While ISPS have been moaning about file sharers clogging up their tubes, one Belgian outfit has decided to show punters the extent of the problem.
Belgian ISP Telenet said that while the majority of people download a reasonable amount, some of the top bandwidth hogs are downloading more than 2TB a month. To do a BBC - this is equal to 2398021120 pages of plain text and 686080 MP3 files.
Between July 4 and August 6 of this year, Telenet's single largest user used 2.7TB of data. Other hogs managed 1.9TB, 1.5TB, and 1.3 TB.
Telenet shoved the list onto a discussion forum. Interestingly the list was not designed to show why evil bandwidth caps were needed. It was more to get people to migrate up from its least-expensive plans to its more expensive "fair use" plans.
Fair use plans are for those who download lots and mean you can receive a very large quantity of data via the Telenet network.
If you turn out to be an "excessive" user, Telenet sends a bloke around to throttle you down to 512 Kbps until your next billing period begins.
Telenet has the fastest network in Belguim so the list is probably the worst offenders in the country.
We should point out that in America one user managed to share 4TB of data in a single month from a consumer internet account and one terabyte of data down their home pipes in a month is common.
According to Ars Technica the the average broadband user is in the range of 2-6GB per month.
Perhaps it's time we abolished private ownership of ISPs and went to government owned and operated ones. Eliminate the need for profit. That way, we could all 'enjoy' the same equally sh(tty Internet experience.
Well, that's free market economics for ya. Nobody is ever really satisfied; but the dissatisfaction is spread about fairly evenly. That's when you realize the system is working as it's supposed to.
However, connectivity is as vital as electricity, and I think that no one in a mature market would tolerate brown outs for any length of time. And a fast, broad and secure national network is in any Government's interest, as this will be reflected in an increase in productivity and GDP, unless we're all planning to use it to watch streaming High Definition porn.