My internet is “capped”. Find out why this is horrible.
October 25, 2009
Australia (which is where I live) doesn’t have a good broadband system. I’ll just put it out there because it isn’t exactly common knowledge. Our system is ancient. Well, it appears that way at least; after all, I don’t think that bandwidth caps have ever been standard in the US. And that is how this begins: bandwidth caps.
Each month, I can only download 30 gigabytes worth of files (that includes web pages and images and videos). After that point I will become capped, which is a term that describes the state of having sub-dial up internet speeds. In fact, I’ve got it better than most – my speeds only get capped off at 256 kb/s, whereas most people only get 64 kb/s. Also worth noting is the system of on and off peak. On peak usually covers the day time, while off peak covers every other hour. It varies from plan to plan but usually off peak is from around midnight to sometime the next morning. Plans are usually split into these on and off peak hours.
Say I have a 50 gigabyte plan. Instead of freely being able to download whatever I like during the month, I would have to keep my downloading to off peak times. See, on peak, you might only have access to 10 gigabytes. After those on peak gigabytes are gone, you’re capped (even if you have the 40 gigabytes left from the off peak time). The really bad part? For this particular plan, the off peak time might be 3 am through 7 am. Horrible. I find this whole peak system is just adding insult to injury.
Now that you know all this (- you’re suddenly well equipped to empathise with Australians who are lagging on [insert online game] when capped -), you’re going to be able to understand what I’m talking about when I use the term capped. Right now, I’m capped. I have reached that 30 gigabyte limit. You’d be surprised at how much you have to limit yourself if you don’t want to cap. Assuming that you don’t want to cap through the month, YouTube becomes almost a chore where you have to monitor how many videos you watch and how many minutes each one is. It really takes the fun out of viewing things.
While capped, perusing the internet becomes surprisingly frustrating. While I’m meant to get 256 kb/s speeds, it varies entirely. One minute I’ll be loading web pages pretty quickly. My Google search might only take 10 seconds to load. Yet the next minute it will over a minute to load the same search.
Videos? Files? Large images? Out of the question. Unless I must have something (you know, for medical reasons an’ all), or I have 15 minutes to spare (that’s roughly how long it takes for a five minute video to load), I won’t download a file or watch a video. This can be somewhat off-putting for some people when I immediately tell them I won’t watch a video when they send me a link to YouTube or a similar site.
To make matters worse, the pages that load the worst are usually the ones I’d like to visit. Each site has a speed it will generally stick to (outside of the aforementioned speed variations) and some are nicer than others.
… It’s hard work not having the internet I deserve.
