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The Technology Liberation Front

The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
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Cuban on bandwidth hogs and tiered broadband

Started by TLF · 3 months ago

In his own special way, the always-provocative Mark Cuban throws down the gauntlet on bandwidth hogs:
When it comes to broadband internet access, you can have speed or large volumes of data transfer. You can’t have both. One certainty in the broadband world is that for those of u ... Continue reading »

3 comments

  • MikeT

    5 months ago

    There is a reason why leaving your PC connected to the internet, downloading 24/7, is called "leeching..."
    reply
  • Raymond

    5 months ago

    I couldn't agree with the author and the above fellow commenter more. That's exactly what I paid $5 for dialup last year was all about... Fast searching. No need to pay $35 a month for a 30mbit capable pipe! Sheesh! Who needs that?!

    Oh wait... I used faster DNS server with better ping than the ones you assholes on cox.

    Granted I needed to download the occasional huge file... But my little pots line handled most any huge file over a few week period via the handy wget command.
    reply
  • eee_eff

    5 months ago

    Mark Cuban says:

    If the choice is between your being able to download more movies or other video and my getting the best possible speed from my internet connection, I'm thrilled when you get kicked off. It can't happen soon enough. Speed is what I need. Take all your P2P downloads and get the hell off my internet.
    I have no sympathy for bandwidth hogs. You all are productivity killers for the rest of us. People who are working, people who are trying to play games, people who are in virtual worlds, people who are networking, people who are just trying to watch a Youtube video or their favorite TV show, you all are the reason why we get incredibly annoyed by slowdowns and buffering.

    But wait! Who appointed Mark Cuban dictator of what is and and isn't good internet usage, so he can decide, in his augustness from on high, that P2P is bad, and Youtube, gaming and 'work' are good. If I use P2P, I could just as well say: all those idiots who are streaming video are jamming up 'my internet'

    Well, get off the double standard. A megabyte is a megabyte, and what application I chose to use, is my business, not yours.

    Oh and there are actually some facts that are relevant to this debate: While it is true that bittorrent is about 20% of the ISP AT&T's internet traffic, it mainly happens at night. Bit-torrent traffic peaks at about 4am, and most users (myself included) set up their bit-torrent client to throttle back bandwidth during the night. Streaming video, by contrast is very much a peak-time application, so it does and will create slow downs, too. See the links below that back up my claims above:

    http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/06/att-embr...

    excerpt: Donovan admits that users self-adjust their habits to take advantage of off-peak times. For instance, he said, BitTorrent on the company's network peaks around 4 a.m., when other traffic is at an ebb.

    http://www.publicknowledge.org/node/1598

    excerpt: 'Despite the industry's constant invocation of the P2P bogeyman, at present, the largest bandwidth hog is actually streaming video,' writes Mehan Jayasuriya at Public Knowledge. 'Clearly, the emergence of online video is something that cable video providers find very threatening and by capping off bandwidth usage, they're effectively killing two birds with one stone; discouraging users from using their Internet connections for video while increasing the efficiency of the network. Is this anti-competitive? It sure seems like it.'"
    reply

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