Japanese Broadband Caps Compared To US Broadband Caps

from the take-a-look-around dept

With various US broadband firms implementing usage caps sometimes as low as 5GBs/month, we are quite concerned about how these moves will hinder innovation by effectively placing much greater mental transaction costs on using any kind of application online. In defense of these caps, some have pointed out that even Japanese ISPs (sometimes used as an example of a much better broadband system than in the US) are also implementing caps.

Broadband Reports now has the details on some of those caps, and they’re much higher than in the US (just like Japan’s broadband speeds). The cap is 30 gigs per day of upload. There are no download caps. So, yes, the Japanese caps (that some want to use as an example of why caps are necessary) are many times greater per day than what some US firms want to offer per month — and it’s only for upload, rather than download. Suddenly, I get the feeling we’ll be hearing the example of Japanese broadband caps a lot less frequently.

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Comments on “Japanese Broadband Caps Compared To US Broadband Caps”

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17 Comments
Monarch says:

Re: by Anonymous Coward on Jun 26th, 2008 @ 11:58pm

“Although if you look at it another way, on a Japanese connection with 100mbps, you only need to average 3 percent (3mbps) of that upload rate in order to hit your upload cap for the day.”

Actually, No. The connection bandwidth is in megabits per second, while the cap is in Mega Bytes per second.

So if you actually have 100mbps upload bandwidth, and used the upload bandwidth at full capacity for 24 hours you would be able to upload approximately 69GB per day. Which is approximately 44% of your total bandwidth, when you have a cap of 30mbps per day.

Monarch says:

Re: Re: by Anonymous Coward on Jun 26th, 2008 @ 11:58pm

My wording is all screwed up:

“The connection bandwidth is in megabits per second, while the cap is in Mega Bytes per second.:
^ bits instead of megabits, and Bytes instead of MegaBytes per second

“when you have a cap of 30mbps per day.”
^30GB instead of 30mbps

Cassius Seeley (user link) says:

No No No :)

If I am not mistaken, they are talking about the amount of data you can push up or pull down on the the connection not the speed at which you can do it so mega bits per second is irrelevant unless you have a 28.8 dial up connection 🙂

At 30GB per day, I run a small ISP and we don’t even send up 30 GB per day. On average we push up about 5.5 GB per day. Of course we don’t have customers that are streaming content but we do host roughly 120 domains.

Chronno S. Trigger says:

Re: No No No :)

The linked to article says “a daily upload limit of 30 GB per day (930 GB per month), and unlimited downloads.” and that’s at 100Mbps up and down for US$42. My guess is that the cap is only to block people from running streaming and file download servers… for several hundred people.

Papafox says:

Japanese network traffic is different

There is a fundamental difference between network traffic in Japan (or Korea, China, Hungary, Finland) and the US (or Canada, Britain, Australia): The vast majority of network traffic in Japan is between nodes within the Japanese network. In the US, Britain, Australia or Canada, a much smaller proportion of network traffic has both ends within the same network. The fundamental reason is that the vast majority of Japanese (or Hungarian or Finnish or Portuguese) content is located with Japan (or Hungary or Finland or Portugal). This is not true of English speaking countries.

The significance of these network flows is cost. The cost of providing internet content, where the traffic is contained with a single country is much, much lower. Perhaps as much as an order of magnitude. Certainly less than a quarter of the international traffic cost.

In the US, the actual cost to a tier-1 ISP of delivering a GB of data is generally rated at between $0.10-$0-20. In Japan and Korea the cost of a GB is estimated at around $0.02.

bryan says:

umm... beg to differ

I live in japan. Right now im visiting the US but at my house I have Yahoo which is the largest ISP right now. I can tell you that my speeds are much faster in Japan than here, It’s not really THAT great.. i can upload maybe 100k/sec on a normal day. but download and stuff matches the comcast that my family has here in the states. no cap in japan? well, if that’s the case, the network blows. now KOREA is where i was amazed with speeds.

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