Capped broadband connections

Let's say, you're on a broadband connection with a limit of 40GB each month.

SL seems to flicker the light on my router constantly whilst it's open. How much SL would I be able to play (without streaming audio or video) before they shot me at dawn?

Rusholme, by using SL 4 or so hours per day, I consume around 6-8 GB every month, a measurement that seems consistent across two cable modem providers I've used in the past 2 years or so... so I guess that 40 GB will be more than enough.

And for the record, I have my network settings on 500 Kbps (my poor G4 can't handle too many textures being streamed in at the same time), and have audio usually on.

Well you lucky bastard. Mine is capped at 3 GB...
There is a bandwidth slider in Preferences > Network. It goes all the way up to 1 Mbps.
At this rate, assuming you could possibly use up all of it by constantly flying around with 512 meters draw distance, you would eat up at most 450 MB / hour. That's enough for 91 hours, or roughly 3 hours a day every day.
Wanna play 6 hours a day? Drop your network slider to 500.
Your real comsumption can be close to zero though. SL has a cache, so if you're always in the same sim you should be constantly running off the local copy, and only a few updates need be exchanged. You could run SL on an analog modem if you were always in the same sim

yay for uncapped!

Who caps bandwith these days??

I have heard of comcast sending out nasty letters for people who download in excess of 300 gb month....but for 30-40 gigs?

... most of Europe, Maximus.

I've never heard of this. So if I would use up a cap, then what? They shut down my internet. That would be a bunch of bull....

The company I'm with charge extra to the tune of £1 a gigabyte.

mcgeeb, be lucky to be counted among the millions that have no caps and still have low prices Since as early as 1993, however, most European ISPs have set caps on Internet access to prevent abuse...

ISPs in Europe usually offer three options:

- when you reach your limit for the month, your access won't work any longer
- all extra MBytes of traffic beyond your limit are charged extra (and at a premium!)
- for a special fee (could be up to 2-3 times the monthly fee) you can get unlimited access

Some also differentiate between national traffic (usually much cheaper to provide through the local fibre networks) and international traffic (which have both a higher physical cost and charges coming from international peering agreements).

What this actually means is that the consumer has a larger choice of options. You can get ASDL2 with 16 Mbps downstream traffic for as low as €20/month, but capped at, say, a dozen or two GBytes per month. Or you could get a 2-4 Mbps connection without any limits and pay, say, €50-100 per month. All combinations thereof are possible, of course; and naturally enough, some ISPs cut on the margins to provide high quality broadband access with unlimited access, but are limited to some areas; while others prefer to go for low-cost, globally available solutions, which will appeal to residential users who usually don't consume much more than a few dozen GBytes per month anyway, and want a cost as low as possible. Or go for the casual users who do not connect every day, but wants very high bandwidth when they connect, and are willing to pay for it (this is common among WiFi and 3G operators, for instance).

This is a subject close to my heart - having signed up for unlimited internet access with a very well known (UK speaking) ISP, I ran into their Fair Usage Policy about four weeks ago. Apparently unlimited internet access means you can look stuff up and access your emails as often as you like, but that's it.

I was informed, with some encouraging phrases, that my access to the internet wouldn't be restricted, but that the bandwidth speed would be very much reduced. And my provider put me into their heavy usage category.

This has effectively closed SL to me between 5pm and 11pm UK time (9am - 3pm SL time). Logging on during that time effectively strips out my inventory - and prevents me from seeing any of the geography around me, including myself. I can only IM - but I've no idea who is near me. I spent a gruesome couple of hours once with no shape at all - it just failed to to load.

I phoned the company and asked if I could simply upgrade my service - but they simply do not have a package for anyone who uses the interent as much as I do.

I've changed ISP's now and as from Thursday this week will hopefully reclaim my evenings on SL.

I'm not sure if this is the experience of all in Europe but in the UK my only advice is to check out what they call the Fair Usage Policy. Whether this was on their terms and conditions when I signed up I truly couldn't say - and more fool me because of that. If I'd seen anything about a Fair Usage Policy - I'm not sure I'd have understood it or it's implications as it's talked about in terms of downloads and file sharing and whilst I know that SL has an awful lot of downloads - but file sharing??? Are we doing that?

So - back to SL for me before my 5pm curfew!

Grrr

Deidru Valentine

Which ISP is that? I've had no such problems with BT, they just send a nasty letter and charge extra on months where I go over the limit (I quite often send large files around for work).

BT are the worst deal in the UK!

Surely you have a better choice, see if you can get Pipex or Onetel for example. Both provide uncapped internet at reasonable price levels ( for the UK )

I'm in an LLU area for Be Broadband, which can provide up to 24MB unmetered, but I've heard such horror stories about them that I've avoided it like the plague. Now they've been bought by O2, surely it can only get worse (if their mobile network's anything to go by!)

To be honest, switching is such a hassle, I'm told it can lose you your connection for days or even a couple of weeks - I can't afford to be without broadband for work reasons. I've been with BT since the dawn of time!

10 days outage is average.
I'm being given a mandatory upgrade from 2-8MBps this month, and with it a "fair usage policy" as the above poster mentioned. Which will happen to cover the only hours I can get into SL... nice.

There are no ISPs in the UK now who don't impose such caps.

My original provider was Tiscali. I ran into problems finding a new ISP because I have a Mac desktop and a PC laptop, and several of the providers couldn't deal with the AppleMac. I've had to sign up to the top level BT package and with all the bad stories I've heard about BT I can't deny I'm nervous. But my fingers are firmly crossed.

Deidru

I'm sorry, but you are being fed a bald-faced lie. That is the biggest line of B.S. since Algore said he invented the Internet.

They charge your differently for International traffic? The Internet IS International traffic. That is the entire premise of how it works. And considering the sheer volume of servers located in the USA, nearly every time your visit a website you are making an International connection.

Ever used Google? That's an International Connection. Ever sent an email to a .com address? International Connection.

I work in the industry and I can tell you for a fact that they are simply bending the customers stupid enough to buy that line of crap, over the table for a few extra dollars, or Euros, or Pounds, or whatever.

They make a peering agreement with the local backbone provider who has agreements with other local hosts and larger backbone providers. Traffic is not filtered based on where it originated and where it goes; that would fundamentally break how the Internet works.

/me wonders what's so different about connecting Macs/PCs to a phone socket ? A cable connection could indeed require a special modem which would need a driver, but a DSL line is a standard connection. The level of corporate bias and ignorance about Macs in the UK is stunning and totally unprofessional, you're wise to avoid those providers! Let's hope they go out of business!

The real issue here that's being hidden from you, is that by encouraging you to use a USB modem they can pretty much ensure you only connect a single machine to the line. Whereas if you throw that USB junk in the bin and get yourself a good ethernet modem ( eg: XModem, adslnation.com ) you can simply connect any machine to the internet, Mac or PC and you don't even need a special driver.

[edit]
I'll add a link because I really rate this company ...

http://adslnation.com/products/xm3spec.php

Its the same line I get when I call Comcast to tell them their routers are down. They are trained in Windows and nothing else.

I can actually hear thier mouths open and their eyes glaze over when I tell them I'm running a network behind the cable modem and my firewall is a Linux computer, not a hardware box.

I get the flustered "umm well, uhh, we cannot support that and I think your setup is illegal."

uh huh.

If you just tell them you have Windows and you need the connection info; dialin number, DNS servers, gateway server, etc. and plug it in yourself, you'll be fine.

Fair use policy stinks, they shouldn't be able to advertise unlimited downloads when it's clearly not. What makes them think 30G a month is fair use anyhow? It certainly isn't fair to me. They offer you speeds of 8meg then more or less stop you from using it properly!

To be honest, I think BT are one of the fairer ISPs as these things go.

They advertise as having a 40GB limit rather than "unlimited *fair use policy" and don't actually bother you if you use 43GB one month. They only get narky if you go consistently over month after month.

Folks at LL, i have a simple request to you, can you please restrict your upgrade releases to just a max of 2 a month.. i'm on capped net as well... and frankly i hate the 56k deal in world.

Do the math and allow us to download only fixes and the like... come on there has to be a way around all these 25/51 meg downloads every time u patch something up.


plus everytime u guys do an upgrade the sim objects get reset..please look into some quality coding now!

thanks for listening.

Disabling CFD.exe seems to allow you to circumvent your cap.....
just sayin

Eh? The cap's nothing to do with any .exe's running on your local machine. I use a Mac and still have a cap imposed. It's set on the server at your ISP's end and can't be altered.

seriously does this work.. i thought the poster above --seemed right.. like yea ISP's server route my ip works, etc. unless this cfd.exe is some thing to do with tcp/ip or pertaining to SL.. i don't know...

can someone please confirm that disabling cfd.exe bypasses the cap? thanks a bunch!