Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?

Thu Oct 4 21:58:13 UTC 2007

On Thu, 04 Oct 2007 15:50:11 +0100
Leigh Porter <leigh.porter at ukbroadband.com> wrote:

> 
> Yeah, try buying bandwidth in Australia! The have a lot more water to
> cover ( and so potentially more cost and more profit to be made by
> monopolies) than well connected areas such as the US.
> 

I don't necessarily think it is only that.

Customers on ADSL2+ usually get the maximum ADSL2+ speed
their line will support, so customers can have speeds of up to 24Mbps
downstream. Download and/or upload quotas have an effect
of smoothing out the backhaul impact those high bandwidth customers
could make. As they could use up all their quota in such a short time
period at those speeds, and once they exceed their quota they'd get
their speed shaped down to something like 64Kbps, it typically forces
the customer to make their bandwidth usage patterns more bursty rather
than a constant. That effect, averaged across a "backhaul region" helps
avoid having to provision backhaul bandwidth for a much higher constant
load.

Regards,
Mark.

-- 

        "Sheep are slow and tasty, and therefore must remain constantly
         alert."
                                   - Bruce Schneier, "Beyond Fear"