Re: [tlug] Provider Info

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephenjturnbull@example.com>]

On Sat, Apr 28, 2012 at 5:56 PM, Philipp Wollermann
<philipp.wollermann@example.com> wrote:

> Yeah, sure, instead of letting me just download the stuff in 1,5 hours
> over my 200 MBit/s Hikari connection, it's much better to waste
> energy, time and nerves by forcing me to trickle-download the stuff at
> 300 - 400 kbyte/sek for 3 days straight.

*sigh*  There's no sin in being peeved at the results (and at the
prices you pay for such treatment), but the fact is that the only
thing AsahiNet did wrong is what they didn't do -- tell you what the
consequences of your behavior would be, in big red letters on the face
of the contract.  It *was* much better to waste *your* energy, time,
and nerves rather than risk having a large number of customers
experience severely restricted bandwidth.  You're only one customer,
and your large bandwidth use doesn't profit them (or anybody else but
you) one bit.

Nor am I surprised at the anecdotes of people having their connections
completely shut off for merely using the advertised bandwidth (for
long periods of time).  History shows that companies are willing to
risk killing to to get short-run customer satisfaction indexes up.
(Just in Japan, the obvious lie about "100% safe" nuclear reactors is
just the most recent obvious example; the electric company in the Kobe
quake was responsible for far more deaths, when they threw the switch
before the gas company had fixed all the leaks; the big train wreck in
Osaka falls somewhere in the middle.)

I suppose it's possible that AsahiNet actually have the bandwidth
lying around and are just trying to sell you a business plan, but that
would be pretty stupid -- it's much more profitable to plan to
throttle the "fat tail" users and invest in only enough bandwidth to
serve the great majority of users well 99% of the time or so.  So I
would guess that heavy use of bandwidth is very perceptible to other
users, especially those who are heavily using YouTube and the like.

As for CL's question, I would doubt that daily usage where you suck
down (or up) a GB as fast as possible once a day is going to get you
banned or throttled.  Especially on the upload side, that's going to
tick any customers who are doing lots of video uploads/downloads.
More than that, you might want to actually talk to the prospective ISP
about your usage patterns.