Edited by deleted (Sat 21-Sep-13 15:29:14)

The flat assertion that "there is nothing you could be doing legally on a residential line that would need 15 TB a month" only shows me that you lack certain knowledge. That such use is unusual I will grant you.

Just for fun you might consider calculating the theoretical throughput of a 120/12 connection and where you would end up if only using it for say 8 hours rather than the 17 hours of a weekday or 12 hours at a weekend that fall outside of limitations.

Folks who elect to be part of any setup like Majestic 12 are probably those same folks who feel that Google has become something of a monopoly that is dictating terms even to governments and would like to find an alternate. all power to them..Part of VM's planning must take into account that there will be maybe 10% of folks that actually want to use what they pay for, users that might get into the realms of 50% or more of the theoretical throughput, users who actually don't really give a damn about the headline speed but buy into it for the additional bandwidth allowance.

I am prone to looking at the caps that are imposed and simply think "if I get that service and run my usage in line with those caps than I can achieve what I set out to do" I consider that letting VM reduce my speed to a point of their choosing and running with it works for me. Do I do this all the time? NO

The lemmings I refer to are those who live for the likes of facebook, love Google and don't give a damn about the direction that internet use is taking.

Although not a user myself I would think that TOR installed on a computer or two could effectively increase internet use

I suspect that if users paid for internet use in the same manner they do for electricity, ISP's would struggle to show investors their income is stable. Notice how cell phone packages have changed over the years?

kamelion: That you consider me inconsiderate and greedy is again showing me that you don't have all the information you need. ~10% of my income is spent on charitable work in the hope of making this world a better place. Altruistic? maybe but we each of us live our lives differently and how we use our connections reflects this.

I think you can allow this system to run a relay on your rig(s) where rather than being the "end user" you become one of a number of steps in a route from a to b for many others

In reply to a post by OldChapXS:

The lemmings I refer to are those who live for the likes of facebook, love Google and don't give a damn about the direction that internet use is taking.

I would probably fall into that group given my main personal email address is GMail, I use You Tube a fair bit, am on Facebook and Twitter and my main search engine is Google as I value convenience and accessibility over anything else.

Well, I'm on Facebook when I'm not working on large corporate networks, SDN and cloud based xaaS, which is the direction my Internet is taking.

Bummer. I'm a lemming. Glad I live inland.

When I next catch him I'll ask VM's head capacity planning bod if they do provision for people who are several standard deviations above normal usage and consume 50% of maximum theoretical throughput.

Going by the statistics I've seen that group is closer to 0.01% than they are 10% though which is actually pretty fortunate as UK levels of pricing would be impossible to sustain if 10% were using 50% of their maximums. The usual capacity planning models budget, depending on the operator, 200 - 500kbps per customer with a relatively limited usage increase when bandwidth increases closer to 30% increase in usage with a tripling or quadrupling of headline speed, not a 150 - 200% increase in usage already 20+ times the average usage and an even higher multiple of the median.

I'm not going to comment on what people actually pay for as that'll be a quite circular discussion, though I find it an extremely sweeping statement suggesting I either don't give a damn or don't know which direction Internet usage is taking because I choose convenience over Linux everything.

Usage is rising thanks almost entirely to increased usage of streaming services - 1 out of every 6 minutes of visual content consumed now is VoD. ISPs are quite aware of this and are budgeting capacity appropriately.

Incidentally cell phone plans changed because operators were simply paying each other charges for placing calls to one another's networks and they were cancelling one another out. No such luxury on Internet access. Settlement free peering is about as close as it goes; transit costs money and above all access network infrastructure costs money.

I'm not going to comment on your or anyone else's usage but just as you think I'm a 'lemming' for using Facebook and Google I consider you naive for thinking that the levels of usage that would apparently make us ignorance masses no longer lemmings are sustainable with the quality of service and costs we have at this time.

Idealistic, which is a good characteristic, but phenomenally naive.

A little reading for you. There's a really good reason why charges get cheaper per Mbps as bandwidth increases, operators know that the increase in usage is way lower than the headline speed increase. This model breaks we all pay more. Much more.

In reply to a post by pcoventry76:

I had a look at TOR it's a browser based on FF with a piece of encryption software that you run when you start it and connects to a public bridge. I didn't see any reason why my BW usage would increase to be honest. But then again I didn't really go into what it could do.

Well that's the TOR I downloaded from the projects website anyway.

When you join TOR you become a relay, it's a peer to peer network. You'll be routing traffic for other people.

If you're feeling really suicidal you could become a TOR endpoint and have, amongst a little HTTP for the paranoid, people's P2P and kiddie porn going out to the Internet with your IP address on it.

Edited by deleted (Sun 22-Sep-13 17:13:58)

I wouldn't talk too much about that project if I were you, VM may sit up and take notice of this Private Limited Company getting home users to use their own residential broadband services to operate their business. It would appear to be in direct contravention of the terms of their VM residential broadband contracts and could lead to immediate disconnection.

Edited by Daemon66 (Mon 23-Sep-13 09:47:04)