[kwlug-disc] UBB comes to Teksavvy

[Chris Irwin]

On Mon, Jan 31, 2011 at 19:38,  <unsolicited at swiz.ca> wrote:
> That has to be a crock. If you take out streaming or torrents you won't go
> over the cap, and you will incur no additional cost.

Wait, what? Remove torrents or streaming? "You don't use as much
bandwidth as you think if you don't count a bunch of the things you
do". I download legitimate things with bittorrent. I could concede the
point if you said specifically "illicit" torrents, but to say that all
streaming and torrents should stop?

My home connection serves two people. We don't do that much
downloading, but we do now have netflix. A two-hour movie is 3.5GB,
That would be $8 in UBB overage charges. Do you really think it cost
almost the same to deliver those bits as it does a physical piece of
plastic for $9.99? Again, this is a month where I didn't also download
updated install media for Ubuntu, Fedora, or anything else I use at
home.

I buy all my games through Steam. Grand Theft Auto IV, for a
from-memory example, is 15GB. One would use *more than half* of their
bandwidth downloading one single game. I don't see why that should not
be counted as something "normal" users do when Steam has 30 million
*active* users (I don't know anybody that buys physical PC games
anymore, even if you can find them in stores now).

Hell, we used 23GB at work in January, and my office currently
consists of two people. By no means are we spending a lot of time on
the Internet, we don't stream music, we don't watch netflix at work,
we don't have torrents at work. We're right at the limit and barely
use the Internet. It is so ridiculously easy for a consumer to fly
past a 25GB limit while doing nothing wrong or unexpected.

>  (And you're already on
> the lowest, or almost lowest tier service, capacity and speed, anyways.)

I would *love* to be on a faster tier. Please remind Bell that the
CRTC ordered them to open the faster tiers to wholesalers over a year
ago.

-- 
Chris Irwin
<chris at chrisirwin.ca>