Creative Ways to Waste Bandiwith?

Youtube

Plug an original release Windows XP box into your network. No anti-virus. No firewall rules. Everything open.

It’ll get zombie’d in about 5 minutes and send spam like crazy.

Of course, then your cosmic karma would drop precipitously… and we’d all hate you the next time we delete spam from our inboxes.

Don’t you think it’s funny that now there are more legitimate ways of using a lot of bandwidth (youtube, iTunes movies and TV shows, streaming TV such as BBC iplayer etc…) that ISP’s are still limiting bandwidth.

@lightlyseared: I think it is business-y of them. Just as more people (even law abiding ones) are going to go over these “limits”, suddenly we have to pay for it. It’s like raising the price on text messaging just when it starts to get really popular – it doesn’t cost them anything and they make more money.

The real problem is the original buisness model for broadband never imagined that so many people would be downlaoding such large amounts of data. Back when the netwoks were being developed most people were using the ‘net for for a bit of web brousing and sending the odd email. Therefore to save money and speed up the roll out of broadband you ended up with people sharing the same connection infrastructure. Now when the data is small and intermittent this doesn’t matter but when all 50 are downloading a movie or something this really slows down the connection for everybody and makes the ISP look bad so rather than improve their infrastructure they limit what you download.

rant over

It’s already implemented. Comcast Security called me three days ago and said I’m using too much internet and the cap is 250. They said if I go over again in 12 months that they would cancel my account without warning.

Less then 1% of people use over 250gig per month. The guy I spoke told me that’s upload and download combined. They don’t give you an option to pay for more bandwidth. I have the upper tier (more expensive) internet from them but they will not let you go over 250 gig.

@Bodyhead
Already? What city do you live in?

Memphis

I don’t have the link unfortunately… it’s buried under weeks of conversations, but my boyfriend sent me the link from Comcast and it said that they already had the cap of 250, they just didn’t tell customers what the cap was.

Join Netflix, during the 2-week trial membership period, watch as much as video as you can.

@bodyhead
hmmm… i live outside of pittsburgh, pa and i remember getting an email explaining that they would be implementing that, it had all the stuff (50 million emails, a shitload of songs, photos) but i dont remember if it was effective immediately…

I haven’t gotten any emails even on my legit Comcast email (which I have feeding in to my gmail). I wouldn’t be surprised if poofandmook was right. I bet they did already have the cap and just didn’t tell anyone.

I’m working on a software linux router that will throttle my speed more and more as I get closer to the limit. Hopefully that will work for me. I could easy use 500 a month.

http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2008/08/comcast_cap.html

It’s not from comcast, even better.. it’s from Consumer Affairs.

The third paragraph is a bit shady though…

And here I am thinking my 25GB monthly cap is generous…

@bodyhead: are they providing a way for you to check on your bandwidth usage throughout the month? Some sort of meter, or a web page connected to your account that you can check?

@bodyhead if you dont mind me asking, how in the hell do you go over that cap? the whole idea of the cap is well crap IMO but thats still a pretty high number. Do you dl torrents like crazy or something?

Here’s a few good ways:
donate bandwidth is still in beta so it’s not open yet, but sign up to find out when it does and then piss off comcast.
donate cpu which will donate your bandwidth as well since that’s the only way to access it.
donate cpu to charity which is the same as above, but is run by berkley so it may have more scientific things available. You can read a bit about it here
OR to really piss them off, do something for the hackers of the world…
Donate bandwidth to TOR =) Comcast’s limit is whack.

edit: just saw that the grid republic link is powered by boinc which is the berkley thing. eh. two different companies so you have the power of choice at least!

@blue British Telecoms “heavy use” plan has 15gb a month cap. I could use that in an afternoon without trying.

@Lightlyseared and all the other Americans here, how do you use so much usage? Do you just download movies, music and TV shows willy-nilly or what. Yeah I can use up 25GB in a month but I would be downloading lots of movies and Games etc

@jasonjackson

There is no way to check (bytes used) unless I’ve set up a router which will log ingoing and outgoing packets, email me a status report and throttle my bandwidth at a certain point. (I’m working on setting this up)

@uberbatman

There are tons of completely legal ways to eat up that kind of bandwidth. For one, I use a Roku player. Two, I didn’t know about the cap and was letting Ubuntu image torrents upload like crazy (i actually try to keep a library of a bunch of the different distributions). Three, I’ll send big stuff in email quite often. Four, I keep a backup of some of my files on the Internet so they’re always trying to sync. Not to mention youtube and itunes. Throw a toss of freelance web work and it seems like I’m pretty much always uploading or downloading. I also prefer direct to drive games.

The cap really is not that generous considering that you have the ability to go ten times over the cap. If you tend to use the shit out of services that you pay for, you get penalized.

@bodyhead ah yea i can see how you can easily go over that cap with all you do, and i do agree that such cap is BS. Ever considered switching to Verizon? They dont have a cap do they?

@uberbatman
Verizon DSL is slower; FIOS isn’t available in my area yet

I meant FIOS, same deal here though not available in my area