Our Cable Connection Is Fast... But Don't Try To Really Use It
from the the-speed-is-just-for-show dept
It seems that many broadband providers have realized that they get attention for playing the "speed game." They keep announcing faster broadband speeds, even if sometimes the announcements are a bit misleading. BroadbandReports calls Canadian cable company Shaw out for bragging about their speed increases while capping downloads at a paltry 30 gigs a month while also using traffic shaping apps to throttle BitTorrent usage. In other words: here's your super fast cable broadband service, but you can't actually use it for much.
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Connection quality
But, as was mentioned, bandwidth is the metric used as a selling point and consumers are eating it up.
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And I thought that happened only on developing cou
Fortunately Venezuela's major broandband player (CANTV the national Telco), who gives ADSL access has been providing unlimited, uncapped broadband access to their customers for a few years, and although the speed plans are not something to wow about (the affordable plan is only 384 Kbps for $50/month) their service is very decent. Faster plans are absurdly expensive, topping at 1.5 Mbps at around $175/month. At least you have a handful of competitors in the US who are still providing fast, unlimited, uncapped service to millions of customers.
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speed
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Re: speed
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Shaw
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Stupid analogy
The assumption is that almost all people will use water 'sensibly'. I could run a fountain directly off the watersupply and into the stormwater, or I could change my swimming pool water every weekend instead of using the filter, but that would be a very wasteful and selfish thing to do. If more than a few people in Hamilton were as selfish as that, we would very quickly find ourselves on a metered water supply.
Broadband, in my opinion, should be the same. It's nice that it's always on and it's nice that it's fast when you need it, but that's no reason to run Kazaa at full rate 24/7 downloading gigs of crap that you'll probably only watch once if ever, and screw up affordable useful flat-rate broadband for everybody else.
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Bad Caps
But if they're offering 8mbs speed then that is what I expect; no matter what software I'm using for my downloading. They're charging me for the use of their technology so they need to give me what I'm paying them for.
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No monitoring tools
I wasn't aware Shaw was hampering BT before I read these comments and I think it sets a dangerous precedent. I know others have discussed this before, but if they are really doing this, doesn't it allow them to hamper other applications like VOIP (especially if for competitors' applications) ?
The worse part of the XX/Gb per month capping is that AFAIK, it is not a published limitation nor do they provide customers with the tools to monitor their own usage.
I don't have a problem with the 30Gb/month download as long as it's published and customers have signed to that agreement. Otherwise, it's just an arbitrary limit unlike cell phone plans which are very specific in customer usage limits and rates.
Also, give me a page where I can go to see my monthly usage stats so I know when I need to back off music/video streaming/downloading.
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No Subject Given
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Re: No Subject Given
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Re: No Subject Given (another stupid analogy)
My friends (couple, no kids) own a fairly large house quite close to university. They rent out half of it to help pay the mortgage. A separate power meter would require having the whole house rewired which would be insanely expensive, so the electricity for thetenants is unmetered. Verne estimates 'about half' of the usual power cost' as part of the rent and requests that the tenants will be sensible about using electricity.
And now he refuses to have students as tenants, because in the past they've run electric heaters
and large numbers of computers 24/7 and ended up costing more in power than they were paying in rent.
It's always the students. :-)
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Re: No Subject Given (another stupid analogy)
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Right now, P2P is very limited to a few people that understand torrent, etc, and with propaganda and lawsuits, lots of folks I know don't want to tempt fate. Good!
But I think eventually P2P will become the prefered distribution mechanism, as hosts figure out they can save millions on storage and bandwith, let alone electricity costs to distribute the work out to its users. At some point, there could be a problem... it's not inconceivable. A perfect excuse to do all kinds of nasty things to internet users, as far as the telecoms are concerned!
For me, I plan to download the entire known content of humanities creation before my provider caps me or bills me for bandwidth. ;-)
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You think thats expensive?
But it use to be a lot more...its dropping in price about 30% per year...it should drop like 30% every 3 months but we are just starting to build up internet capacity.
The price is more in india
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