So you're saying I should move to finland and you're also telling me kwang is a bitch?

Shit this has been a very informative thread.

Fomenta, I understand your point.. but do you really think that it's just 5%? I don't. Not at all. Shit, I download on an average week up to 10-20 maybe double in GB. For instance, My dropbox (I have two, one for NS2 Beta, and my own personal) accounts are well over 20GB. I have to constantly sync new builds released for NS2 each week... sometimes two or three @2.4GB/ea. I have Netflix which my wife and I use constantly. Blu-Ray player which hooks up via router/Xbox360. My two iPhones connected via wireless, my wife's computer. She browses YouTube ALL day. All the virtual machines I download/play with/browse on doubles my incoming bandwidth. I do torrent and seed (legal things) in excess of over 20GB sometimes. My website and my First Sun music. My music can range over 60MB a file since they are raw WAV files. I store them on my website to keep a backup in case my computer takes a shit. My astrophotography pictures are about 5MB a piece and I uploaded over 100 of them a few days ago, not including the raw videos I make from the CCD imager which can exceed over 1GB. Then we've got the little servers I run (MatrixMod, CS Source Servers, NS2 server, so-on) and the fact that I live-stream almost every League of Legends game which is bandwidth intensive.

Now, do I do all of this every day? Hell no! I do, however, do ALL of these more than once a month, and I can guarantee you, that if you did all the things on this list at least three times a month you would be completely uphauled about it. Now, that being said, imposing bandwidth limits on connections that could possibly never reach that speed to get that far is a bit easier to deal with, but you've got to understand that this is about money and legal issues. This is their way of controlling bittorrent speeds without throttling the speed of the ports it uses. I shouldn't have to resize all my pictures, stop using my Xbox, Netflix, Blu-Ray player, and all the other great internet compatible hardwares I have available just so I can work on my website for the month. And woe to those who use dual gigabit ports like myself.

I restarted my computer the day before yesterday, and in two days from both of my LAN ports.. I've sent and received over 5.3GB+2.6GB=7.9GB(sent/received on LAN 1) + 21MB+31MB=52MB(sent/received on LAN 2) = 7.952GB/2=2.976GB/day so we'll just round it up to 3GB a day. That's 90GB/month. Now that's not really bad, but we're not taking into consideration that I haven't used my Xbox/blu-ray/watched any Netflix/watched pr0n/downloaded pr0n/done any website work/torrented/ran a server/downloaded a vmachine/ or any of those other things in the past two days. I've only played LoL. Just imagine a guy like me who works with huge files all the time getting boned once every three months or so. I can guarantee you that I wouldn't over my limit every single month, but I can guarantee you it'd be at least three times a year.

With the speeds the internet is getting to, putting a cap on bandwidth per month is just stupid. Do you remember when there was no such thing as an Xbox 360 that hooked up to a LAN line to get internet access? How about Blu-Ray players that had Netflix/Youtube? How about phones that didn't have internet capability or wi-fi? Do you think these things will go away soon or that they'll flourish? My thought is that eventually, our refrigerators will order our groceries for us, our telephones will contain video conferencing, and more. To me, it's like the same thing with hard-drives. You know NASA is using drives faster than we could even imagine here at home, but we'll never know what it's like because as a consumer... it's unavailable to us. Constantly, we see corporations limit their bandwidth, hard drive capacities, memory speeds, cpu speeds, and more because restricting these things means that they can MAKE MONEY. Now I'm all down with people making money, but what I'm not down with is taking the latest technology and holding it back to the consumers because releasing "obsolete" technology (which seems new to us) makes them money. Why restrict something that you KNOW will eventually need to be modified because everyone is using high amounts of bandwidth? Don't you think that eventually Netflix subscribers will be able to stream Blu-Ray content straight through to their televisions? I do! If we were all on 56k modems, not fiber... I could see the point in this. All the retardation of the technological advancements should be completely gone. If Terrabyte-sized drives were available ten years ago, why did we just begin to see them just about five years ago? If SCSI drives had some of the fastest speeds, why were all the hard drives still rocking seek times over 40ms and RPM's at a whopping number of 7200?

Bottom line is this... with the way the internet is growing torwards DLC/streaming media and more, imposing limits on what people are capable of doing and limiting their educational growth (for those like me who personally educate themselves on things like learning linux by downloading a Virtual Machine distro) just doesn't add up.

I posted something like this a while back, under a thread of which I can't remember, dunno if it was even n00bfest but....

a lot of people worldwide are unaware of the fact that everything th at is happening with copyrighting, protection laws, and in this case ATT internet, has little to do with "corporations getting greedy" and a lot more to do with the fact that its how the free market system that everyone knows and loves works. I dunno about the states but 10-13 years ago up here, shopping malls weren't open passed like 7 weekdays and sundays nearly everything was closed. Today, everythings open till like 9, 10 even 11 pm, 24 hour convenient stores and 24 hour businesses in general are booming ahead, and the general office hour work week is pretty much gone.

The corporations which are charging more and maknig more money year by year are the biproduct of the system they're run under, and until the system is changed and people view our current market system as outdated and completely irrelevant this is how its going to continue. One of my profs put it best when he said that the free market economy is like a treadmill, whereby you need to continually pump out more and more products and make more and more money just to stay in the same place you were the year before. The worldwide recession that hit everywhere is not so much a lack of growth, moreso its a stagnation of growth, and look what staying in the same spot caused.

on topic though, I wonder how long it will take ATT to do a full 180 and go back to unlimited bandwidth, the timing of this is horrid, and it'll probably screw up a lot of already strugglin homes who don't pay attention to bandwidth use. Im on an unlimited plan up here, and up until a few years ago I didn't realize there were bandwidth caps around.

I will give Kwang props for posting this link in another thread but all this metered internet is basicly another form of artifical scarcity... Like when you lease a server from IBM they have 4 cpu's already installed in the machine that you already have but have to pay more to use the other 2 or 3 cores

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_scarcity.

I think the cap is dumb, but i have to agree with the above poster about fixing the problems with the 2-5% of the population that abuses the unlimited bandwidth.

BUT, IMO their going about this backwards.
if an ISP wanted to get paid for what is used wouldn't it make more sense to charge out by HOW MUCH you use? a floating scale or something thats laid out like a tax bracket, where the amount of bandwidth you use is reflected in the price. so the heavy users pay more and the people that go on vacation for 3 weeks and dont use their internet at all can save on that months bill.

I would support something like this but the cost would have to be kept low basicly around what we pay now for unlimited.

Just out of curiosity, how much does an unlimited plan go for in the States? I pay 65$/month for 80GB.

Follow-Up Article to the ones posted by acid and Geno:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/03/is-atts-new-150gb-dsl-data-cap-justified.ars

$50/month for unlimited for me. It ranges from $40+ based on the speed. I'm not sure about other ISPs but there are no caps for FIOS and Roadrunner.

I run Roadrunner Turbo, and max speeds for me are around 22mbps, but sometimes can boost up to 28 if I'm routed well. It doesn't happen often, but I pay about $80 a month for it. I would gladly pay $120 per month to get something like Fios.

EDIT: Also, I read that follow-up article you posted, the very last part of the article explains my entire point, and I believe it 100% to be true:

"But as Internet video continues its march into our homes and living rooms, Internet bandwidth use will continue to grow. Will caps be raised over time to rein in outliers only, or will they remain at current levels and catch more and more users?"

Indeed, it will.

FiOS is so hardcore! I love it hence my sig

I don't think I've ever gone over Eastlink's 250 cap, but I do hope that's true.

dam that sucks

beating dead horse - looks like I'm those 2%.

Got the notification from AT&T that they are changing Terms & Conditions. Time to look for a new internet provider...

Ya. they wanted to put a meter on our internet. Tony Clement says he won't let that happen. I hope so.

I will now sum up the entire problem so that we can let this thread die.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/03/data-caps-claim-a-victim-netflix-streaming-video.ars

Now I understand what all the fuss is aboot.

now imagin that you have 3 other people who have xbox', iphones or netflix enabled dvd / tv plus surfing and gaming and see how much data is used. Lawl i havent gotten the letter from ATT yet but as soon as i do im switching isps and ill be sure to let them know why.