[ILUG] Slightly OT. The which ISP Question!

[Justin Mason]

=?ISO-8859-1?Q?P=E1draig_Brady?= writes:
> Justin Mason is getting a new BB connection also,
> and as always has very lucid, pertinent and contemporary
> info on the subject:
> http://taint.org/2006/02/09/195117a.html

heh -- thanks Padraig!

I actually got involved with an off-blog discussion with someone following
on from that, regarding my negative comments on capping.  Here's some
notable data from that thread, too, to add to the mix.


Until about a week ago, I was on Comcast's 6Gbps cable internet deal,
paying $45 per month, in Costa Mesa, CA, USA.  It was uncapped.

I don't keep bandwidth usage figures, since I don't have to at the moment,
but it appears that I last cycled the internet-connected interface at
22:33 on Feb 8.  Since then, I've chewed through 913.3 MiB. It's now
15:49, Feb 10, so that's like (24-22)+24+15 = 41 hours, so 22.3 MiB per
hour * 24 = 535.2 MiB per day.

I don't know how much of that was rsync -- I would doubt it made up all
that much.  But it *was* a typical day or two's traffic, made up of:

    - cvs updates against work
    - svn updates against open source project sites
    - polling & downloading new mail
    - web browsing
    - listening to mp3s on various blogs
    - net radio
    - Skype
    - RSS
    - IM
    - IRC

Note: there wasn't any filesharing use, and in fact I didn't have to
schlep around any corpora either ;) .  This is just typical usage for me.
535.2 * 30 = 16.05 GiB per month.  You can immediately see that I'd be in
pretty big trouble on most of the capped schemes!

This is the reality for me; I don't find capping to be based on a
realistic picture of how a user *like me* uses the internet.


By the way a very important factor of capping that's being overlooked, is
the effects of spam, virus, bounce blowback, and other malicious traffic.
I am very fortunate in that I have a colo server, where I can filter the
viruses, since a quick look in my "filtered" mailbox there indicates that
(according to the traffic since yesterday) I'm getting 408 MiB per day of
viruses.

However, besides that, much of the spam and all of the blowback traffic is
still being delivered to my home network. I wouldn't be surprised if that
traffic is the main reason I see so much bandwidth usage.

Given that I am a bloody expert in the field of abusive mail traffic
mitigation, and my server is therefore doing all sorts of non-standard
wonderfulness to block this before I have to download it, what do you
think the typical pleb users can do faced with that volume?

Are capping ISPs taking action to not count the abusive traffic against
their caps?   I doubt it.


For what it's worth, Magnet's 150GB cap sounds pretty reasonable -- but I
would still go for an uncapped scheme in preference.  This is simply
because I don't want to support the practice of capping with my customer
euros, if I'm given a choice.

--j.