Japanese ISP becomes first to cap uploads
Friday 27 June 2008
When choosing the most suitable ISP download caps are one of the first factors that play a part in the decision process. Speculation is arising that both land-based broadband and mobile broadband will revert to a pay-as-you-go format following increasingly heavy usage on the customers behalf when on unlimited download packages.
Limits could be taken a step further however, as a move by the Japanese broadband firm OCN has signalled the potential for ISPs to also cap customer uploads.
OCN announced this week that from August all of its 7 million customers would be limited to 30GB of uploads per day in an effort to stabilise internet speeds and connections. The hope is that 30GB of upload data is far too excessive for any normal broadband user to achieve and so the rule is merely targeted towards persistent file sharers.
Explaining the new rule the OCN statement release confirmed, "a small number of individual users have been monopolising substantial network resources by uploading massive amounts of data, which can slow the speed of the network and lower communication quality for other users."
Whilst 30GB sounds like a hefty amount of data usage to achieve within the UK it is important to remember that Japanese residential fibre connections run at an average of 100Mbit/s.
Source:
Tech Radar
