Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?

Thu Oct 11 06:45:37 UTC 2007

On Wed, 10 Oct 2007, Marshall Eubanks wrote:

> Many people leave the TV on all the time, at least while they are home.
>
> On the Internet broadcasting side, we (AmericaFree.TV) have some viewers 
> that do the same - one has racked up a cumulative 109 _days_ of viewing 
> so far this year. (109 days in 280 days duration works out to 9.3 hours 
> per day.) I am sure that other video providers can provide similar 
> reports. So, I don't think that things are that different here in the 
> new regime.

If it's multicast TV I don't see the problem, it doesn't increase your 
backbone traffic linearly with the number of people doing it.

But this is of course a problem in a VOD environment, but on the other 
hand, people are probably less likely to just leave it on if it's actually 
programming they can have when they want. You don't need a TiVo when you 
have network based service that does the TiVo functionality for you.

Personally, I'd rather pay per hour I'm watching VOD, than paying nothing 
for channels filled with commercials where I have no control over when and 
what I could watch.

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se