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unknown posted:You're incorrect in that - a significant portion of users on average use less than 5 gigs per month combined up+down. Noone cares that grandma doesn't use her computer for anything more than text only email on a creaky Windows ME computer. If there's so many people barely using any bandwidth then that by definition means there's plenty of bandwidth to spare for people who use a lot!
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Jan 27, 2011 19:02
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I don't believe Canada actually needs infrastructure upgrades to not have to have caps. You've all obviously been doing fine going way above caps with no slowdown or anything right? This is just a money grab and a blatant one at that.
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Jan 27, 2011 20:08
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less than three posted:That's bullshit. They tried it in the USA and everybody flipped out. And that's with caps of 300GB, not 25. Er, the ones that got people flipped out were Frontier DSL trying for 5 GB and Time Warner Cable trying for caps starting at 40 GB on the lowest cable plan. Most people really don't give a poo poo about Comcast's cap which is basically the only one any major company has. It's 250 GB and in most areas it's completely unenforced. If you're in an area where it is enforced, paying $5-$20 extra for a business internet plan removes the cap and also give you the ability to freely run servers on the line too. Also if they do enforce the cap on you, there's no actual overage fees iirc, you just either get told to stop or are offered an upgrade to business internet at the same speeds.
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Jan 27, 2011 20:30
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A 56k connection with maximum utilization of it's bandwidth (it maxes at 64 kbps, so if you're topping the download at 53.3 k your upload will max at 10.7k, likewise when you max the upload at 33.6 k you can only download at 30.4 k) will provide 20 gigabytes of total transfer per month. I see no goddamn reason why a broadband line should ever be sold with less bandwidth per month than a dialup line, much less a tenth of it.
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Jan 27, 2011 23:38
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Nomenklatura posted:Yeah, this is what's bugging me. UBB as an ITMP measure might make sense if they were up against some sort of hard physical limit, like spectrum or some such thing. But that's not the problem. The PROBLEM is that they under-anticipated demand in the age of ubiquitous streaming and downloadable media. Stop believing the lie that they HAVE bandwidth problems! Where's the proof they have any kind of need for upgrades?
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Jan 28, 2011 17:39
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Nitr0 posted:Where's the proof that they don't? That's the problem. There's no way to get reliable data like this without going directly to the source and we have no idea if they're lying or not. The proof is that people in this thread were happily doing hundreds of gigabytes per month with no issue! If there were congestion problems, they would know about it, because poo poo would get slow. Congestion isn't invisible!
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Jan 28, 2011 17:51
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Nitr0 posted:Yea! A bunch of random people on an internet forum spread around Canada is a great way to determine congestion issues!!!!!!! Anyone who's not experiencing congestion does not have congestion issues! And of course, even if there WERE congestion issues, bandwidth caps wouldn't fix it! When congestion does happen, it's because a whole bunch of people are on at once, who may not actually transfer much on a monthly basis! Imagine there's 50 people on this one node, they all have 5 megabit downstream connections and the connection to that node from the outside world is only 50 megabits downstream. One guy on the node is constantly downloading at 5 megabits per second no matter what, he's pulling 1.6 terabytes every month. Everyone else on the node only uses the internet from 5 PM to 6 PM and is downloading youtubes and maybe streaming an hour of Netflix, etc. To make it easier we just assume that the 1 dude gets to maintain his speed, the other 49 people are now splitting the remaining 45 megabits, and thus each getting 0.9 megabits down for that one hour. Those people are all going to have problems doing what they want to do even though they're barely heavy users at 12 GB a month each. They're going to have congestion, and even if you kick off the guy who does 1.6 terabytes a month, everyone else still suffers, since now they're getting 1.02 megabits per second each for the one hour a day they each use the internet! And putting, say a 5 gb cap on them won't help matters either since they will still be using the internet at about the same time! So if there's no congestion issues - caps are a cashgrab with no benefit. If there ARE congestion issues - it's STILL a cashgrab with no benefit to average people! So either situation, caps don't solve anything! What WOULD solve things in the case of congestion is one of two things. 1) Upgrade the relevant infrastructure. 2) Institute unbiased throttling to maintain quality of service when and only when the congestion exists.
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Jan 28, 2011 18:27
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Nitr0 posted:The problem is you have absolutely no oversight into these networks so for you to sit there and say "Well the solution is simple, just build the network up" isn't a solution since you don't have any idea what it takes or what upgrades are required to deliver 25Mb/s unmetered to everyone like some people in here are demanding they get. You can be sure if everyone started running through hundreds of GB per month (which with current internet trends is getting to be pretty easy) you will see your congestion issues pop up really quickly. CONGESTION ISN'T CAUSED BY THE AMOUNT OF BANDWIDTH YOU USE, IT'S CAUSED BY THE AMOUNT OF PEOPLE USING CONNECTIONS AT THE SAME TIME. That was the ENTIRE purpose of my little demonstration thing with the one guy who's always on and the 49 other people who are only on an hour a day! If he downloaded at full 5 megabits per second all the time except for the hour each day the other people were on, he could blow through 1.5 terabytes without causing any congestion. It's the 66 gigabytes he uses AT THE SAME TIME EVERYONE ELSE IS TRYING TO GET ON, that CAUSES the congestion! You can't fix congestion by instituting caps! It does nothing! And apparently the actual cost of delivering that guy 1.5 terabytes of data is something around $15 on the current system, but with the planned overages they'd charge him $1500 at least. It's a blatant loving cashgrab. Nitr0 posted:I agree the networks need to be overhauled to meet current and future demands. There needs to be some sort of government oversight to determine if these problems exist or if they're all made up by the large companies to make more money. They are ripping you off! Are there not people who just a few months ago had no caps and were easily going over a terabyte a month? Did a moose come and eat all the bandwidth between November and January? And it doesn't make any sense that Canada can't deliver reasonable internet service to its population when 85% of the country is either in a strip within 100 miles of the US border or in the Edmonton-Calgary corridor and the one or two other major cities and suburban areas not falling into the aforementioned two categories. "Well we can't give Bob the fuckin Fur Trapper in the Yukon DSL so hey you can only have 25 gb of transfer a month in Windsor, while the dude across the border in Detroit has a rarely-enforced 250 GB cap at worst" is the kind of argument you're making here, and it's basically bullshit. I don't see Verizon telling its FIOS customers to only use 100 GB of data a month because hey, some bumfuck towns in Nebraska are hard to reach!
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Jan 28, 2011 19:49
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Nitr0 posted:Right, because then instead of someone downloading 20GB @ 20Mb/s in 2.2 hours they download at 10Mb/s in 4.5 hours. How don't caps relieve congestion? If you are limited to the amount of data you can pass then you are not on the network as often. The faster they get you on and off the more speed they have to give to someone else. Caps don't relieve congestion because congestion is not caused by downloading a large amount. It's caused by downloading AT ALL when a lot of other people are. But of course, it actually rarely happens! Again, see my little scenario earlier, it simplifies it! The Massive Downloader Guy can easily get 1.5 terabytes of data a month as long as he wants. Since the other 49 people sharing 50 megabits total capacity all want to go at once, none of them can get near to their 5 megabit speed limit, and if the Massive Downloader guy is there at full speed already, they each get .09 megabits down, if he ain't they each get 1.02 or so down. Either way they're far congested. Even if only 11 them are on at once, it's impossible to maintain their full speed! Instituting bandwidth caps is just as moronic as trying to solve rush hour traffic by only allowing people to drive 100 miles a month before they have to pay a fee to go farther!
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Jan 28, 2011 20:22
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Nitr0 posted:The congestion won't be as bad though since you don't have the people who are downloading all day continually using up 20Mb/s running through 800gb a month. 800 gigabytes per month is 2.5 megabits per second, not 20 megabits per second. 20 megabits per second is 6.2 TERABYTES. You're complaining that some guy wants to be able to run a 20 megabit connection for 1/8 of the time he's online? Complaining that someone might want to max out their internet connection a scant 3 hours a day? And if they really can't handle people doing that much traffic, they could just throttle their speeds when there is trouble (result: congestion actually solved, noone's paying extra) or they could you know not advertise speeds that are unfeasible. Viktor posted:There is some validity in caps, the problem is pushing the 25GB cap which is less then we had a decade ago. There's no validity in caps really, if what you actually want is reducing congestion. They're a great money maker though.
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Jan 28, 2011 20:39
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Nitr0 posted:I didn't literally mean 24 hours a day... Well what's wrong with using your internet connection to its fullest for 3 hours a day? IS 2 hours wrong too? 1 hour? 15 minutes? 20 megabits down for 15 minutes a day for 30 days = 66 gigabytes a month. If you never use any transfer at all outside those 15 minutes a day. If it's only possible to handle that service for 15 minutes a day, why bother selling it at all?
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Jan 28, 2011 20:57
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Another thing to note is that a lot of traffic that used to be people grabbing movies and music off P2P services is now quasilegal or fully legal videos on youtube and legal streaming from all sorts of providers. A thread a few months ago showed the change in proportions very well, can't remember it though. A lot of that can conceivably be blamed on attempts to make it harder to use illegal p2p transfers like throttling torrents and poo poo.
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Jan 29, 2011 00:20
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Nomenklatura posted:(And premium differentiated services, like Facebook et al.) Wait, they're actually doing that up there on top of still having roaming charges for leaving your "home area" and charging extra for calling long distance on a cell phone (both of which have been gone from all major US carriers for a decade, I might add)?
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Jan 29, 2011 05:22
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Dudebro posted:I'm confused by this post. Netflix is killing who and how? They don't get to blame high usage on illegal piracy now, so Netflix is evil. Again, those small ISPs could simply throttle connections to maintain their network!
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Jan 30, 2011 04:27
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Nomenklatura posted:A lot of that has to do with the directions given the CRTC by Maxime Bernier back when he was Industry Minister, but the lion's share is simply because our telecom monopolies were never broken up like their American counterparts. They have a death grip on anything that has to do with media or communications, and they're becoming more vertically integrated by the moment. It's pathetic. You have to admit that "breakup" in the US hasn't been very effective (these don't show the fact that AT&T itself retained ownership of nearly all long-distance telecom lines they owned before the breakup, by the way):   Live in Pennslyvania? Basically no choice for standard phone but Verizon. Wyoming? Qwest. California? AT&T. There's 0 competition between these carriers of course for actual home phone service and for the most part for DSL Now of course, pretty much anywhere you live in America you have the choice between the mandated monopoly cable provider or DSL from either the big phone company, or 3 or 4 other companies that provide the exact same service for almost exactly the same price off DSLAMs in the central office. Of course, somehow, the FCC doesn't directly bend over and take it like the CRTC apparently does. Or maybe every company involved is bribing enough against things bad for them but good for others that they never get the special treatment they want, who knows. And as far as cable goes,  (larger at http://www.mediabiz.com/media/content/Top10_Cable_Footprints.pdf if you want) This doesn't directly show it but to show the same areas covered say 10 years ago this would have to be like the top 100 cable operators. Glory of mergers!
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Jan 30, 2011 07:49
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skidooer posted:The ISP. It is a small rural ISP where I suspect 50 year old farmers were not doing a lot of torrenting before, but there is a good chance they are using Netflix now. Their internet business was already a loss leader offset by the profit from telephone subscriptions; the recent increase in data use is just making it that much more difficult for them. That ISP is probably getting their bandwidth and such supplied by one of the big operators aren't they? They're probably trying to put the squeeze on that little ISP just the way they do it on their own customers.
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Jan 30, 2011 19:06
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Ok serious question here - how much of the Canadian broadband subscriber base is taken by the top carrier? Just for reference, Comcast is the top provider with 15.9 million subscriber households out of 80 million us household with broadband - 19.88%
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Feb 1, 2011 07:44
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It's time to revive dial-up BBSes! Break out the extra phone lines and modems, and set up some relays to the US. 
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Feb 1, 2011 18:40
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Stanley Pain posted:To be honest I hope the line between lovely caps and UBB gets blurred to the point that they not only reverse UBB but force ISPs to either abolish caps, or charge the actual cost of bandwidth (~ $0.12/GB). Didn't Netflix say the actual cost of bandwidth to the home was a penny per gigabyte?
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Feb 2, 2011 03:59
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LitigiousChimp posted:That's not a good analogy. Road tolls could help reduce congestion because they would encourage commuters to use public transit. There is no "public transit" option for internet access, so all UBB is going to do is force us to act like its 1999 again when it comes to how we use the internet. No it is a good analogy. If you institute road tolls during rush hour in a place where there is no public transit, the only effect is a few people would carpool. The internet is the highway with no public transit.
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Feb 3, 2011 20:02
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Hirez posted:What about mentioning something like if you downloaded for 18-20* hours at the download rate they offer, that you would hit reach the cap. So essentially you can use your monthly plan for less than 24 hours before you would be charged extra. If you have a 25 GB plan, for example, it only take 11 hours 22 minutes 40 seconds to exceed it if you download at 5 megabits per second.
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Feb 3, 2011 22:19
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Martytoof posted:She needs to hammer on why our caps suck compared to other countries. Bell wants to impose those caps on their resellers' customers which is 100% stifling competition. Other countries don't have this barrier to competition, why do we? It's not even like there's a lack of American cities directly across the border from Canadian cities with wildly better internet service available. Detroit's a total shithole but as far as internet goes I'm pretty sure it beats the crap outta Windsor.
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Feb 3, 2011 23:33
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True usage based billing would also mean that the dude who actually only uses 1 gigabyte a month would pay like $8 a month to cover the other expenses besides bandwidth and the ISPs won't be having that.
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Feb 4, 2011 01:01
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jizzpowered posted:How slow is the 5M dsl line? I'm thinking of switching over from Videotron's 15M line. I'd rather have unlimited than a shitter 70GB cap. It's 1/3 the speed down, I dunno what the difference is in upload since you didn't specify.
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Feb 4, 2011 19:28
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cowofwar posted:If I get a phone line I can talk as much as I want. Don't forget that if you did dial-up you could also use it as much as you want - you can do 20 gb combined upload and download in a month with it.
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Feb 11, 2011 05:30
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Has anyone brought up that people with handicaps might have to use more data and therefore be unfairly discriminated against by lowered caps/bandwidth charges? Think blind people getting audio versions of sites or deaf people watching sign languague video instead of listening to things. If people want to talk "fairness"...
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Feb 27, 2011 18:20
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Ruklo Burosee posted:I think that's just YouTube being YouTube. I'm with Rogers and their "Extreme Plus" cable internet and YouTube can be incredibly sluggish at times. I find it varies on the video and also the quality selected. A 480p video may load super-slow but bump it up to 720p and the video is downloaded in a matter of seconds. It varies on different videos and different resolutions because the videos and different resolutions of them can be hosted on a whole bunch of different servers, some of which have a great connection to your isp and you, others that don't or are currently overloaded from other people. less than three posted:You should switch to Google DNS anyways. 8.8.8.8/8.8.4.4 http://www.grc.com/dns/benchmark.htm You should actually run this quick application. IT does a 10 to 15 minute test of the speed, reliability and consistency of like a lot of different DNS servers from your location. In most cases it turns out that Google or Level 3 DNS (4.2.2.1-6) comes out on top but its sometimes others, and there are places where Google DNS for some reason is really bad and poo poo like that. fishmech fucked around with this message at 16:58 on Mar 21, 2011 |
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Mar 21, 2011 16:56
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Don't forget that according to Netflix, the cost of delivering transfer to residential user in Canada is under 1 penny a gigabyte (so a terabyte of transfer should be under $10).
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Mar 29, 2011 17:00
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8ender posted:Unf Speeedboost. The drat thing was boosting to 60Mbit during this test: Why is the upload speed still under a megabit?
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May 20, 2011 18:20
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Bloody Hedgehog posted:Looking at those plans and just general internet packages all over the web, when are we collectively going to start measuring download speeds in megabytes and not megabits? Maybe once you also have upload speeds that aren't 0.125 megabytes per second or less?
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May 26, 2011 07:28
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Stanley Pain posted:The only thing is that 250GB isn't that much to begin with and easily reached when your household uses Netflix, Hulu, etc. Not to mention that 250GBs usually costs the ISP next to nothing as most of that content is provided by a local CDN. On top of that, most of the peering contracts between ISPs and the US tend to be cost neutral. 250 GB a month = the ISP claiming to only be able to handle sustained download at 797 kilobits per second
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May 27, 2011 02:59
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rhag posted:But 100 Mbps? With a 9.1 hour or so cap? For a decent price? Fixed this so you can understand how stupid it is. You'd blow that cap in 9 hours and 6 minutes if you used the speed you had. You can only use your speed for 1/80 of the month, in other terms.
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Jul 10, 2011 03:30
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less than three posted:Yeah. I'm fine with something like 15mbps service, but in order to get a decent transfer allocation I have to purchase EXTREME 250 MEGABIT CABLE EXPRESS PLUS or something. This was what I was trying to get across when I pointed out the guy with a 100 mbit connection could only use it for 9 hours before overrunning the cap. Is it really so much to ask that if you pay an ISP for 30 days of internet service and a certain speed, you could at least use that speed for say, 2 hours a day before you exceed the cap? For example, that means a 395 GB cap for 15 megabit service, 131 GB for 5 megabit service, etc. Not to mention - if you ran a 56k modem at full utilization up and down (which works out to 64 kbps combined incidentally) you could pull 19.8 GB a month. The fact that there are plans in Canada right now for home internet service that are lower than that or even only 3 times as big or less is just plain wrong.
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Jul 12, 2011 18:11
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Backov posted:That's to prevent us being owned by the US. Then it's already failed.
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Jul 15, 2011 08:27
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Sprawl posted:Because shaws service is only available to this customers that already get internet/tv/phone from them. That is exactly what makes it anti competitive.
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Jul 15, 2011 23:09
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rhag posted:Found a post on frooglegeek (via reddit) about how comcast should be sued for their download caps.  The Comcast data cap is largely unenforced and if you pay attention you notice there's no actual overage fees possible. If you live in an area with bad infrastructure, it gets enforced but you pay $10-$20 extra for "business" internet to remove the cap.I'm a comcast user and I did 250 gb the first week of this month alone, no issue.
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Jul 16, 2011 02:36
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iframe posted:It's a soft cap, so they'll complain if you go far enough over. Try moving a couple terabytes in a month on a residential connection and let us know how things go. In June I did 2.5 terabytes of transfer, combined up and down, since I got every computer in the house set up with online backup services as well as streaming video services like Netflix and Hulu on most of the TVs through addon boxes or a new tv. Since I'm in an area with better infrastructure, there's been no problem. And if they ever do complain all that will happen is that they'll offer to "upgrade" the line to business class for $15 extra at this speed tier.
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Jul 16, 2011 23:18
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Brace posted:How do you guys download Terabytes of data? I don't get it. What do you guys do? I've honestly stopped pirating completely too which is the kicker. There's just so much good streaming or download services in the US these days, and I'm not the only one in this house who uses the internet. And getting all the computers on proper online backup services uses up a lot of bandwidth too. I mean I get why you can't figure out what we possibly do with this all but then as far as I can tell apparently everyone in Canada can't get upload over 2 megabits per second if this thread's speedtest images are to be believed. Add that to you guys living with hard caps for quite a long time and thus having to maintain a certain discipline in internet usage...
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Jul 17, 2011 06:07
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iframe posted:OK, I don't know how the gently caress they decide who to call then. I'm in an area that can get their 105 megabit service and I still got a call threatening to disconnect me if I went over the cap again after doing a terabyte in a month. They've got some manner of congestion or traffic issues on your node. That's basically it. Since they have network troubles in that area, they check you. If they really wanted to just rack up extra money they'd do the Canadian model and actually enforce the cap + have overage charges.
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Jul 17, 2011 08:46
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Why haven't any of these ISPs decided to go with peak-times throttling? It's what the British ISPs do for the most part, and it actually is a solution to the claimed problems of congestion.
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Jul 20, 2011 05:52
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