aren't going to admit to it.

So how is it then that the RIAA and MPAA can go on a witch hunt? I'm off topic and apologize but I think the numbers are there provided it suites your business model and profit margins. There's no question its a problem and I, like many others, just don't like it painted with the same brush.

brill

Downloading, Streaming Video and Audio...

Entertainment is taking that path...It might be interesting to see average customer use and the " Excess Use" that Comcast was taking action against.

Sounds like Comcast will need to dial in their Fair Usage agreement.
They have screaming download speeds and Im sure that these folks were most likely mega abusers...

Personally, I dont have an issue with it. If you like to download, buy an OC1.

Peace

reply to post by Beachcoma


I agree with cutting them off temporarily to a certain extent.

These arent you average losers like you and me who are chatting all night.

These are people that have torrents, pirated software, p2p stuff, and movies downloading constantly, 24/7 ..

They goto school, they set up the downloaded. Work? setup the downloader. Sleep? Set up the downloader. Hard drive space? These are the types with four 200gig hard drives sitting in a stack in their mighty mighty desktop tower of babylon.

These types truly do downgrade the service for everyone within a certain diameter from their connect point. So if you're sharing that cable input .. you're connect is screwed, dude! you might as well get DSL! OR ..

call the cops on your neighbor for internet addict activity.Lol.

because if you dont .. youll never have the connection you pay for; your neighbor will be using his portion of the bandwidth for downloads as well as yours.

and theres nothing you can say or do about it whatsoever.

isnt that sweet?! come here, give me a hug!!

Originally posted by Beachcoma
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.

You know, I'm an amateur Deejay, and my girlfriend is an amateur Design student involving film, video, and imagery.. and as such, I understand the sheer amount of Bandwidth recording studios use. Video studios use 10 times more.

But I bet you anything, if those studios are worth their salt, they'll each have a dedicated internet connection .. not a share one like cable. They'd have @ least a DSL, at most a T1/T3 etc.

[edit on 9/9/2007 by runetang]

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

It's because they are ignorant to the ways of the internet.

I thought you fellow liberals would be on point here, I mean .. didn't you know Al Gore made the internet? Geez, you better go read that book homie..

For those who are trying to justify Comcast's actions, you should know that 1000 songs or 4 feature songs is about 3.5 Gb.... not that much.

That's only 100Gb a month

Originally posted by brill

So how is it then that the RIAA and MPAA can go on a witch hunt? I'm off topic and apologize but I think the numbers are there provided it suites your business model and profit margins. There's no question its a problem and I, like many others, just don't like it painted with the same brush.

brill

They can go on a witch hunt because the US legal system is so tilted to the corporations.

They wont do it in the UK because anyone who cannot afford a defence will get legal aid and a good lawyer and they know the case will be thrown out, just as they usually do in the US, they use legalised extortion to con people out of their money.

Originally posted by Flyer
They can go on a witch hunt because the US legal system is so tilted to the corporations.

They wont do it in the UK because anyone who cannot afford a defence will get legal aid and a good lawyer and they know the case will be thrown out, just as they usually do in the US, they use legalised extortion to con people out of their money.

You do realize that both entities are american based right? Obviously their interests lie in protecting american corporations and therefore they would pursue this specific to US sources. The fact remains though that there are obviously numbers involved as cited by their legal departments. The statement was made that it would be difficult to ascertain clear numbers who use this protocol for illegal purposes, obviously that is not the case.

brill

first let me say I hate comcast more than most.
unfortunately Verizon Fios won't get off their A**
and install cables. so for high speed comcast is it
nowhere else to go.
when they promise unlimited they are talking about
access not bandwith they do not promise unlimited bandwith
such a thing does not exist.

Originally posted by D0MiNAT0R 1OOO
We had the same problem with an ISP (1und1)some time ago here in Germany.
But i think they made the Heavy-Use-Customers at least a fair offer, they
said we pay you 100,-EURO if you go to another ISP.
But it wasn't a must!
If you didn't change, you didn't get any reprisals.

Grüss dich

the same thing happened to me, i gladly took the money and switched to T-online, now on an unlimited telephone flatrate plus the 3mb package for 45€ a month.So glad i switched because with t-online i havent had any problems at all in the last 3 years.

Ive once had the DSL switched off due to problems for 2 hours other then that full speed 24 hours a day 7 days a week and no complaints what so ever regarding P2P

Originally posted by Harlequin
many many countries around the world have a FUP or Fair Use Policy for broadband - i would be very surprised if comcast and time warner doesn`t have one to be honest - it`ll be buried in your contract - but downloading 80 gig a month is excessive - as to be honest , what teh heck are you downloading - 80 gig is a massive amount!

Agreed, Lets call a spade a spade. Comcast was busting the envelope with speed in the NW region and still is. Sure, I dont like their total stronghold but then again, confronted with the other options...Uhh..Ill take the highspeed thank you...

You want 80 gigs of data, go buy yourself a commercial line. Abusers of adaptive rate services really dont get much sympathy from me.

Comcast is trying to keep a balanced service and I see nothing wrong with that.

Peace