I posted this on my guild webpage as a response to this article.

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Here is a more informative story with actual numbers for comparison:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0...ref=technology

Think about it. A rough check on the internet shows that games use around 5kbs down and 3kbs up. Lets be generous and double that to 10kbs down and 6kbs up (here is my source http://www.dansdata.com/bandwidth.htm).

Ok so lets assume you play 8 hours a day for 30 days.

The math goes:

[(10000bytes/sec + 6000bytes/sec)*(60seconds/1minute)*(60minutes/1hour)*8hours*30 days]= 1.3824*10^10bytes/month= 13824mb/month= 13.824gb/month

Remember this is both download and upload with very liberal values for most quantities. According to the NYTimes article, "the exact terms had not been set, but that packages would probably offer between 5 gigabytes and 40 gigabytes a month. The top plan would cost roughly the same as the company’s highest-speed service, which typically runs between $50 and $60 a month."

So you could safely go for the 30gb package and be completely safe and pay less money to the cable company than you do now.

Its all this HD video downloading/uploading (limewire, youtube) that are hurting the internet for gamers. One HD movie is 1 to 2 gb. So let them pay.

Unfortunately gamers are being sucked in to this argument and they don't really think about how it will affect them. In the end it will make the internet faster for gamers, more expensive for movies and videos. That is fine with me.

Instead of trying to charge us more for the crappy services they provide, perhaps they should invenst some time into getting the damn things to work in the first place.

However, I may point out one thing they didn't touch upon, choice of billing. With mobile phones, you get a choice, fix fee per month with extra's, or pay as you go, were you pay for the time you use as you use it. Both have benefits for each type of user, the heavy user having a big bill for big usage, and the lite user paying piss all for not a great deal of time per month.

For example: 2 months ago, I had to put £10 on my mobile phone for calls. Today, I still have £9.50 of that tenner left to me. Same type of idea, a lite user only paying per hour (or fraction of) for net time, with a restriction on speed and limit. Whilst the big users paya flat fee with no per hour limit of speed restriction (although you'll prob get slapped with a download limit). Course, such genius thinking is probobly beyond a giant corporation, so someone would have to subjest it.

This is part of the reason you can never let yourself get to the point of only having 1 internet provider available. These guys have been staying up late trying to figure out how to charge you more for the same thing. I promise you that they will succeed one day.

I read about this earlier, it's a disaster for the internet in general imo. With everything aiming towards video streaming, constant live updates as well as MMO's and multiplayer, people will have to watch bandwidth very closely.

Spread the word about this one. This IMHO is a disaster for electronic gaming distribution.