Broadband bandwidth caps in Australia? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Sypher
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: August 10, 2013, 07:46:53 pm
content: I was listening to the Amp Hour, and must have heard Dave wrong. He said something about netflix would eat up all your bandwidth if it was available in Australia. Chris said we don't have bandwidth caps here in the US.Is he implying that there are bandwidth caps on Australian internet? I couldn't image that :\Edit:After some research, turns out there are some bandwidth caps in the US, starting around 250 gigs for the lower plans in my area. Never knew that.7

author: mariush
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 10, 2013, 09:01:03 pm
content: Lots of countries have bandwidth caps... and lots of countries do traffic shaping (killing or limiting torrent and ftp and newsgroup transfers).From the "1st world" countries I would guess Canada would probably be the most guilty one here... if I remember correctly in Europe Italy has quite some bandwidth caps.Usually, countries which have a lot of DSL and internet coming through phone lines also have some bandwidth limits.Australia has the problem of being an island.. all connections outside go through ocean cables and those aren't unlimited bandwidth and reserving bandwidth of those costs money.Here in Romania, most users have cable or fiber.. i have unlimited 100/6 cable and it works great... no bandwidth limits with youtube or other sites.

author: nukie
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: August 11, 2013, 08:27:53 am
content: There's a few ISP in Australia with unlimited bandwidth, I use one of them with lausy call center but great connection reliability.Sent from my Nexus 10 using Tapatalk 2

author: SeanB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 11, 2013, 08:34:36 am
content: Max here is a 4M connection, and the latest upgrade was from residential going from 384k to 1Mb. Almost usable for streaming, but uploads speeds are slow. Upstream at the moment is 507kb/s........

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: August 11, 2013, 09:11:47 am
content: Yes, we have bandwidht caps here, very common.Anything like Netflix, if it's tied in the with the service provider would usually be excluded form that cap.e.g. My capped Bigpond plan includes unlimited "unmetered" content on various Bigpond/Telstra affiliated websites.

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: August 11, 2013, 09:12:44 am
content: Quote from: nukie on August 11, 2013, 08:27:53 amUnless you exceed the "fair use" policy, then they can boot or cap you.Unlimited doesn't mean unlimited!

author: SeanB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 11, 2013, 10:39:21 am
content: Unlimited provided you do not go over a certain poorly worded hard to find clause that may or may not be implemented equally on all customers, hidden in a small print on page 88 of a 500 page document that is posted as an image in an obscure non searcheable corner of a affiliate website.Clear as mud.

author: GeoffS
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: August 11, 2013, 10:44:03 am
content: 200GB per month for me.Mostly that is enough, especially with the slow connection speed I get (10Mbps at present)

author: NiHaoMike
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 11, 2013, 03:19:00 pm
content: Where caps make no sense is that 1GB of usage at peak times is very different from 1GB at 2 in the morning. They should always make the caps only apply during peak times or even better, allow you to categorize traffic as low priority in order to exempt it from caps at any time.

author: tom66
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 11, 2013, 03:22:32 pm
content: My provider is 250GB/month 10am-5pm and "unlimited" outside that range. Also get 76 Download/21 Upload Mbit speeds.

author: NiHaoMike
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 11, 2013, 06:27:54 pm
content: Another thing I wonder is what prevents hackers from making malware that uses up the caps or even merely sending data (with a botnet, for example) to use up the cap. The latter sounds especially problematic since the end user can do little about it.

author: johnboxall
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: August 11, 2013, 11:20:13 pm
content: Quote from: Sypher on August 10, 2013, 07:46:53 pmBeing an island country, a fair chunk of data has to come in over a few cables which cost the wholesale ISP money, so that's reflected in the bandwidth costs/caps. Being in the US you have the YouTube and porn servers locally so that helps keep the cost down.

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: August 11, 2013, 11:33:10 pm
content: Quote from: tronixstuff on August 11, 2013, 11:20:13 pmWe have Youtube servers locally.This was the problem when I did my Telstra rant video. Telstra were accidentally pointing to the US youtube content servers, thus as Australia's biggest ISP, the majority of the entire countries youtube traffic was piped from overseas via those couple of fibre connections, thus capping the speed for everyone. They didn't notice this for almost a year until I posted the video and they looked into itIt was fixed within 2 days.

author: johnboxall
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: August 11, 2013, 11:36:29 pm
content: Quote from: EEVblog on August 11, 2013, 11:33:10 pmOh yes now I remember that

author: metalphreak
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: August 12, 2013, 02:37:07 pm
content: There are true unlimited plans, and plans with "might as well be unlimited" data caps. Providing such massive amounts of data costs ISPs money (no such thing as a free lunch) so most of these plans are expensive. You have to pay to playMy ISP does a 1TB "anytime" plan for $100, and anything downloaded on the weekend doesn't count (late friday to early monday morning).