Starband Declares SL ABUSIVE !!

Well this could be the end for me.

How much bandwidth per hour of SL time...is an average or reasonable amount??

For the last few days I have been having fits with SL not loading..or loading with all phantom objects. So I did a speed check of my modem. WOW...72Kbs down and 6Kbs up. WTH?? Finally decided maybe trees had grown into the direct line of sight to the satellite. So cut down everything within 10 meters in all southern directions. No help.

Finally today called Starband Tech support. Turns out , after 4 years as a loyal customer, I am now in deep do-do. Seems I am using WAY too much bandwidth and so have been throttled down. More like they sat on my head. I explained that I was simply playing my favorite game, Second Life. I was then told that Second Life is ABUSIVE of bandwidth. ABUSIVE???

Did you guys know that you are abusive of bandwidth?? LOL...?? Well according to Starband you are...and thats not all....

After some research I have been reading...the move is afoot...seems that most EVERY ISP out there is contemplating bandwidth restrictions...period...no upgrade paths.

I am feeling real sick right now...as in my area cable nor DSL are even options....

This might be the end of Second Life for me....Im praying I can figure out _something_.

Sighs...Goodbye wonderful SL..hello cruel world.

Limited bandwidth isp sucks bigtime ,, just to show you how much SL can use , look at this,, so thats about 10 gig download . 1.5 gig (ish) up/download

Yes, this is a fundamental technical problem which the CEO of SL should probably be concerned about.

However, bandwidth technology is improving so there is a possibility (not that slight) which may indicate that this could be less of a problem in the future.

Time will tell, I guess.

In the meanwhile, you may wish to simply consider cutting down on your SL usage.

Tip for you if you want to cut down download/upload, i use a program called netlimiter ( www.netlimiter.com ) with that you can specify a max download/upload before it will just plain cut you off.
I never tried it out , but i guess it would help.

(so glad i dont have a limit, the last 3 months i downloaded about 51 gig / up 4)

Yes, nearly every satellite company does this. That's part of the reason we don't support satellite, or any connection that isn't DSL or Cable.

It's called a Fair Use Policy by most satellite providers, or something similar. Most of them have a FUP in place because satellites operate on the principle of shared bandwidth (i.e. we don't have enough bandwidth for everyone to download full-speed at once). Once you download a certain amount of data in a certain period of time, bad things happen (ranging from throttling your connection to sub-dialup speeds, to charging additional fees).

My major recommendation would be to turn down SL's Bandwidth setting, to maximize the time you can spend online. Check the Preferences guide for more:

http://secondlife.com/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=Preferences+Guide

As for the rest... There are Terabytes (thousands of gigabytes) of data in Second Life, even stored in the very optimized formats we use. To put it in perspective: I spoke last weekend with an FPS developer, who prided himself on having developed one of the largest outdoor maps ever shipped with an FPS. This map (several hundred megs of terrain, models, lightmaps, textures, etc. that the game must have installed ahead of time) was 16 acres... the size of ONE region in Second Life. Of course, around here, you fly around and see dozens of places that size, thousands of textures (most of which aren't re-used), and it all has to show up on low-end broadband in a few seconds. It's really impressive when you think about it.

Thankfully, my DSL provider at home has no bandwith restrictions. I being the pragmatic person I am, asked, "you may say you have no limit, but obviously, at some point you really do. When is too much?" The rep replied, "Well, we had one guy shut down our service in the greater New York area. That was too much." ;^)

Um cable and DSL are going this way as well. Call your ISP up and ask them if they have any policies about high bandwidth usage. Have them note your account, take ther person's name, date, etc that you spoke with as well if they tell you no. These occurances are few and far between but they do happen.

Also if you are gonna play a game like this like LL says Dialup is not suggested for a reason. DSL and cable have speeds or packages for a reason. You want more you pa more.

hehe , they tried to put limit on bandwidth where i live, guess what happend, they lost just about every customer they had, going to where isp's would allow it, soo a few months later they nearly went out of business and now they allow it,

That was dsl's , cable here where i live never have restrictions (small country), if they start that trend , if you can , say byebye and choose someone who can offer you unlimited (well alot anyway), dont let them controll us with limits.

well remember alot of the reason why these things are done are becuase people are hosting things from thier computer like:
A) Audio streams
B) Websites
C) Gameservers
D) napster style programs
E) FTP servers

DSL/Cable were never meant to have such things running on thier systems.

DSL and Cable ISPs have been threatening for quite awhile to throttle you BW. This is nothing new.

Japan, SK, and even the US have been developing low cost / high BW offerings. I'm not ready to stick a fork in SL just yet, but it's certainly a risk factor..

I'm not sticking a fork either but it might be a good warning to those in SL that want to stream videos, music, website, etc for thier Second Life from thier PC. Incidently I warned of this also when people were asking about how to stream videos from thier home PC to SL.

My true advice is after doing this for a month contact your ISP or check your bill. If you don't loose bandwidth, get shut off, or get charged more money then you are fine.

Well basically dsl and cable is a contended service, ie a shared resource, so it will come to a time when the speed will slow down to the speed of the contention and then force the bandwidth to be limited to that speed.

In the uk dsl already have bandwidth limited services as well as unlimited services, of course one being the cheaper, cable wise, one company is totally capped while the other offers fair use.

Luckily sl is install with a good setting on the bandwidth slider of 300, so dont think it affects most people here, and im happily buzzing around on the 1000 setting.

I feel very thankful to have an account with my local isp (since 1998 with them). They offer dsl service 1500 down 900 up without restrictions. I called them up once and asked what bandwidth restrictions they have for servers in my apartment. They said there are none, whatever you can fit on the pipe. I will be very sad if the fcc has its way and the phone companies no longer have to share their facilities with other isps.