Why Compulsory Licenses Are Bad: A Look At The Sausage Making Process

Japanese Broadband Caps Compared To US Broadband Caps

from the take-a-look-around dept

Thu, Jun 26th 2008 11:04pm — Mike Masnick

With various US broadband firms implementing usage caps sometimes as low as 5GBs/month, we are quite concerned about how these moves will hinder innovation by effectively placing much greater mental transaction costs on using any kind of application online. In defense of these caps, some have pointed out that even Japanese ISPs (sometimes used as an example of a much better broadband system than in the US) are also implementing caps.

Broadband Reports now has the details on some of those caps, and they're much higher than in the US (just like Japan's broadband speeds). The cap is 30 gigs per day of upload. There are no download caps. So, yes, the Japanese caps (that some want to use as an example of why caps are necessary) are many times greater per day than what some US firms want to offer per month -- and it's only for upload, rather than download. Suddenly, I get the feeling we'll be hearing the example of Japanese broadband caps a lot less frequently.

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Filed Under: broadband, broadband caps, japan, us

17 Comments

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Anonymous Coward, 26 Jun 2008 @ 11:58pm

Although if you look at it another way, on a Japanese connection with 100mbps, you only need to average 3 percent (3mbps) of that upload rate in order to hit your upload cap for the day.
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- Monarch, 27 Jun 2008 @ 4:41am
  
  Re: by Anonymous Coward on Jun 26th, 2008 @ 11:58pm
  "Although if you look at it another way, on a Japanese connection with 100mbps, you only need to average 3 percent (3mbps) of that upload rate in order to hit your upload cap for the day."
  
  Actually, No. The connection bandwidth is in megabits per second, while the cap is in Mega Bytes per second.
  
  So if you actually have 100mbps upload bandwidth, and used the upload bandwidth at full capacity for 24 hours you would be able to upload approximately 69GB per day. Which is approximately 44% of your total bandwidth, when you have a cap of 30mbps per day.
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  - Monarch, 27 Jun 2008 @ 4:45am
    
    Re: Re: by Anonymous Coward on Jun 26th, 2008 @ 11:58pm
    My wording is all screwed up:
    
    "The connection bandwidth is in megabits per second, while the cap is in Mega Bytes per second.:
    ^ bits instead of megabits, and Bytes instead of MegaBytes per second
    
    "when you have a cap of 30mbps per day."
    ^30GB instead of 30mbps
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    - Some Other Guy, 27 Jun 2008 @ 7:34am
      
      Re: Re: Re: by Anonymous Coward on Jun 26th, 2008 @ 11:58pm
      Your multiplying is messed up too.
      
      http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=100+megabits+per+second+*+1+day
      1 terabyte per day at full speed.
      
      http://www.google.co.uk/search?aq=f&hl=en&safe=off&q=30+gigabytes+%2F+100+mega bits+per+second
      41 minutes (less than 3% of the day) to hit 30Gb
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- joel, 30 Jun 2008 @ 11:42pm
  
  Re:
  True - though that's a continuous usage of 3% of the upload bandwidth.
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wolferz (profile), 27 Jun 2008 @ 12:27am

From the but-they're-EVIL! dept.
Comcast just notified me 2 days ago that they are doubling our upload rates.
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Jared, 27 Jun 2008 @ 1:32am

Down Under
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Jared, 27 Jun 2008 @ 1:34am

Down Under
In Australia we have plans with as little as 500Mb per month and then pay as you go for the rest of the month.

$50 will usually get you between 10 - 20Gb per month. Some isp's will offer as much as 100 Gb per month, but thi is usually trageted at businesses.

Oh to live in Japan...
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- Chirs, 27 Jun 2008 @ 2:25am
  
  Re: Down Under
  Or its a peak off peak situation.
  I oay $70 a month for
  40Gb peak and 110Gb offpeak 3am-9am
  
  And When I lived on Campus at university we HAD (there was no alternative) to pay 2.0c/Mb or 20 Gb
  
  The US has it good...
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Peet McKimmie (profile), 27 Jun 2008 @ 3:53am

Caps in the UK
I use a Free broadband service in the UK, and I have a 40GB a month download cap.
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Sonja, 27 Jun 2008 @ 3:58am

South Africa
I pay approximately US $30 for a 1mb wireless connection with a 1 Gig cap. To buy extra bandwith costs me USD $29 per gig. And its not like I can get 1mb download spead, I am lucky if I get half that. Telecoms are really expensive in this country.
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Cassius Seeley, 27 Jun 2008 @ 5:13am

No No No :)
If I am not mistaken, they are talking about the amount of data you can push up or pull down on the the connection not the speed at which you can do it so mega bits per second is irrelevant unless you have a 28.8 dial up connection :)

At 30GB per day, I run a small ISP and we don't even send up 30 GB per day. On average we push up about 5.5 GB per day. Of course we don't have customers that are streaming content but we do host roughly 120 domains.
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- Chronno S. Trigger, 27 Jun 2008 @ 6:15am
  
  Re: No No No :)
  The linked to article says "a daily upload limit of 30 GB per day (930 GB per month), and unlimited downloads." and that's at 100Mbps up and down for US$42. My guess is that the cap is only to block people from running streaming and file download servers... for several hundred people.
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  - JB, 27 Jun 2008 @ 6:59am
    
    Re: Re: No No No :)
    My guess is that the cap is only to block people from running streaming and file download servers
    
    No, the cap is designed to put the kabosh on Grandma sending out endless baby photos to her friends in the canasta club.
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    - Chronno S. Trigger, 27 Jun 2008 @ 9:18am
      
      Re: Re: Re: No No No :)
      30G worth of baby photos a day? Damn, Japanese grandmas are fast on the shutter. :P
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Papafox, 27 Jun 2008 @ 9:20am

Japanese network traffic is different
There is a fundamental difference between network traffic in Japan (or Korea, China, Hungary, Finland) and the US (or Canada, Britain, Australia): The vast majority of network traffic in Japan is between nodes within the Japanese network. In the US, Britain, Australia or Canada, a much smaller proportion of network traffic has both ends within the same network. The fundamental reason is that the vast majority of Japanese (or Hungarian or Finnish or Portuguese) content is located with Japan (or Hungary or Finland or Portugal). This is not true of English speaking countries.

The significance of these network flows is cost. The cost of providing internet content, where the traffic is contained with a single country is much, much lower. Perhaps as much as an order of magnitude. Certainly less than a quarter of the international traffic cost.

In the US, the actual cost to a tier-1 ISP of delivering a GB of data is generally rated at between $0.10-$0-20. In Japan and Korea the cost of a GB is estimated at around $0.02.
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bryan, 27 Jun 2008 @ 11:00am

umm... beg to differ
I live in japan. Right now im visiting the US but at my house I have Yahoo which is the largest ISP right now. I can tell you that my speeds are much faster in Japan than here, It's not really THAT great.. i can upload maybe 100k/sec on a normal day. but download and stuff matches the comcast that my family has here in the states. no cap in japan? well, if that's the case, the network blows. now KOREA is where i was amazed with speeds.
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