Bandwidth Caps Force In-House Bandwidth Cops?

[Jason Dunn]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110408/16503613835/bandwidth-caps-forcing-users-to-police-their-own-household-internet-usage.shtm' target='_blank'>http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...rnet-usage.shtm</a><br /><br /></div><p><em>"I have three teenage daughters who also download music, TV shows and so on. I figured someone had just gone a little overboard, and since it was close to the end of the month, I thought it wasn't anything to be worried about. The next day, however, I went online and checked my usage (Rogers has an online tool that shows daily usage), and it said that I had used 121 GB more than my allotted amount for the month. In other words, I had used more than 100 GB in less than two days."</em></p><p>The basic premise of this story is that, as bandwidth caps become more common, home owners with multiple Internet users will have to become "bandwidth cops" to ensure that the shared resource (GB transferred per month) doesn't get used up too quickly. It's not a role that most people will be comfortable in; technical limits of most home users will be the primary barrier. Expecting users to be able to log data transfers on a per-computer basis is simply beyond the skills of an average user.&nbsp;I will point out, however, that this guy's problem ended up being the old <em>"my kid was using a file sharing service to grab TV shows and I didn't realize it"</em>. Not educating your kids on the legal/moral ramifications of content theft is up to you, the parent. No ISP is going to do that for you!</p>

[Sven Johannsen]

Limiting the amount of data one can download in a given month, is not a bandWIDTH cap. Bandwidth is a speed value given in amount of data per second. That's just semantics though.

Reading the comments to the article, I can only relate using my cell phone experience where I have an actual data cap for the month. That annoys me, but it would really tick me off if I had that on my terrestrial service. At least I think it would as I have no earthly idea how much I use, or any idea how to find out, off-hand. Never had to. I do know how on my Cell plan, because it is relevent. Only because the cell provider says so, though. Not because the amount of data I use in a month should mean a thing to them. They don't produce that data, just transfer it. What should matter to them is actually 'bandwidth', how fast I want that data. That's an instantaneous, or average, parameter though, not a cumulative one. It really seems to me that it is irrelevent to the infrastructure how much data is transferrd by it over time. I get that the infrastructure can be burdened by too much flowing to fast at any particular time, but that is somewhat self regulating anyway.

It is really frustrating how so many things are gravitating to the web, or internet if you will, streaming music and video services, easy videoteleconferencing, gaming (don't forget stuff like XBox), cloud services for production applications, backup, etc, while at the same time the bit pipe providers are conspireing to limit the amount of data that is transferred, or gouge for it.