Guideline GB/month Usage

A suggestion in answer to the front page "So what is better than 'unlimited' in marketing material?" - how about ISPs declare a "Guideline Usage x GB/month" figure on their accounts without hard limits ? It should then be clear to even the dimmest P2P addict that 100 GB/month is in excess of what is expected and hence action under the FUP is waiting round the corner.

We can all figure out from the economics that x is likely to be a fairly modest number, but would this appease the mindset that has a problem with "unlimited" ?

Well said Yarwell.

I think that most of the gripe is just about the hype advertising that most ISPs do quoting 'unlimited'. Why can't they just be honest about it and clear up all the confusion.

IMHO it's just a few greedy boogers who want to use P2P and similar services 24/7 who make it bad for the rest of us. As was quoted on the VirginMedia forum, 40% of the total bandwidth on VM is used up by just 2% of the VM subscribers.

Everyone knows the UK system struggles to cope with demand, and probably will for quite a while to come, with all the new customers coming on line and wanting fast speeds.

Waits to be flamed by the p2p/torrents users.

I can, so therefore I will, doesn't necessarily make it right.

Mike.

Edited by deleted (Sat 17-Mar-07 09:44:28)

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how about ISPs declare a "Guideline Usage x GB/month" figure on their accounts without hard limits

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Because the ISP wouldn't get as much business. The whole point of declaring a service as "unlimited" for marketing purposes is that the average punter hasn't a clue how much they are likely to use, and therefore a product tagged as "unlimited" saves them having to worry. It's just unfortunate that a small minority think that "unlimited" entitles them to "as much as they can possibly get".

Perhaps the solution is to add some guideline maximum usage in qualitative terms in the small print. "P2P no more than x hours per day", that sort of thing. This would avoid scaring away the average punter as they know what that means and that it doesn't affect them, whilst at the same time warning off the P2P junkies.

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"P2P no more than x hours per day", that sort of thing.

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or even "no P2P". "Heavy downloader ? our service is not for you" etc.

It's obviously the ISP's perogative, but I don't agree with "no P2P". Even P2P throttling worries me. There is plenty of legitimate usage of P2P out there (eg: a lot of non-commercial software distribution, and a growing amount of legal music and video distribution). Freedom of legal internet usage is very important, and I doubt this would be a problem to ISPs if it wasn't for inability to distinguish and filter out the large volumes of illegal usage. As a compromise I think ISPs need to be aiming for unrestricted use of specific applications up to a certain volume per customer.

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or even "no P2P". "Heavy downloader ? our service is not for you" etc.

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Given the state of the system in the UK at present (overloaded for most of the day) I would vote for that.

May annoy those who want unlimited P2P/bittorent, on a cheap connection; but there are ISPs (at a price) who will be happy to sign them up.

Mike.

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Given the state of the system in the UK at present (overloaded for most of the day)

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You mean the current BT IPstream system. There are LLU networks that don't seem to suffer significantly, and cable also seems to do a better job.

its the nature of P2P apps that bug me, they seem to have no built-in self restraint, download Opera with Bittorrent for example using default settings and I found it then went on to upload 5 GB/day and that was on the old 288 upstream.

That and the thousands of parallel connections established, the whole P2P thing is based on the assumption that someone else is prepared to pay for bandwidth to facilitate the dissemination of the publisher's content.

I think the legality of content is a distraction TBH.

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its the nature of P2P apps that bug me, they seem to have no built-in self restraint, download Opera with Bittorrent for example using default settings and I found it then went on to upload 5 GB/day and that was on the old 288 upstream.

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I agree with you there. Many P2P clients are designed with continuous use in mind, which doesn't do a lot to help their image. I think it's actually a lot to do with asynchronous broadband not being designed with P2P in mind. The nature of P2P is that you need to have the same amount uploaded as downloaded on average, and if your upload capability is a tenth of your download capability then you need your client running 10 times as long as the time spent downloading. It would perhaps help if clients automatically closed down by default after uploading as much as has been downloaded.

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the whole P2P thing is based on the assumption that someone else is prepared to pay for bandwidth to facilitate the dissemination of the publisher's content.

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Well yes, but that's the whole point, and is the key advantage to P2P for everybody. A lot of not-for-profit content simply couldn't be distributed at all without P2P, and society would be worse off. Even where there is profit being made, if a product can be supplied at lower price by a manufacturer using P2P then who's losing out? It's a similar model to grid computing. An increasing number of valuable research projects could not be undertaken without grid computing distributing the costs. These are both key aspects of freedom of internet usage for society's benefit.

it would be an improvement but if its only a guideline people will be of the mindset it can be breached. In my opinion if an isp cant handle a minority of customers using their connections as advertised then the solution is very simple. Remove unlimited from product defenitions and apply a limit.