[Merged] Whats the best BB option

[ian@huth]

Originally Posted by Matth

Excellent read!
http://usertools.plus.net/status/archive/1101830040.htm


Now that's an interesting figure, and it sets a good perspective on the 1Gb/2Gb "dialup replacement" broadbands, and NTL's 1Mbit/5Gb - we can call it a "below average" service.

Don't forget that averages have users both above and below them. The 7Gb average includes all those very high usage customers. Remove those and the average will drop below the 5Gb mark. Naturally, if an ISP has several broadband tiers then the lowest one will always be below average but it will cater very well for the tiers users.

[BBKing]

Since my (ADSL) ISP has download/upload stats online going back seven months, here's what a fairly high usage chap like myself who uses the net all the time and does the odd bit of heavy downloading uses in the average month:
Month/Up/Down/Up (peak)/Down (peak)
Jan 2005 4.19G 8.83G 1.36G 2.85G
Dec 2004 8.99G 13.6G 2.91G 4.47G
Nov 2004 4.05G 6.30G 479M 1.75G
Oct 2004 11.7G 11.5G 8.36G 7.67G
Sep 2004 8.64G 13.4G 3.28G 4.01G
Aug 2004 14.2G 19.2G 5.20G 6.06G
Jul 2004 10.6G 13.6G 4.50G 5.72G

peak is 8am to 8pm weekdays nominally.

Average downstream per month is therefore 12.3Gb, peak hours 4.64. Given that it looks like I do 66% or so of my downloading outside peak times anyway, I've just moved to a 2Mb ADSL 3Gb/month peak hours limited tariff, and I'll just watch the peak hours downloads a bit.

[Matth]

I'm surprised the average made it as high as 7Gb, across all classes of broadband including those 1Gb dialup replacements, I suppose it takes 15 1Gb Lite users to balence one 100Gb glutton.

Getting back to the point though...

Cable, an architecture designed for high volume data, should be better.

However, the choice in ADSL means there are better and worse ones, and more choice.

Can't say I'd have much preference either way - when NTL is good, it's VERY good, far more stable throuput and no flaky disconnects like a friend's ADSL, but then we all know the trouble with NTL, mostly now, the flaky proxies, and the frequent case of the DNS being so slow that Windows gives up waiting.

If there were a choice of ISP on cable, it would be perfect!