What does My ISP meanwhen they say I have 1GB BandWidth a month ?
Thanks
Ron
Ron,
You are paying a monthly fee for a bandwidth of, maybe 1.5Mb/sec (aka 1.5M). If
you used that 1.5Mb/sec, every second of every minute of every hour of every
day, you could, theoretically download 1.5M * 60 * 60 * 24 * 30 or
3,888,000,000,000b or 388,800,000,000B. Since they don't want you using your
connection at the max, they cap you at 1,000,000,000B, or 1/389 the maximum.
This is an example; I don't know if I did the math right here, and I'm getting a
headache from this.
If your bandwidth is higher, say 3M, or even 5 or 6M, the cap becomes even more
noticeable. If you're in the habit of downloading code, like maybe operating
system installs, you could easily run up to 1G in a week. So you need to
control yourself.
If you exceed the cap, they may penalise you. The penalty could range from
immediate disconnection, to abrupt throttling to a speed of, as reported
elsewhere, 64Kb ie dialup speed. You need to check with your ISP to find out
what YOUR penalty might be.