Anyway, when you factor in Windows Update (for Windows users – of which I am one), anti-virus updates, iTunes updates, and usual web browsing (what with all the embedded videos and suchlike)…I am sad to say that I’m not the only person to end up with over $500 in excess usage charges.
What’s worst is that there is no notification (from most ISPs) until you get the bill. You are relied upon to check a Usage Meter constantly, which doesn’t always work (sites have glitches, servers have glitches, and it doesn’t always come up with my ISP).

Oh, and beware of ‘unlimited’ broadband in Australia – it’s not. The best I’ve seen for an ‘unlimited’ plan was 150GB. 150GB is not unlimited, it is 150GB. Granted, most home users won’t use that in a year, but it’s still not ‘unlimited’. ‘Unlimited’ implies that there is no limit to the amount of data exchanged.
IANAL, but isn’t that technically false advertising?

But then I thought of something else… were you also, probably equally inadvertently, violating the Apple Terms of Use for iTunes by downloading outside the United States? (That seems to be what the very first paragraph says.) I don’t think Apple means to be pushing HD versions of U.S. shows to New Zealand net connections. I’m surprised they did. (But I suspect you were tunneling or doing something else to get a VPN for security purposes that had the effect of making your location appear domestic.)

I’m against bandwidth caps — I’ll try to switch ISPs if my cable provider imposes one. But the particular problem you describe may have been at least partially caused by a mismatch between U.S. content expectations and New Zealand’s warped internet space.

1)higher profit. you lure peopleto buy cheap bas price and pay more. but I guess this is the more rare reason.

2) lack of bandwidth. If you have limited inbound you cannot just live with users using up 50% of your total incoming bandwidth onehandedly. This makes the other users experience terrible (say 3000 ms ping or 0.5 kB/sec), which is not acceptable. What can you do? You can prevent overbooking, and sell “100 kilobit” (that is appx. 10 kilobyte per second transfer rate) internet, run most of the time on 5% utilisation, good luck for this business model. Or you do overbook to try to keep utilisation good (70% is pretty fine) but then you do this for the _average_ users. But what do you do with those who have the right by contract to use 100% of their pipe for 100% of the time? THey use, say, 1000 times more bandwidth than average. So?

You cap the users, and use a cap which covers 80% of the users, pretty much more than average. They pay nothing more than base fee. And the rest of 20% who notoriously over-use will either self-restrain or pay, and more income makes it possible to buy more incoming bandwidth.

So caps are (or, in our present case, could be) the best tools for equalised use.

Now,only if it’s priced and communicated right. First, it is a fee, not a fine, and should be priced as such. Second, it has to be clearly communicated, so people with extreme appetite can decide whether to avoid it at all or not. In our present case it was priced bad, communicated bad, and done in pretty bad taste. But I see the reason behind it, do the math. How much bandwidth do you need to cover 1000 times 5 Megabits? (Since Larry seem to have got that amount.) 5 gigabits? Hmm, anyone care to guess the price of 5Gbps line to NZ?

Flame me. 🙂

While our broadband services are indeed crap compared to what US users enjoy, things aren’t quite that bad. 🙂

And as someone else noted, we can’t even use the iTunes store without some trickery anyway.

That doesn’t mean that a bandwidth cap or limit or sliding cost scale has to be enforced in this punitive way. But you certainly aren’t making a good case for unlimited usage with your example.

Given campus organization and technical skills, this caused extremely wide-ranging strategic behavior on the part of students. A student-run file sharing system immediately sprung up, where one student would download popular files and upload them to the service on the school network, allowing everyone else to download it for free. Credits and everything else associated with other file-sharing systems were adopted.

It was, undoubtedly, more efficient from a bandwidth perspective, though certainly less so from the perspective of students’ time. (Except for the experience gained in using a network.)

When companies like Time Warner suggest bandwidth caps are just about stopping “piracy,” that’s not quite true. They’re also about stopping lots of other business models that try to leverage the real potential of fast, cheap Internet access (assuming of course we can get fast, cheap Internet, or keep it where we’ve got it).

They are about both of those things. But they’re also about that anything that isn’t priced by consumption will see overuse and congestion if congestion is possible at all. It is true that a small percentage of users use an enormous percentage of bandwidth at any point. The Internet isn’t actually like a highway, where congestion i the absence of tolls is inevitable in dense areas, but the point is not entirely without merit.