Download Caps... How long can ISPs Maintain them.

Hey Hey,

I find this subject to be rather interesting, and it was the Comcast thread that made me want to bring it up.

When broadband internet was first introduced... there was no cap... no limit on what you could download. I can remember that one month, my online traffic usage was well over 200GB, but this was probably 4 or 5 years ago. Then came the day of the download cap. With my current service, I have 60GB... I don't exceed that... in fact I seldom utilize the max but I'm seldom online at home these days... I'd rather be doing other things. A lot of people switched providers here when the first cap was introduced, however once the only competition introduced a cap there was nothing that could be done. These caps are a nuisance but currently unless you are violating your ToS or downloading illegal content, you seldom have issues with these caps... 60GB is more than the average user will go through surfing, reading email, etc...

The problem is how rapidly the online landscape is changing. iTunes and the iPod really started this... prior to that we had torrents and file sharing, but the majority of music and videos exchanged were illegal and thus the user had no right to complain about their ability to download them being capped. With iTunes first introducing music and now video, we're seeing the landscape change... now there are legit reasons to require large amounts of data transfer. With iTunes and Netflix competing for line video rentals, which can include HD content... the landscape is changing further.

We also have streaming music providers that are becoming more popular... I'm a Yahoo! Music Unlimited subscriber (which is being migrated to a competing service from Rhapsody)... and I stream quite a bit of music. I've got on demand access to a couple of million songs and I quite frequently check out new albums and old favourites.

How long can ISPs continue to maintain these transfer limits? Will they have to move to a new model and upgrade existing infrastructure so that they can remove these limits? Or will we see these content providers (iTunes, NetFlix, Rhapsody) partner with the ISPs? Will we see a Verizon/iTunes partnership competing with a Comcast/Netflix partnership where not only will you chose your ISP based on their service, but also on the services associated with them.

Thoughts?

I'm not aware of any caps on the two major broadband ISPs in my area (Philly, US). They are Comcast Cable and Verizon DSL and FIOS. There are different levels of service which will give you varied download/upload speeds but no enforced limits on how much you can DL or UL.

I download several hundred megs of data every day with my podcasts and various music subscriptions. Not to mention OS updates and various ISOs or VM appliances. I upload gigs a day seeding torrents for various *nix distros or VM appliances.

If caps were set or enforced, I'd simply choose a different plan that let me do what I want/need. Or, maybe change ISPs if there was a better option.

I'm not aware of any caps in the US, either. I know that back in Belgium, every single ISP has a cap, so I'm going to guess that it's region/country-specific. If only one ISP would have caps, no one would use that ISP, so it's all or nothing...

Interesting.... I always thought that the US was subject to the same download caps as Canada...

Alrighty then... I guess we're posing the question to all non-Americans :)

Comcast doesn't exactly have a cap, but they do throttle torrent trafic down.

Most ISPs in Holland used to have caps.. But now with all the competition none of them have it anymore. No datalimits, just a difference in speeds. Pay more get more bandwidth. Only the cheapest of the cheapest accounts still have that monthly datalimit.

Try surfing and downloading on a 3 GIG cap. Yes I wont lie, 3Gig. You guys should thank your lucky start you arent in Africa :)

Well, over here we have pretty much of a mixture of services. Some have caps and some do not, also the speed varies.

Most providers offer more than one "plan" so you just pick what suits your particular internet usage requirements.

i'm in America. i go through a service provider. called CableOne. they cap me at 3GB a day. starting at 1:00pm till Midnight if you go over that cap. the connections goes from a 300MB to a 20MB

Quote:

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Originally Posted by devildell

i'm in America. i go through a service provider. called CableOne. they cap me at 3GB a day. starting at 1:00pm till Midnight if you go over that cap. the connections goes from a 300MB to a 20MB

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I would give an arm for a cap that like that on a daily basis.

There was a survey here in South Africa.

It would work out cheaper to jump on a plane, fly to Japan or China, do a 50 gig download and fly back to South africa.

This would be cheaper than to download it from here.

These are the plans that I found for CableOne (dated October 2007):

http://www.cableone.net/internet/limits.htm

It appears that once you reach your volume cap, they halve your connection speed.

I haven't seen that approach over here, just daily and monthly volume limits. The providers are generally not too aggressive about it, but if you persistently exceed the terms of you plan they will shift you to a more expensive one.

Our providers seem to have a different business model............... peak time would be considered to be something like 08.00 to 18.00Hrs, which is what they consider to be peak for the telephone system as well. I guess that they are trying to give priority to business customers?

I just recently went from a corporate sponsored blackberry to getting my own personal blackberry. I changed jobs and my new employer uses the Treo over the Blackberry... *shudder*.

Anyway, the "unlimited data plan" from Verizon limits you to 5GB per month. I think it would be rather difficult to exceed 5GB per month unless you were using it as a modem for your computer or laptop. In that case, they are very specific about what you can and can't do when it comes to p2p and streaming media. Verizon Plan