I wonder which title they're gonna choose for the episode!

I was there too - in fact, I went to 3 of the filming sessions and we've got a treat in store for this season :)

P.

Condition your incoming power with one of these babies:

http://www.gamatronic.com/PowerPlusUps.aspx?prod=52

Nicely expandable, redundant and just perfect for small to medium sized server rooms.

P.

Can't we just get the unemployed people to catch it? Two birds and all that..

Huh? What about if I wanted to use TPB's Personal RSS

I'm not talking about actually torrenting over 3G - that would be fairly retarded. Sometimes I'm on the bus and remember something I'd like. Log onto TPB, add it to my rss, and by the time I get home, it's there.

It's a slippery slope... skiing..

P.

One of the tech gurus at my local ISP posted an excellent thread which details how UK ISP's are charged for their bandwidth.

It is certainly UK specific, but it does go into some depth as to how and why there are bandwidth limitations on ISP services in the UK. By far and away the most expensive part of the connection is between the Customer and the ISP, and not between the ISP and the Internet.

The blog post is available here. Makes for some interesting reading.

I get a fully unshaped 8Mbit connection with 15GB transfer per month for £20.

Anything downloaded between midnight and 8am is not counted towards the cap

One of the tech gurus at my ISP wrote a fine blog article about how UK ISPs are charged for their transfer. It's a completely different market economic to the US, which is why we've had transfer limits for some time.

The problem for us is more a case of getting the forecasting right than anything else. 2 years or so ago very few people had heard of, never mind used YouTube, as at last June it was 10% of the Internet traffic. iPlayer 2 months ago was probably a fraction of 1% and is now 5% of our traffic. Over time usage continues to increase and we have to adapt to and predict how and when that usage is used, in particular we have to buy capacity for the busiest hours of the week.

Those hours though may shift and the type of traffic may change and that's what we have to be on top of. Sunday nights for example tend to be busier than others for gaming whereas Monday nights there's more people online in total and every second Tuesday of the month it's Windows update time which than carries on as a pattern Wednesday morning and evening. Then from there who knows what the next big thing might be? Could be iTunes movies, HD streaming from somewhere else or something else entirely.

But that's only the PlusNet perspective as I say, for the ISPs that don't have clear usage allowances, or advertise "unlimited" or don't receive extra revenue from customers going over the allowance then there are the concerns of what they need to do to pay for the extra usage.

This data may be of interest to some, this is the usage data for our customers for January divided into 10% chunks (just over 200,000 customers in total) in GB:

Customers Average GB per customer

0-10% 0.10
11-20% 0.32
21-30% 0.61
31-40% 1.01
41-50% 1.55
51-60% 2.34
61-70% 3.61
71-80% 5.81
81-90% 10.53
91-100% 41.51

Mean usage across all customers was 6.74GB in January, ignoring the top 10% mean usage was 2.88GB for the remaining 90%. As I say with our forecasting we need to see where those percentiles are headed, a 0.5GB (about 2 hours of iPlayer streaming) increase in that 2.88GB actually represents an extra 90,000GB of data used and translating to cost if that's all spread out over 16 hours about £34,000 extra cost per month, if it's all in the evening then about £68,000 per month. Wouldn't like to fund that if there wasn't an increase in revenue coming in from the extra usage.