Not sure I have tthis right but if it is a monthly cap then this is the norm here in Australia and always has been. Has been one of the reasons why I argue very strongly for proper compression and also other aesthetic requirements in videoblogging. I get 8GB a month, but have the advantage of a university job during the day. A feature film is around 500MB, so that's 16 features a month, which if you're a AV professional is not much, but for the majority is probably in the ball park.
However, I am going to poke the possum here (colloquial Australian expression, stir up things if you like). I don't understand why there is an attitude where bandwidth is treated as infinite and not a finite resource. It is a finite resource. Data and digital duplication of our material is trivial, but transferring that to other places is not. For example, even in Australia the majority of our schools have quite poor bandwidth, and if I want my work to be viewed in regional Australia (and for that matter parts of rural United States) then I have to be aware that bandwidth is constrained. Now bandwidth might be fast or slow, but it does have a width, and it is a material infrastructure with its associated costs. Just as with telephony there are international, national, and local agreements about how much a byte costs, and while the telcos might make lots from it (or not), the pipes are not infinite. Treating it as infinite leads to what I teach my students is "bandwidth pollution". Emails with stupid large attachments, videos that run to gigabytes. First industrialised world bandwidth arrogance is the internet equivalent of cheap oil (the analogy is simply if oil is finite, but cheap, then there is little incentive not to use it, in spite of it's inevitable disappearance and of course the pollution it is causing). The solution then becomes simply adding more. More cables, more electricity to run it all, and presumably more time for us to actually view all this extra material (I know, that's facetious). Here in my state we used to (20 years ago) think that water was infinite, and you pretty much got it for free. Then they started charging for it, on the reasonable basis that a) some people used more than others so if you had a swimming pool and fancy garden why shouldn't you pay more? and b) it required expensive infrastructure which needed to be paid for and c) it might encourage water conversation. We are now in a major and prolonged drought with substantial water restrictions. The governments response is to spend billions on desalination and pipelines (bigger fatter pipes) instead of spending the same money on ways to reduce our demand for water. I live on the driest continent on earth yet outside my window right now are English style gardens with roses, azaleas and fuschias. The point? Bigger pipes is like cheap oil is like infinite bandwidth. It supports an economy (of mind, of practice and of institutions) which thinks the answer is simply more, not less. Compress properly, think about length. Sustainability applies here as much (if not more given the energy demands of the net) as the real world. And the model of "I should have as much as I want" translates poorly outside of very specific cultural and political economies. On 05/11/2008, at 7:42 AM, Heath wrote: > I just did another post about this from another communications > company but now another big dog in the US is going to start limiting > bandwidth....AT & T...I am telling you all, this is going to stiffle > most video on the web, at some of these limits watching one movie > over Netflix will put you over for the month. Things like VloMo, > will go away....it's scary.....its real scary.... cheers Adrian Miles [EMAIL PROTECTED] bachelor communication honours coordinator vogmae.net.au
