how much bandwidth does SL use?

Ok so Time Warner will be soon charging in my area for bandwidth - Yes its comfirmed I called TMC and asked, They are capping at 40 gigs per household per month everything over that will be charged a dollar per gig. According to Business Journel, the estimate tht the average household will have to pay an addtional $200 Per month.

How will this impact SL residents in my area?

I was hoping to come up with some quick good news about a higher cap plan at a reasonable price, but unfortunately their doesn't seem to be one.

If you have any choice of other internet provider, I'd look into it and consider changing.

Second Life can use a lot of data. You can reduce how much it uses by lowering your draw distance as low as you can stand, don't go adventuring unless you are really in the mood, either by flying or teleporting, and not playing music or video unless you really want to.

If it helps I used almost 27GB in march. I work on SL an average of 5 hours a day and last month was a particularly heavy month since I was at the best practices in education conference and doing a lot of scripting and building. So you ought to be OK. March has been my heaviest month ever.

I'm glad threads on this subject are starting to appear so quickly. Time Warner execs should be rounded up and shot for this one. There's absolutely no reason for what they're proposing, other than raw greed. They're only initiating these caps in markets where they feel they have no competition. It's got nothing to do with anything technical. It's all about how much money they can get away with squeezing out of people. It's anti-consumer, anti-business, and downright anti-American.

It's not just SL that's being put at risk. Online games of all sorts obviously will suffer. Movie streaming services such as Netflix, Blockbuster, and Hulu can forget about acquiring customers in the affected areas. The same goes for music download services.

Among the worst hit institutions will be online education. I was actually doing the math with a friend of mine this afternoon, since we're working on starting up an online education service. The numbers showed that a full time student would almost certainly hit the cap in 2 weeks, and then would be faced with at least $40 a month in overage charges, just for attending classes and doing homework. That's before even accounting for anything else a student might use the Internet for. Throw in other normal usage, and the overage fees could easily be in the hundreds of dollars each month. It's insane.

Hopefully the public outcry (and there has been a TON of it today) will be enough to scare them straight. I'd recommend you contact your local mayor's office, your city council, your state and US congressmen, and your state's attorney general, as soon as possible, and demand they take action to stop Time Warner's unjust greed in its tracks. Have everyone you know do the same. This is no trivial matter. Something must be done about it immediately.

I use SL for around 6-8 hours per day, with my draw distance at 256 and average roughly 1Gb a day, that's been pretty constant for the last 18 months or so.

so basically with TWC i can be on sl and thats it no music video or anything else

I'm not sure about Time Warner, but I know when comcast put in their cap on areas (granted it was MUCH larger) they also had an uncapped plan, usually found under business plans. If you can, look at that, see if the cost effectiveness of it would be worth it to change your plan to an uncapped one.