🚀 go-pugleaf

"Augustus" <Imperial.Palace@Rome.It> wrote in message
news:ac3iss$mi5ci$1@ID-97594.news.dfncis.de...

> 10 years ago, you had your choice of dialup ISPs that offered unlimited
time
> online per month for $15-25...

There still are. It'd be suicide to charge any more for unlimited dialup
since you can get unlimited DSL for $5 more than the upper end of your
range.

> As the internet's popularity rose tho, ppl were spending more and more
time
> online... companies that were making a hefty profit started losing money,
> because they had to keep buying more and more bandwidth to meet up with
> their user base

Perhaps because there were too many of them and quite a few had reputations
as being absolute shite?

> Then... slowly these companies started going out of business or merging
with
> other companies... these unlimited packages were being dropped by almost
> everybody, save for a few hold outs still out there.

Because of less demand.. more and more people have access to the internet at
their schools and offices and are getting DSL and cable connections at home.

> Just as times changed from back then, they are changing now...  high speed
> internet (cable or dsl) has risen in popularity, and more and more people
> are switching to it... but more and more of these users are experienced
and
> know their way around the internet

True.

> So that means more and more of them aren't just getting dsl or cable to
surf
> the net and chat on ICQ and send email to friends... but are watching
> streaming video, downloading vast quantities of porn and sharing warez and
> mp3s over many of the services now available.

Only seems natural, I've seen Sympatico use the fact that streaming video
looks so much better on DSL than on dial-up as part of a sales pitch, I've
also seen computers from brand-name companies being promoted on the premise
that the network card and burner and software that comes installed makes it
really easy to get online, download music and make your own CD's.

How fair is it for them to tell you about all the wonderful things you can
do with their service only to turn around and impose ridiculous charges for
it?

> All this means more and more people are using up more and more available
> bandwidth... the companies have to accomodate... allocating more
> resources... buying better machines... buying more bandwidth... upgrading
> hardware...

So basically you're saying that Bell's excuse is that they thought their
customer-base was a bunch of brainless morons who would never think of ways
to make good use of the service provided, and now that they've been proven
wrong, they have no choice but to hike prices.

> Effectivly, they are billing just the users who are using up their
> resources... 5GB is alot to use up in a month... you can download a couple
> of DVDs, a couple of games, thousands of porn pics, and still have lots
left
> over to surf the net with...

See that's all relative. Maybe for you 5 GB sounds like a respectable limit
for them to impose per month. I would see it as an acceptable weekly limit,
and even at that there'd be weekends where I'd be paying extra.

> But, if you are going to sit there and run a file server on irc, or set up
a
> warez/mp3 trading server for kazaa... then yeah, you are going to pay for
> it...

Different strokes for different folks, actually I've got an FTP server, a
web server, winmx and a few other things running 24/7. If you enjoy paying
however much a moth for broadband internet access so that hotmail doesn't
take 5 minutes to load, by all means, go ahead, but personally if that was
the only reason to use broadband, I'd revert to a dial-up account and access
a regular POP3 account with PINE.

> And what can I say?  "Boo Hoo"?  You could just NOT do that

Why should I not do that? Because you don't do it nor do you see a reason
to? You're gonna have to come up with a much better reason than that.

> One guy complains that he likes to play games and watch streaming video...
> and worries that this'll affect him...

All depends what sort of bandwidth the games tie up and how much he watches
the streaming video.

> To use up 5GB, he would be able to watch abou 125 hrs of continual high
> quality streaming video... and play play about the same in online games...
> or about 10 straight days of continual, non-stop heavy computer usage

You need some help with your math, dude. If you watch 125 hours of continual
high quality streaming video and use up only 2.5 GB, that means your "high
quality video" is coming through at 5.8 KB/s, which is less than half the
rate of high quality streaming audio...

At any rate, my computers -- yes, plural -- are on 24/7, and last I checked
there are 30 days in a month, not 10.

> It all boils down to: for legit use, you should have no problem at all...
if
> you are pirating video games and movies off the net, then yeah, you got a
> reason to complain cuz you'll be limited in how much you can download a
> month... but then, you don't have any ground to really stand on... maybe
> everybody does it, but nobody sympathizes with a pirate.

Actually, let's see what I've downloaded lately.. about 250 megs of
shareware to put on my OS/2 box, an ISO of FreeBSD to burn to a CD, I'm
gonna d/l linux pretty soon. Oh, my old HDD crashed and I lost a bunch of
MP3's to which I do own the CD's, I just prefer downloading them to encoding
them because with my old PII/266, it's faster to d/l. So there's a couple
gigs. Downloaded another couple hundred megs from mp3.com not too long ago,
oh yes.. scanned a bunch of pictures and put 200 MB of TIFF's on my FTP
server for a friend to grab because I don't have Photoshop, at least it
won't be 200 MB when I get them back as JPEG's.

And that's just in the span of a week or so. Geez.. good thing I'm not with
HSE.

Richard