Daniel Mak

Online Distribution, Bandwidth Cap

Online distribution seems to be growing in popularity every day while your internet service providers are cashing in on your excess bandwidth. Steam is an example of a successful Online distribution which sells gamers online and allows the customer to download their games instead of going out to the store and buy a physical copy of the game. It is an effective way to sell content, but with the bandwidth cap it can be quite limiting. I remember the days when ISPs offered Unlimited bandwidth when the internet was relatively slow (compared to today’s standard). But with advancements in technology you’d think the ISPs can handle the increasing traffic with less resources than before.

What is the point in offering faster download speeds “for file sharing” when the bandwidth cap isn’t even enough for 2 blu-ray discs worth of content. They say majority of the consumer base never go over the bandwidth. And what only 1% actually do. Yet they are spending thousands of dollars to prevent their 1% customer base from enjoying the full experience of the internet. Traffic shaping is already put in place to optimize the network so no one customer uses 100% of the providers speed. But a limit on how much you can download? It’s like putting place a limit on how much air you can breath in before you have to pay for it.

Take my provider for example. Hi-Speed Extreme. Offers 10Mbps down and 1Mbps up, sounds great before you calculate the bandwidth cap of 95GB per month with $1.5/GB afterwards. I know alot of people would say 95GB is alot and that they can’t think of any possible ways to use up all that bandwidth per month. Not yet maybe its hard, but when more full 1080p content show up, you rely 100% on making online purchases for games, music and movies through services like Steam or iTunes. That 95GB or even Comcast’s cap of 250GB would seem like a speck of dust. I can easily go over the bandwidth in downloading legit content from various websites without even breaking a sweat. Downloading a game off Steam is around 4-5GBs, Linux LiveDVD is around 4.7GB, 1080p content is at least 18GBs usually more. Add those up and you’re already half way there to the limit.

It just pisses me off that Providers are trying to control how much we access the internet. With their false advertisements of “Download as much high def content as you want” with the fine print of “as long as you stay with in the limit we set for you then you pay by the GB or in some cases I’ve heard people paying by the MB. We’re in 2009 where HD companies are talking int Terabytes now while Providers are still talking about Gigabytes and Megabytes. :S. I can’t even imagine how much worse ISPs are going to make things. Lower the Cap so they would make even more money while teasing us with Gb/s speeds? lol. But if it keeps up like this. Then the internet as we know it will no longer exist.

All I have left to say is. Stupid Monopolized Internet Service Providers trying to make more money by overcharging us with relatively slow connection speeds. -.-

Tags: bandwidth, cap, internet, isp, traffic