At one point in my life I considered myself to be a bandwidth power user. Someone who uploads and downloads constantly, maxing out their available bandwidth 95% or more of the time.
Dave’s post early this afternoon got me thinking throughout the day about bandwidth usage. He apparently used around 450GB of data transfer in one billing cycle, pissing off Comcast his provider, so they shut off his cable broadband.
Flickr gives you 100MB per month upload. I barely even scratch that. I’d really like to take more pictures, but of what, is the difficult question posed to me. I’d like to try and use as much free upload bandwidth I can for any service. For Dave to use even 100GB of traffic to/from Flickr, that would be amazing in my eyes.
I use Bittorrent. I seed probably around 140 different files, +/- 10 for stuff I’m downloading. They certainly aren’t high traffic torrents, but I manage to peak my upload bandwidth, a measly 65KB/s, several times an hour on average. I also try to keep my seed ratio 2:1 or more depending on the content.
In general, while downloading my bandwidth will peak at around 900KB/s from tier 1 sites, which is the soft cap set in place by Cox, my provider, for my internet package, the lowest speeds available from them for $31.95/month. This is a hell of a lot better than the “high speed” offered in 2001, except today the upload speed hasn’t stayed inline with downloads.
Now my home router keeps tabs on my transfer, and unfortunately it hasn’t been up since the beginning of the month, so much for nice good numbers. But here is 11days of up time statistics.
IN/OUT 37138780/9595423 (3.68 GB/3.64 GB)
My virtual server is allocated 300GB transfer per month, and for the last 9 months I generated virtually no traffic, perhaps only 15GB tops any given month
The source videos of this post is about 66MB, and the images another 2MB. Do you know how much you use in your tasks? I wish I had an easy to use bandwidth calculator off hand.
I would try and calculate the maximum possible transfer for both up and down in a given billing period for different speed connections. I wonder if this widget, bit, chart already exists? Internet service is already considered by many to be a utility, lacking only regulation. Customers should be able to know how much traffic they incurred, and like a leaky faucet they should be able to pay for the usage instead of being turned off.
