Bandwidth Monitoring and Capping
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http://live.pirillo.com/ – I push out tons of GBs of data every day. In my house, I personally don’t want a bandwidth cap. However, I do believe in it as a whole. I would actually be even more in favor of it if there were a way to buy even more bandwidth.
Xedlos emailed me to ask if there is a way to monitor his bandwidth usage, and wonders how I feel about bandwidth capping in general.
The good news is that there is a free, or should I say open source, program called FreeMeter. Using this, you can measure the amount of data going out and coming in, your connection and upload/download speeds, and even your memory usage. You can enable logging, set limits and graphical presentation. This is a very easy way to keep track of what your Internet is doing.
Now, as for how I personally feel about bandwidth capping. As I already said, for MY house, I don’t want it. But when you look at this as a whole, it’s generally a good thing. When it comes to a network leg, and you have a certain user who might say…. stream live 24 hours a day… that person would eat up a large chunk of the bandwidth. Of course, no one I know would do that. Yeah…
I would be more open to the idea of bandwidth capping if I could purchase more bandwidth. I believe if an ISP is going to limit the amount that any normal user can have access to, then that user should be allowed to purchase more bandwidth above and beyond those limits. Heck, I’d pay twice as much for more space… and more speed!
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4 Comments
Mike Power
August 31st, 2007
at 4:36am
I’m based in the UK and I’m just about to change ISP after British Telecom Broadband started traffic shaping in the evening. My 8meg connection drops to below 1 meg for six hours and now they are capping as well, even though I signed up for ‘unlimited’ use. I’m moving to ADSL24 and getting 345 gigs a month uncapped, unthrottled and fully burstable. And they include a control panel which allows me to check pretty well everything I want. So I should be getting a minimum of 7.2 megs 24/7 for little more than I pay now. Extra gigs work out at about 25pence (50 cents) per month. Not bad really :)
In life, people usually have to pay for what they consume and I don’t see why bandwidth should be any different.
Mike Power
August 31st, 2007
at 4:36am
I’m based in the UK and I’m just about to change ISP after British Telecom Broadband started traffic shaping in the evening. My 8meg connection drops to below 1 meg for six hours and now they are capping as well, even though I signed up for ‘unlimited’ use. I’m moving to ADSL24 and getting 345 gigs a month uncapped, unthrottled and fully burstable. And they include a control panel which allows me to check pretty well everything I want. So I should be getting a minimum of 7.2 megs 24/7 for little more than I pay now. Extra gigs work out at about 25pence (50 cents) per month. Not bad really :)
In life, people usually have to pay for what they consume and I don’t see why bandwidth should be any different.
bayoujim
August 31st, 2007
at 6:12am
Why not install more fiber optic cables so everyone does not have to worry about bandwidth. I think Chris’s bandwidth should be capped, too much computer knowledge would escape into the world.
Bandwidth capping and charging a tiered layer for Internet access is the beginning where only the rich can afford it. This makes the Internet providers very happy.
bayoujim
August 31st, 2007
at 6:12am
Why not install more fiber optic cables so everyone does not have to worry about bandwidth. I think Chris’s bandwidth should be capped, too much computer knowledge would escape into the world.
Bandwidth capping and charging a tiered layer for Internet access is the beginning where only the rich can afford it. This makes the Internet providers very happy.