Charging by the byte to curb Internet traffic

Here in the UK many ISPs already do this. I have a download limit of 25G per month; for £10 a month less you can gave a service limited to 2G per month, for an extra £10 a month a 50G limit. With al of my ISP's servies you can then buy extra allowance for a pound a Gigabyte. My allowance has just been raised fro 20G and even when downloading a new Mandriva DVD I would rarely go over 20G per month. All-in-all it works well and it's not an issue. Some of my friends have the 2G allowance and never go anywhere near it, just depends on your needs.

I have spoken to friends in Australia and the situation there seems to be way worse. A couple of people have told me that for them, they have a monthly download of something paltry like 2G and they don't have have the option to top up or pay more for a bigger allowance. Now that seems bad!

I have 50 gig per month. I've gone over it once, when I was setting up a mirror of the 2008.1 repositories. It's shite when you get shaped to 64kBit.

It is being tested here in Texas...you can read about it here. http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080602/tec_time_warner_cable_interne...

I for one see the advantage going to the isp that positions itself as the one that Doesn't charge for usage. Time Warner is Fat with profits and I don't begrudge them their success...I do however think this is a move to calm stockholders in a turbulent market. I download a ton of new distro iso's to test and send out to anyone who asks for them. As many as 200 a month isn't rare.

This isn't going to play well here in Austin...why do you think they picked the city they did? The people there just don't use their internet bandwidth near as much. We'll see.

Quoting: I have 50 gig per month. I've gone over it once, when I was setting up a mirror of the 2008.1 repositories. It's shite when you get shaped to 64kBit.

Shaping, that was what they called it, yes. So they couldn't do things like play Second Life, but could get emails and the like, even if it was very slow. I hadn't remembered that quite right.

I have no caps. Bandwidth usage is all over the map with me. Some months I only use 10 GB. Some months much, much more. It's largely determined by the number of backups I send and recieve from-and-to my friend's server and how often I listen to streaming music from my home server at work.

If there's one pet-peeve I have with my ISP is that I can't get more upload speed. Currently I have 8 Mbit down and 1 Mbit up, but I can't get any faster upstream. I can get downstream as fast as 20 Gbit but I don't need that.

My ISP does offer business solutions that go as high as 4 Mbit up, but they come with the guarantee of 99.99% uptime and you pay a *lot* for that. I don't want the guarantee, just the speed. Apparently it's impossible.

All is not lost though. There's a new ISP in the area that offers 100 Mbit up/down for something like 75 euro a month. Two downsides: [1] You need to have fiber all the way up to your home. If you home is older than 5 years then you probably don't have it, so it costs you 500-1000 euro to have the fiber installed. [2] They offer it everywhere in the area except my town. We'll be one of the last to be able to connect to them. All other towns in the area already have it, but not us :-(

South Africa is the same. Most standard broadband subscriptions here are capped at 3GB of traffic unless you buy extra bandwidth. At home we have a 10GB per month contract. Even that is awfully tight.

Isn't the whole point of charging-by-the-byte and "traffic shaping" to prevent us from publishing our own stuff?

Isn't that the real reason behind the stigmatization of BitTorrent?

If everyone has a printing press, then nobody is a gatekeeper to opinions, styles, trends, etc.

Let's see...

Time Warner - TV/? company - probably doesn't like online entertainment (unless provided by them of course) Comcast - TV/Phone company - probably doesn't like online entertainment and voip (unless provided by them of course) AT&T - Phone/? company - probably doesn't like voip (unless provided by them of course)

Not that I'm paranoid or anything...but it just seems a tad odd that the companies mentioned all have a vested interest in people NOT doing their entertainment/communications online....

The key to this is competition. We need to have choices in where we get our broadband.

Where I live, I can get DSL from the phone company, from a third-party company that leases capacity from the phone company (this is what my provider does), or from the cable company. DSL is slow but cheap, so that's what I have.

I'd love to see municipal WiFi, but that's just not happening these days.

> I'd love to see municipal WiFi, but that's just not happening these days. Only if it's privately operated.

A friend of mine used to (moved to Hawaii, lucky bugger) use his high-gain antennas to set up an open (rate limited) hot-spot that hit a nearby truck stop. He'd put it up on holidays and nights, when his usage was low, and it would always receive good use.

There is something of an "open ad-hoc" network around here, or rather in another part of town. I've also run into them in hotels with pay-to-use Net access. It seems that the people themselves are creating answers.

I could see potential co-op ISPs coming in the near future where a small group of people actually have T1 or T3 lines installed at a place of choosing, and have a surrounding portion of the neighborhood hooked up to the connection for a small monthly fee. Profits would then be used to fund the co-op and pay for the people working with the co-op, etc...

You cannot go anywhere downtown in Austin Texas and NOT be connected. Outside of San Jose California, block for block, it has the highest rate of WIFI in the nation. Then again, that's one of the Lures the city is using to encourage Urban Dwelling. Our traffic is rated third worst in the nation and there aren't alot of places worse to drive in the US. I've driven in over a dozen major cities in the US and aside from Atlanta GA, Austin is the worst. That is why they want us all cramped into some 900 sq ft condo for two thousand dollars a month down town.

I don't think always on wifi is going to be an incentive...

Contacted Cox Cable, a small competitor of Time Warner and they assured me that they have absolutely no plans to shape or cap bandwidth. I don't think I am going to wait for TW to pull the trigger since it's pretty much a done deal that they are going to do this. If I can get a halfway attractive package, I will be sending my discontinuation notice to TW shortly