Published on Nov. 1, 2008
I've lived in several different parts of the world, and they all do internet differently. Back in the US I had 8Mb/sec cable (leaving just before Fios was really an option, darn!) In New Zealand, for instance, I was paying for "high speed ADSL" rated at 1.5Mb/256k. Vrooom. Up in Taiwan I was paying 1/2 what I paid in New Zealand, but for 12Mb/1Mb. Down to Sydney and we have a rated 24Mb/1Mb.
But there's a catch with the plans in New Zealand and Australia: they are 'capped'. This means you only get XGB/month -- and it isn't like Comcast capping at 250GB/month, I'm talking about 1GB/5GB/10GB and so forth. And there's more -- just like mobile phones, you get on-peak and off-peak times.
This all does make a bit of sense to me -- there are only X amount of tubes going in and out of NZ and AU, and I would imagine they get pretty clogged.
Either way, last month was pretty painful. Two weeks into our plan I checked out usage: 14GB of 18GB! We had only 4GB left to use for 15 days. This sounds like a lot, but for the two of us, and my 10 virtual servers, it isn't. The first thing I did was looking at a way to do WSUS with Linux -- I ended up using apt-cacher (I'm using only Ubuntu at home). BitTorrent, out; downloading any new ISOs, out; streaming music, totally out. For a while I has to VPN to home, and then VPN to a client, as our router at work didn't seem to like letting us access one of our clients. I even disconnected from the VPN if I wouldn't be doing work for 20m!
We eventually made it, and used only 2GB in two weeks. What an accomplishment!
Oh, I forgot. My Cisco captures SNMP traffic and logs it to my 'monitoring server'. Below is the relevant graph.
Tagged as: doh | graphing | internet
I hate ISP's that cap their bandwidth, I can understand the reasoning, but off times, on times. horrible. If they turn internet service into quasi cell phone like plans, i'll throw my computer away and start a new career. The cell phone industry is so backwards lets not get started on that conversation.
What kind of fee's are there for going over your allotted bandwidth?
2GB in two weeks, miracles can happen.
Peace,
Sean
"Luckily" there aren't any fees for going over your cap -- they just, well, cap you. I think we get shaped to 64kbps, which is pretty darn painful.
However, Telstra here in AU doesn't shape you -- they just bill you, per MB used excess. I've talked to some users whom left their AP open, and their neighbour downloaded, and downloaded a lot. The result was a $1,400 internet bill for the month. Yikes!
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This entry is from my tech blog and was written on Nov. 1, 2008. It's been tagged with doh and graphing and internet. There have been 3 comments so far.
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