the tindog coffeehouse

I’m only at the end of the 2nd day of my month-long metered bandwidth experiment, and I’ve already exceeded the 5 GB usage cap being imposed by New York ISP Frontier Communications (not my ISP, thankfully).

What pushed me over the limit? Well, on Friday I remotely connected to my computer for maybe about 30 minutes. I also downloaded audio podcasts using Juice, video podcasts using Miro, and did some general browsing. Today I downloaded some YouTube videos, downloaded a few trial programs, and uploaded the YouTube FLV videos to Media-Convert.com to convert them to a different format.

Combined, those activities over two days amounted to a total of 8 GB of total usage. And keep in mind that’s only activity from my computer, not including Christy’s or the girls’ computers or any other Internet-connected device we may have (such as the Wii).

Here are the reports so far (click to enlarge):

The totals really surprised me, but my biggest surprise came around 8:30 this morning. Overnight I had downloaded a rather large (1.76 GB) documentary via the “Yes, We’re Open” channel on Miro. The documentary (completely free) was downloaded using the bittorrent protocol (an example of a perfectly legal use of bittorrent). Everything was fine and dandy until about 8:30am, when our Internet connection suddenly slowed to a crawl. A speed test on Bandwidth.com showed our download speed to be almost exactly 512 kbps while our upload speed was still the normal 800 kbps or so. (Normal upload speed is around 5 Mbps, 10 times the speed of what I was seeing.) After about an hour our Internet speed returned to normal.

Had AT&T throttled our Internet connection as punishment for downloading over bittorrent? I have no idea. I’m sure if asked, they would deny it.

By the way, the documentary, ironically, was The Corporation, a Canadian film about the rise of big business and corporate America. Coincidence?

Previously:
Metered broadband: An experiment