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All posts tagged "bandwidth"


Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Enjoy Your Cap! There are Children Starving with Much Worse Caps in the World!

Posted by Hooch Tan in "Digital Home News" @ 03:00 PM

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/fe...ps_around_world

"It goes without saying that America’s Internet infrastructure (and pricing models) can vary wildly from those found in the rest of the world. But let’s not end the comparison with just a throwaway statement like that: How do American ISPs fare against their cross-cultural brethren? Does it get much worse than this… or better?"

Data caps are becoming far more commonplace and will probably remain for a long time to come. With each ISP setting up their own limits, it is expected that comparisons be made between different ISPs and even different countries. While it is interesting to see the limits imposed in different areas of the world, I do not see it as any reason to be relieved, or frustrated about what the limits are in one's own country. With the increasing utility and prevasiveness of the Internet, I think that Internet access should be seen as a basic utility and made available to everyone for as low a cost as possible.

Going beyond the standard usefulness of having Internet access, from accessing and paying your bills online to research about what your city is doing, many companies impose data caps that I find are quite low for what they offer, and can hamper innovation. I also strongly suspect that some caps are in place to protect other forms of revenue, such as cable or satellite television. Regardless, I think that pushing for larger data caps is a good idea. While you may not see a need for it now, it can open up new possibilties that can make life that much more improved in the future. Imagine if the Internet for everyone was still stuck at dial-up speeds!


Friday, January 28, 2011

Netflix Criticizes ISP Nickel and Diming

Posted by Hooch Tan in "Digital Home News" @ 04:00 PM

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...-ridiculous.ars

"Wired ISPs have large fixed costs of building and maintaining their last mile network of residential cable and fiber. The ISPs’ costs, however, to deliver a marginal gigabyte, which is about an hour of viewing, from one of our regional interchange points over their last mile wired network to the consumer is less than a penny, and falling, so there is no reason that pay-per-gigabyte is economically necessary. Moreover, at $1 per gigabyte over wired networks, it would be grossly overpriced."

The battle over how you access your Internet seems like it will never end. Data caps in Canada (and the US) are quite common, meaning that services like Netflix are in a difficult position. Streaming movies adds a considerable amount of convenience since you have access to a large library (sometimes) of videos to watch. However, data transfer caps and overage fees can make such luxuries impractical.

When Netflix announced they were opening to Canadian customers, Canadian ISPs immediately announced they were lowering their caps. Now with Usage Based Billing seeming to become a reality, it seems like services that are data heavy may be few and far between. Resellers like Primus, who previously offered unlimited DSL has placed a 25GB data cap on their service. Anything over and you pay overage fees at rather impressive rates. On top of that, certain types of Internet traffic are still being shaped.

Sadly, it seems that at least for some places, it looks like there is plenty of potential for your Internet costs to go up, or be forced to limit your activity as companies seek to squeeze even higher profits backed by regulatory authorities.


Friday, July 30, 2010

Busting Bandwidth Bugaboos: Troubleshooting ISP Speed Problems

Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home Talk" @ 11:30 AM

Since most Thoughts Media readers are using high-speed Internet, I decided this article would benefit everyone, so it's one of our rare across-the-network pieces of content. I hope you find it useful!

Figure 1: What is this, 1994 all over again?

Whenever bandwidth is discussed, there's always lots of finger pointing because there are so many variables, and players involved, that it's rarely a simple issue. My particular bandwidth bugaboo this morning? I was ticked off that Dropbox (referral) was only uploading at 10 KB/s. I left a 900 MB transfer running all night and it wasn't finished in the morning, and that's when I discovered the awful speed. My first instinct was to point a finger at Dropbox, thinking there was some sort of bandwidth throttling going on. I did a speed test with a tool my ISP provides (speedtest.shaw.ca) and was shocked to see 1.7 Mbps downloads and 107 kbps uploads (Figure 1). It's normally 20x that on downloads and 10x that on uploads, so I knew something was wrong beyond just Dropbox. Read more...


Monday, May 10, 2010

How Fast Does YouTube Say Your Internet Speed Is?

Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home Articles & Resources" @ 01:11 PM

http://www.youtube.com/my_speed#

I'm not entirely sure how I ended up finding this page on YouTube's site, but I'm always interested in seeing real-world bandwidth tests, and YouTube probably burns up more bandwidth than any other domain on the planet, so they have some rich data from which to draw upon. Make sure you're logged into YouTube, then check out their historical speed page. The above screenshot shows that I consume YouTube videos at 11.98Mbps average speed; I was surprised to see that the average Canadian rating, and the global rating, were so low. Read more...


Friday, April 10, 2009

My Lop-Sided Bandwidth Chart

Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home Talk" @ 03:00 PM

I happened to be poking around the Web-based control panel from my ISP today, and I figured I'd check out my modem bandwidth stats. I'll give you one guess which month I installed Mozy in. ;-) I blew past my ISPs 100 GB bandwidth cap that month, but you have to do that three months in a row before they drop the hammer on you. I have to chuckle when I hear people complaining about Comcast's 250 GB bandwidth caps - I bet only people that are complaining are the ones running bitorrent clients 24/7. Unless someone is downloading an Xbox Live HD movie every single day in a month, it's almost impossible to blow through that much bandwidth with legitimate use. But I digress...have a great weekend everyone! And if you want to check out Mozy, use the coupon code APRIL to get 10% off. [Affiliate]


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