Comments on: road runner: now 3% faster than dialup

By: Josh

Josh — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 05:09:05 +0000

No cap here is Rochester, NY yet… but TWC is talking about capping my area in the near future… It sucks for those of us who love getting good use out of p2p clients. I haven’t needed to spend a penny on a single movie, music album, game, software or any of the above for about a decade.

Always knew it was too good to stay true forever…

I average around 300-400 gigs a month. I don’t know what I’d do without it… Would lose out on a lot of free entertainment.

It all seems so unfair to set such a cap. I hadn’t even known it had been going on anywhere until recently.

What they should be doing is figuring out a new technology which transfers Gigs per second and not KBs per second. Some sort of lazer network to help support the growing infrastructure we call the internet. Or am I too far fetched? Maybe in 50 years.

Until then… Does anyone know of a way you can hack your ISP’s database into not knowing what volumes you’re using? Or maybe somehow confuse or scramble whatever software tracking device they are using to keep record of your bandwidth usage?

By: John

John — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 20:37:04 +0000

Here in California, my wireless ISP gives me the privilege of downloading a whopping 3.5GB per month for 69.95$ and 13.95$ per additional GB of data! Let’s hear it for lack of competition in the wireless sector!

By: makkara

makkara — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 15:00:58 +0000

“Pretty much all of Europe usually has some sort of cap on download volume. Nothing new here.”

????

I don’t. I download some 1-3 terabytes worth stuff monthly, never had any caps. I actually can not find one single capped DSL connection from the country, no one sells those.

By: Sebastian Redl

Sebastian Redl — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 11:19:17 +0000

Pretty much all of Europe usually has some sort of cap on download volume. Nothing new here.

By: Mårten Woxberg

Mårten Woxberg — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 10:34:17 +0000

So? It’s been like this for ages in Sweden, although here you can log into your ISP account and check your own usage.

A friend and I bought an unlimited plan but still got our speed limited because we where using about 120GB’s+ per month.
We just told them that it was in our contract and if they wanted to slow our speed down they had better lower the price too. The limit came off. (We got better at not downloading the same Ubuntu DVD iso more than once too :)

About the Spam/Virus thingy, if you got it, you have yourself to blame.

By: blizzard

blizzard — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 03:49:56 +0000

Oh, it’s totally unfair. But that’s kind of the point. :)

By: James Henstridge

James Henstridge — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 02:40:28 +0000

A lot of the plans in Australia have monthly download caps, although it is common for them to reduce the bandwidth (e.g. to 64kb/s) when you go over rather than charge extra. For the plans that do charge you for going over the limit (usually the cheaper low end ones), 15c/MB is not unheard of. So $1/GB doesn’t sound that bad …

Also, comparing this to the maximum theoretical limit of a dialup account is a bit off base. Most users have bursty usage patterns, so are much more likely to be able to use 20GB with a higher bandwidth than if they were forced to keep their usage to a uniform 66kb/s for the entire month.

By: Jeff Waugh

Jeff Waugh — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 02:15:21 +0000

This has always been the case in Australia. :-)

By: Mossop

Mossop — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 01:34:03 +0000

No-one else may do that in the US, but in the UK the practice has become prevalent. Even with packages that have usage limits you can also be stung with “fair usage” policies and have your bandwidth reduced if you are using too much data during peak hours. Every man and his dog can resell the main BT broadband service on their own pricing scheme. The whole system has become so confusing I don’t know how regular consumers can make a good decision.

By: Havoc

Havoc — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 00:02:02 +0000

Where there’s a DSL company competing we shouldn’t get screwed too badly, but I’m pretty afraid since the one and only option for broadband at my address is cable…