On Mon, 2004-03-01 at 20:55, John Daniels wrote: > The cheap cable contract now offered allows a download of 500mb per month. > Can someone give me an example of the number of emails I could download or > web pages it is possible to visit for 500mb?
According to http://www.bigpond.com/internet-plans/broadband/cable/ and http://www.bigpond.com/internet-plans/broadband/adsl/ they offer 200mb plans, too. I could've sworn they also had "zero data pre-paid, 20c/mb" plans - but don't see any here, so either they've removed them or I was wrong about that in the first place. They've actually added a feature that I hadn't seen before, to try to give people a grasp of what their usage actually is. A surprisingly decent thing to do, actually. If they had it before, I'm fairly sure it wasn't linked direct from the pricing pages. You can try it here: http://www.bigpond.com/home/support/tools/usagecalc/ According to them, you could download 5000 emails and view 7000 web pages on 500mb. I challenge anybody on a 500mb plan to try it, and tell me what their bill is next month. No, I won't pay the extra! Try entering one hour of streaming content (think 'net radio) and see what the usage estimate says. Then translate that to a dollar value in excess usage fees. Pricey, eh - I bet the 'net radio stations wish they could persuade users to pay even 1/10 of that. For that matter - try entering your estimate of what /you/ use every month, and compare it to what numbers they come up with. I'd actually be really interested in hearing the results of that. According to them, I'd use about 385MB/month - in reality, it's closer to 5GB, not counting free WAIX traffic and my VPN to work. I did list a lot of 'download programs' though, and that's one area where (a) their meter is badly whacked, and (b) I'm massively abnormal, tending to download "programs" that are tens or hundreds of megabytes (XFree86 source code, OpenOffice and source code to it, etc). They say that that 1 hour of streaming media (like 'net radio) adds up to 24mb - I'd say they're giving some optimistic estimates. A 128kbps MP3 stream (no video, just mid-bandwidth audio) uses 16 bytes/second, or 57mb per hour. That makes their sample stream (described as "streaming content, eg net radio" - not "low bandwidth audio") - a 64kbps audio-only stream, like a news feed or RealMedia stream. As an example, my steaming library is mostly 96kbps, 128kbps and 192kbps services, most of which are labelled just 'broadband streams' by the provider. So - this estimate is reasonable enough for low bandwidth audio - but if someone uses 'net video or high-quality audio streams based on that estimate, they're in for a rude shock. Their estimate of 50k for a web page seems optimistic, given the bloated sites one tends to see these days. www.bigpond.com is a 380 kilobyte page! www.msn.com is 172k; www.ninemsn.com (a default page for many users) is 188k; www.yahoo.com is 156k; www.google.com is a lean 24k. Two other common sites will be the papers www.thewest.com.au at 336k, and www.smh.com which weighs in at a whopping 436k. The front page of www.worth1000.com, a favourite site of one of my 'non-geek' housemates, is 264k - but many pages inside are 600kb+, with many "next" links at the bottom. Another example is webcomics - most of the ones I looked at are about 350k. Then again, things like worth1000.com and webcomics might be better counted under "images downloaded" by the meter user. BTW, Many of these sites re-load their contents, and ads, if you leave your browser idle at them - further adding to the traffic used by the site. On the other hand, some (fewer than you'd like) permit caching of images and site content, reducing the amount downloaded on subsequent visits. If I make an effort to find sites favourable to BigPond's site size estimate, I can find sites as small as 10k. They also almost all permit image caching, and none of the ones I found auto-reload themselves. These are geek technology information sites, though - I don't know how many sites that small most users would ever view. As for programs - how many 1.5mb programs do /you/ download? The Safari release, which many of you will have downloaded, is ~80mb. Aren't significant MacOS X updates usually above 40mb, going up to 80mb plus (especially with updates to other programs, Java, security fixes, etc). Users may not even be aware of how downloads over Software Update add up. Now ... think about a user with a Windows box - you know how many updates /they/ need, right? (Linux is actually the worst of the lot, as a tiny security fix can need a 100mb download - but people on these plans are unlikely to be using Linux). Most of the others are reasonable enough, if often on the low side. Any sort of estimator at all, just to make users aware of /vaguely/ what their usage could be, is better than nothing. For many people it'll probably be vaguely close to the truth, at least if you rule out software updates etc. Oh - and anyone who fires up any form of p2p software, for any reason, will be in for a really rude shock in their next bill. Remember, they charge for /uploads/ too. I do, however, find it hard to sympathise in the particular case of /illegal/ p2p users. Another gotcha is going to be people using VPNs (graphical remote access, like MS Terminal Server, VNC, Timbuktoo, etc, or ip-level VPNs like IPSec, PPPtP, etc). Many of these can generate large amounts of traffic - sometimes "idle" traffic that's generated even when the system is not in use. Again, in Telstra's favour, most people on their cheapest plans are unlikely to be using VPNs, so this isn't too much of an issue. Of course, they still don't offer shaped / capped plans to prevent the user from running up huge bills - but they've clearly responded to industry criticism by actually making some effort to inform users. So - I'll credit BigPond with some effort here, but it's only a band-aid on the fundamental problem - they don't provide 'flat rate' or shaped plans on the low end, where uninformed and inexperienced users are likely to sign up. Craig Ringer P.S: While writing and researching this email, I measured traffic of 60mb to Vigin Radio UK, which I'm listening to right now. It's not even a 128kb/s stream. I also downloaded five to ten megabytes of websites.
