They’re at it again!

I listen to or watch a number of podcasts that emanate from the United States of America. Once again, the topic of bandwidth caps has come up and the talk I am hearing makes me both laugh and cringe.

I once heard Leo Laporte say he thought 250Gb was perhaps a fair limit. Now some providers over there are rumoured to be thinking about 40Gb limits and these podcasters are ridiculing them for it. Well, I guess it’s what you’re used to…

In the last 12 months I took advantage of ever-decreasing prices to up my limit to 51Gb. Amongst the people I know, that’s a very high limit.  Most have 10Gb or less, some have 20Gb or 25Gb.

So, why do I have 51Gb? Well, because I found 25Gb wasn’t enough many months. These days there are four people using computers in the house. My wife doesn’t use a whole lot of bandwidth at a time, but does run our small business on the net so contributes a fair amount to the bit-bucket. My two sons are uploading their photos to Flickr, watching numerous videos on YouTube and elsewhere and even creating some of their own movies and uploading them. They both contribute significantly to the bit-bucket.

For myself, it depends on the season really. Every week I (legally) download songs and upload at least one podcast (should be two, but that’s another story), download numerous audio and video podcasts, download (to try) new software for my Mac, for my iPhone, download other media (ahem, certain automobile-related shows from the motherland are popular!) and generally send a lot of media around the place or receive it in emails.

This current (billing) month ends 11 days from now and I’ve not really done much in the way of ad-hoc media upload/download this month. The current usage stands at about 20Gb. So at that rate, it will close off at about 30Gb for the month. That’s a light month for me.

And so to the States and their ‘predicament’. Why on earth are they using 250Gb? Well, because they can!

Leo’s flagship podcast This Week in Tech (TWiT) is currently sponsored in part by Carbonite. Carbonite are an online backup service where you upload your precious data to their servers for safe keeping. That’d use a few bits! I considered whether something like this would be suitable for me.  In short, it would except for two points. First, my upstream connection is fairly pathetic (though faster than most Kiwis’ connections) and second, I’m using 30Gb/51Gb purely on the day-to-day in a light month.  I’d probably have to go to a 100Gb plan at least.

In the States, they also have high definition video all over the place. Sites like Hulu and even Apple’s iTunes offer a ton of video content which is, by nature, very large. These same pundits suggest that video-on-demand over the internet will supplant even Blu-ray technology in a few short years. To do that, 250Gb+ and fast connections will be a must for most consumers, or the market will be too niche.

So the problem the States have with introducing caps is that the lack of caps up to now has allowed the growth of high-bandwidth uses of the internet to the point that capping will cramp many people’s daily use.

Here in New Zealand, the masses are finally about to be unleashed on the possibility of ADSL2 speeds (the vast majority of New Zealand is limited to plain old ADSL currently) and I wonder what will happen with the limits and indeed the prices, as suddenly more uses become practical.