
Time To Face Facts: Broadband Caps Are Really About Protecting Video Revenue - yanw
http://techdirt.com/articles/20100723/04083610334.shtml
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aohtsab
I've always been confused on this part — do ISPs have a certain bandwidth to
start out with, of which they then allocate portions to their customers?

The problem with 'bandwidth-hogs', from that assumption, is that ISPs oversell
pieces of their pie based on some equation of how many people use how much.

I've never understood why one can sell "up to 5 Mb/s", and then sanction your
customers who used their service to that extent.

It's like dangling a carrot in front of their face and smacking them when they
get too close.

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saurik
Bandwidth over the course of seconds and bandwidth over the course of days are
not comparable. If you are using the fast bandwidth provided to download a
file and have it nearly instantly, that's great. It is wonderful to be able to
watch YouTube videos without buffering, to get entire webpages in the blink of
an eye, and to install an OS over the network without wishing you had splurged
for the Cd's. But as soon as you provide something like that, you get some
asshole who thinks that it is then his right to use that speed /constantly/,
doing nothing but downloading files day and night. If everyone does this,
there is no more bandwidth to go around: the expectation is that users will
use "up to 5MB/s" only for a few seconds, not for days at a time. You might
even say a fair allotment of the finite bandwidth resource might be "5MB/s, or
100MB/min, or 1GB/hour", despite those numbers not even remotely multiplying
out. And this is, in fact, how many ISP's are now trying to solve the problem
of people who don't understand the concept of sharing: "burst rates", where as
you use bandwidth it slows down over short time spans.

