Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?

Fri Oct 5 01:31:44 UTC 2007

On 10/4/07, Hex Star <hexstar at gmail.com> wrote:
> Why is it that the US has ISP's with either no quotas or obscenely high ones while countries like Australia have ISP's with ~12gb quotas?
> Is there some kind of added cost running a non US ISP?

One early US cable modem company started propagating the "Don't Let
Customers Run Anything Resembling a Server" meme to many other ISPs,
primarily cable but also DSL.
One early Australian cable company started propagating the "Don't Let
Customers Download More than X MB/month" meme, and while it hasn't
been picked up as widely, there are a number of ISPs that have adopted
it.
At one time Australia did have a relatively small amount of Internet
bandwidth and a large non-data-clueful dominant carrier, which had
only gradually been bullied into accepting that there were data
customers who wanted an E1 line because they wanted the whole 2Mbps
for one medium-sized data channel as opposed to 30 channels of
boringly slow 64kbps (perceived by the carrier to be blazingly
fast...)  So they charged their users a lot to download data from
outside; I forget if they were the ones who had a cheaper rate for
data downloaded from inside Australia or not.

But outside the Land of Oz, it used to be that European PTTs also
charged excessive amounts of money for connections around their
countries or across borders.  That's changed  radically with
liberalization.  And of course Japan and Korea charge minimal amounts
for huge home broadband bandwidth - Korea has about triple the
population of Australia, in much smaller land area, and while it's not
quite as far from Silicon Valley as Australia is, and of course it's
much closer to Tokyo, it's still got to cost a bit to run the cables
there.
-- 
----
             Thanks;     Bill

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