I think I used up my allowance on uploading my new website (77 pages), Kath & Kim, and up-to-dating 3 Mac's from scratch, Skype, Classic FM (where I live, we only have 6 radio stations!!!!) and leaving my puter on 12 hours a day.
Uploading your Web site is negligible; you could upload it once an hour every day and not even use a tenth of your bandwidth.
Leaving the computer turned on does not use any bandwidth, unless it is uploading, downloading, or playing streaming media.
To me, what Frances is saying is that her provider only allows he to up/download so much content within a certain time frame... Am I understanding that part correctly??
Yes, exactly correct.
And look for more and more and more ISPs to start doing that in the future.
Essentially, ISPs are overselling their broadband connectivity. An ISP will promise broadband to hundreds or thousands of customers, when their own connection to the Internet is capable of handling only perhaps two percent of the traffic they have sold. They are counting on the fact that 98% of the time, their customers are not using any bandwidth.
Most of the time, that's true. Even when you are surfing the Web, you are using only a tiny little bit of bandwidth--and when the pages finish loading, you're using none at all. So in the past, an ISP could sell 50 times more bandwidth than they had and it did not matter.
But now, more and more people are doing things which cause network traffic all the time. When you download movies, or play streaming video or streaming radio stations, or run programs like BitTorrent and LimeWire, you r computer is sending and receiving data nonstop, constantly.
So the ISPs have a choice. Either they can buy more connections to the Internet backbone, which is hideously expensive, or they can limit the amount of data you are allowed to send and receive each month. Because it is costly and difficult to get bigger backbone connections, more and more ISPs are opting to limit their users' data transfer.
And that's the game Google is counting on winning before anyone else even realizes the game is afoot at all.
Right now, Google is, very quietly and without fuss, building enormous data centers all over the country, and very quietly signing leases with backbone providers giving them tremendous amounts of Internet connectivity--hundreds of times more than what they use.
Many industry analysts believe that Google is planning to take over much of the sale of Internet broadband by stealth, before the normal broadband providers realize what they are doing.
The way it works right now is that consumers can buy broadband from large regional providers like Verizon, Bellsouth, and Comcast, or they can buy broadband connections from small local ISPs such as Knology and Internet Junction. The small local ISPs in turn buy their connection from the big regional names like Bellsouth and Verizon.
In turn, Bellsouth and Verizon and other big players get their backbone connection from places like Level 3 Communications and other Internet backbone providers. These connections are huge and very fast, but very expensive--tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a month.
Google is betting that the Verizons and Bellsouths of the world have shot themselves in the foot, and are about to get squashed as more and more of their customers use more and more bandwidth. Google, according to these analysts, believes that a tipping point is coming, where the regular ISPs will not be able to provide as much bandwidth as they have promised their customers, and will end up either having to make Draconian restrictions on what their customers are allowed to do, or have to spend tend or hundreds of millions of dollars, or more, building new data centers, then spend more millions upgrading their own connections.
Enter Google, with all these nice shiny huge new data centers and all these enormous pipes directly to the backbone. Google, the analysts are predicting, will step in to rescue the Bellsouths and Verizons, and say "Look, you're in a bad position. You've oversold your bandwidth, and now you can't serve your customers without spending tens of millions of dollars on new data centers and new pipes. But look! We have a brand-new data center right down the street, and we're not using all of it! Instead of building your own data center and paying all that money up front, and losing all your customers while you're building it, why don't you save your money and lease space in our data center?"
