Bandwidth Monitoring and Capping

Chris Pirillo — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 04:16:22 +0000

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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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Bandwidth Monitoring and Capping

Chris Pirillo » bandwidth-cap

Bandwidth Monitoring and Capping