TekSavvy → Re: tsi unlimited logins

The former, because I CANNOT go over the cap (assuming it's around 300) and needn't worry about having to pay more if I do.

You all might favour insane speeds with low to medium caps. I do not. Different strokes.

Again, if that's your concern, then don't screw over the rest of us; take your 5mbit connection with 300GB cap and limit it to 1mbit at your router. There, you don't have to worry any more, and the rest of us can enjoy non-crippled speeds.

I'm not fucking with the rest of you. I'm just giving an alternative to the current situation. Most places in the world have different internet packages priced at different speeds; usually faster is more expensive. Why isn't that the case here? What happens here is that the 'up to' phrase is used and many people pay for 'up to' 5 Mbps but only get 3 or 2 or even less. Better to have a guaranteed speed and pay for that only. It also increases consumer satisfaction without them being tricked by a sneaky 'up to'.

Anyway, if you want a fast connection, that's fine, and you can pay whatever price the market sets. But I think that in the long run it is better if there are several speed profiles at different prices for those of us who don't give a damn about speed but do worry about going over the cap.

It's easy to say to limit the speed at the router, but most people don't have a clue about how to do this. Having different profiles can also defend them from having high costs associated with going over the cap. Additionally, why would I do that if I'm paying for (up to) 5 Mbps, being able to get 5 Mbps it but don't use it? It doesn't make any sense. I'm not saying that I would ALWAYS want 1 Mbps connection (since I can do do sometimes download at fast speed, and it can be an advantage), but, if I had to choose between a 5 Mbps package capped at 300 GB or a 1 Mbps package capped at the same, I'd choose the former.

Granted, that choice isn't here today, but maybe it might be prudent to have that choice in the future.

Anyway, TSI is still unlimited so this is a non-issue and I won't debate this any further. I agree to disagree,

Thanks for the BT tip. The 70K/sec is a maximum that I set in Azureus. I use the auto-speed plugin to adjust as necessary. I usually download at about 450K/sec on a well-seeded torrent with a large swarm (such as TV shows0 but most of the stuff I download with BT has small swarms and a low seed2peer ratio, so that usually limits the download speed to be approximately the same as the upload speed.

General comment:

Some had said that increasing the DSL speeds in pointless until transit costs come down.

You forget peering. For instance, if you download a google video, or somethin from akamai, then you don't cost Teksavvy any transit since tesavvy connects to them directly via torix.

So, on such occasions, having higher speeds pays off.

And in the end, when you look at very big content like HD movies or even HD television "live" (streamed), the only way it will work is if each ISP as its own server to stream it to its own customers, or use peering with folks like google or akamai to do it "locally". Having 5000 customers all stream HD version of a LOST episode live from the abc.com servers would be ludicrous because it would no only cost Teksavvy a lot of transit, but the idea of the ABC servers able to serve all its viewers live is not feasable. Distribution of content will have to be done as locally as possible to eliminate transit costs. (or reduce it to just one stream coming in from abc to each ISP and the ISP then streaming to all the customers who want that stream.

This sounds an awful lot like webcache and peercache... I'm sure many webcasters have deployed a number of such techniques with their partner ISPs sand are working on standard ways of enabling caching for streaming content.

Duplicating transit for one data stream is inefficient and everybody would gain from standardized caching technologies for it.