Do you guys got bandwidth limit imposed by your internet provider company?
I've never talked about this on the internet but my bro and me don't have cable tv or satellite tv, and so we started seeing tv on internet sites such as hulu.tv, justin.tv and such. Although i really wish to see it on a normal tv set, i admit having no commercial is awesome. But now i can't after Onelink (my internet provider) contacted us we where downloading and exceeding the limit by ALOT. They charge $10 more for every 10 gigas u exceed. Whats the limit? 40GB. We used to spend 100GB to 500 gb watching streams and entire series on hulu.tv and Tonight Shows. But now we cant.
I was wondering if you guys got this same problem, as its a pain the ass and it takes out the fun in the internet. Problem is where i live 1 company provides the service per area. Meaning the zone is monopolized by Onelink' who has the fastest internet speed of 3mb.
I was wondering if you guys got this same problem, as its a pain the ass and it takes out the fun in the internet. Problem is where i live 1 company provides the service per area. Meaning the zone is monopolized by Onelink' who has the fastest internet speed of 3mb.
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Personally, I know AT&T doesn't limit my bandwidth whatsoever.
So it is in North America then? Wow, that sucks. I know you haven't hit it yet, but I think I'd switch providers if AT&T started in on that ridiculousness.
Somethings not right here...
It's a provider specific thing. Here in the UK, there are providers with limits (usually going from 2GB-20GB), providers with unlimited (with a "fair usage policy" which is supposedly really high. We've got that, and i regularly stream HD content, and play games online), and providers with true unlimited broadband.
I would say, given 3MB is your highest speed in the area, you live in a rural area, with old cables, which can't sustain high volumes of data traffic, so the limit is there to allow other to use it, without being painfully slow.
I also have AT&T DSL. I only play $25 per month for it, and I don't have a GB-per-month download cap either.
I forget what my bandwidth limit is, but dslreports.com says it can clock my bandwidth to a server in Toronto at ~2.5Mbps download/~500kbps upload.
That being said, when I download files from the net, it usually shows up as downloading at 300-400kbps.
My parents went on a trip to Europe recently and my Dad says that, while he was over there, not only did he have a download limit but he also got bandwidth speeds that could only rival dialup. He might have only been using his iPhone, I'm not sure. Even if he was, getting only 50kbps download speeds on a iPhone is pitiful. You can't even watch Youtube videos at that speed.
It's why I often use YouTube to watch TV. I'm sure there are more legal options, but YouTube's filesizes seem smaller.
Just ten dollars for a whole ten gigabytes? Wow, that sounds really reasonable to me.
My speed is usually around 8-10 mbps. In fact
When i did it earlier, around 7ish, it was 9mbps.
Psuni i dont live in Europe, i live in Puerto Rico which is a US territory with US federal law and our own state law. So legally (not geographically) we are under North America. The problem is in my home we are 4 people and i dont think that cap limit is enough for all of us.
Now 250gb sounds about right! I feel stupid to have to stick to a company which offers you an internet service but barely allows you to download and watch streams.
Im not european, i live in the americas and we can get access to hulu and all those sorts of streams. Though i think its unfair to now allow europeans to watch Hulu.
Sorry just went to my bro and he told me its $17 bucks per 10gb in excess. I still think its expensive!
I happen to be hooked up to the university network for now, which is great because it's a 100 MBit link with a 50GB/week external upload limit and no download limit. (But note that with speeds like that, the weekly upload limit could be exhausted in only three hours if you wanted.
In the Netherlands you can generally get unlimited access at around 20 MBit/s but expect to pay in the range of €40 to €50 per month for it. There are broadband alternatives which are a lot cheaper (€15 to €25 per month) but then you might have a lower speed cap and a transfer limit. You get what you pay for.
My folks, however, live in rural Australia. Landline broadband is not an option so they're limited to mobile access using a USB modem.
Coverage is patchy to say the least. They can pick up one provider only in the living room (but nowhere else in the house) and another provider only in the bedrooms. So they are signed up to both ISPs and have a USB modem for each one, switching depending on the part of the house they're in.
I've also seen them run the modem out the window on a long cable and stick it on a chair in the backyard to get better reception... and put it in a little plastic lunchbag if it starts to rain.
Don't know what the speeds are like, but my little bro plays online games over that connection so I guess it can't be too bad.
When the family lived in town, they used a broadband plan where you were "shaped" if you exceeded the download limit - the ISP just limited your download speed until the month rolled over. Downloads during off-peak periods (some time in the late evening til 6am) weren't counted towards the quota. If a contract must involve a cap, I think this is my preferred option. It seems less painful than being cut off entirely, or charged an additional fee.
Oh but you can, maybe you gotta pause a bit and put the quality down, but it's do-able. My internet's highest speed was 60kbps untill quite recently. I'd cry if I had to go back to it though
Japan is about twice that expensive, but offers similar service (except the cheap telephone. Telephone service there is the worst of any industrialized nation, by far) along with fairly cheap fiber optic, all uncapped.
I had the same service for the same price with SFR. Free phone to most countries (never found one I wanted to call that wasn't free), unlimited internet and cable TV (that I didn't even used but hey, it was part of the deal so whatever), and a cellphone thrown in without a plan (so, unlimited calls/texts to that phone but needed to pay to call/text from it) that I never used either because I just don't use cellphones anymore.
Now we pay almost 80 CAD for telephone (only 2 hours per month nation-wise, no international plan, free calls in town) plus Internet (limited bandwidth, we go over it pretty much every month, and that was before I started using skype so I'm scared for my next bill), and no TV.
And that's the only provider here. It sucks.
EDIT:
Given how people use the internet these days, (digital distribution, media streaming etc) capping upload or download seems ridiculous to me. If you don't have enough bandwidth to offer your customers unlimited service, it means you should spend some of those profits on upgrading your backbone network and other equipment.
That's because they are specified in different units! Watch that B; lower case b means bit, capital B means byte (8 bits). 2.5 Mbps = 320 kBps. (Use Google calculator for quick conversion)
I could have used my own provider to test, and the upload would have clocked in a bit higher, but I thought I'd try something a bit further off...
np: ISAN - 64 Fire Damage (Glow In The Dark Safari Set)
On the contrary they try to get me use more bandwith, because service providers keep calling me and offering me 100mbit/s broadband. I don't need it to anything, but who knows what happens when the price goes down a bit.
Time Warner as an ISP/cable company is probably the single best reason *not* to live in southern California.
Monopoly is a bad thing because it allows dictating terms to the customers.
Around here they couldn't really dictate such terms, because competitors would give better terms. Only limitation is that some smaller service providers priorize traffic in their mobile Internet connections (i. e. peer-to-peer gets less bandwith than other traffic), but most don't do that, because there are plenty of legal peer-to-peer applications and all major competitors allow free use without limitations.
This is the fastest it's ever been in my experience. I suppose if I'd used American Internet I'd feel like I was missing out, but I don't really.
It would be cool if it was really fast, though. I'd be able to load entire YouTube videos in seconds. It'd be awesome!
I live in US territory. And there is competition, but its just than in our area Onelink is the only one who offers fast internet in our area. If we want to loom for their competitor he will say "We dont do service in that area" I believe this companies has picked apart puerto rico between them in order to not compete with other companies in each area. And that is immoral.
Good Lord. I never realized just how slow the internet was too. Urgle.
True story.