Bandwidth Question

[The_Dude]

i'll be movin to college soon and the university has a bandwidth cap.

it's 4 gigs/week for 20 bucks (that's the cheapest).


so, is 4 gigs enough? i play a lot of online games and have NO idea how much bandwidth it consumes. i'm not gonna be lookin @ much porn since i've already have enough.


i might download a program onces in a while and surf the web alot...

how hard is it to use up 4gb's of bandwidth?

[Technomage]

4GB/wk is quite a bit, according to how much you dl, how fast the connection is, etc... I would suggest you get some kind of a bandwidth monitor and see what you currently use, then you'll be able to determine if it is enough. I us4e something called DU Meter, it tells your up and down speed, but also keeps traks of your daily, weekly, and monthly totals. I'm sure there are other such utilities available, just have a look at any shareware site and I'm sure you'll find something.

[juanvaldes]

$80 a month!!! Your getting ripped off.

[Technomage]

I hope he meant the $20 was per month, not per week, if it is weekly then that no good at all

[Pragma]

If all you do is chat on AIM, surf the web, browse TFP occasionally (while not looking at TOO many high-rez image posts), playing games, then 4GB/week should be fine.

(I am assuming this is 4GB of traffic to off-campus sites. Within the campus shouldn't be monitored.)

If you plan to do a lot of leeching of movies, mp3s, and games, then you'll really have to watch to make sure you don't go over the limit.

[sixate]

Dude, you better check into that a little more because $20 a week is fucking rediculous. Think about it. Who the hell charges by the week anyway? If it is per month a 4 gig cap probably wouldn't last me a week, but I download movies and other large files off of Kazaa while I'm sleeping and working.

[Pragma]

Doing the math, 4GB/week is only 6.9KB/sec if you're downloading at 6.9KB/sec for every second of every day in the week. It's a pretty shitty deal, even for 20$ a month. You're basically paying for a modem, with the side effect of being able to download things faster (but still the same TOTAL amount downloaded).

Depending upon how much more the other options cost, I'd recommend going for one of those. That or just living off campus and buying cable or DSL.

[juanvaldes]

I bet the school has kazza and others blocked or throttled WAYYY down.

[macmanmike6100]

sorry to hear about the cap, dude. At Univ. of SoCal (USC), you're allowed up to 3.5GB in two hours but no more than 10GB in any 24 hour period. It was a sweet deal, and it was <b>included</b> with our housing fee.

[sandeep]

i'm going to university in the fall, but i dont know about the bandwith caps.

now i'm a little worried!

[Vanquish]

4gb a week is fine unless your a huge music downloader or if you are into other acts that should not be discussed here it would be hard to go over the limit unless you were on the comp 24/7 and I doubt that would happen at college :P

[The_Dude]

sry about the wrong or misguided info.

it's 20 bucks a month.


and the network traffic is unlimited and i heard that you get like 1mbps transfer rate.

and the internet is 10 mb connection (whatever it is).

i still think that i'm gettin ripped off here.

these days, u can get dsl for 30 bucks/month with no bandwidth limit. but my room mate doesnt wanna subscribe (weird, since he'll be paying $20/month also).

[sandeep]

can you get external dsl in a dorm room?

[The_Dude]

i dont know, i'm wondering about that.

plus, we have one cable line coming into the room (cable's free for us).

[sandeep]

the school i'm going to has individual connections per student, so a double room would have two lines. but that's about all i know about the internet there.

i dont want to ask, because they'll think i'm some hacker who is just setting himself up to get to the school and abuse their connections :P

[beerClown]

Most games are very low bandwith (CS, etc), but latency does matter quite a bit. I assume you won't be downloading a lot while you sleep/are eating/are in class/partying/et al. so that really should be quite ample. If you start serving up files however, you're SOL.

[Pragma]

It will be nigh impossible to get cable modem or DSL to your dorm room, just because the school will fight you every step of the way, telling you to use their connection.

If your dorm is anything like mine, you'll have a 10Megabit connection (divide by 8, means that you have 1.25MB/sec download rates, theoretically). In practice, I get around 700 to 800 kilobytes/second downloading from high-bandwidth places (SourceForge, Microsoft, etc.).

As for the 20$ a month, that's the first that I've ever heard of a college charging an additional fee to use their network connection. The way I've seen it is a misc. fee added on to room and board called "Technology Services" which includes TV, phone, and network.

[sandeep]

pragma, i havent seen any schools charging more for it either. seems a bit odd.

[cliffxpro]

When I was in school, the cloest thing to the internet we had was Lynx and gohper in the library, so I don't know if 20 a month is a good deal or not. 4gb a week is a good amount of traffic, but if you live on usenet and bittorrent and such, you'll eat that up in a day or two. Do they ahve higher level plans which may feature unlimited bandwidth? If so, you could consider getting with a few of the folks on your floor and chipping in for that service, and use a wireless network to pipe the network around amongst you.

[Vanquish]

You know all you would need to do if your worried about cost and you wont be using the full bandwidth, just set up ICS with your friend, pick up a bandwidth monitoring program and share one Connection, $10 a month aint too bad.

Mind u thats a nogo if you both like to download stuff.

Also that 10mb/s probably means your School has you on a T1 line internally, I doubt that they would use a T1 to go out with, even small universitys around here have at least a T3 line. But 1MB/s is nothing to complain about

For exaple, most DSL lines (the cheapest anyway) rate at 3mb/s witch usually works out to around 150KB/s

[Pragma]

Vanquish: What the 10Mbit/sec means is that you have a 10Mbit connection to your room.

What ends up happening is that you're on a hub with several other people (probably 24, but maybe as few as 12). The school (unless it's a small one) undoubtedly has a SONET connection running into the building. A T-1 is only 1.54Mbit/second, so your dorm connection (10Mbit) is superior to that.

3Mbit/sec is 384KB/sec theoretical max, a T-1 only gets 197.12KB/sec. Just to update your figures.

[Vanquish]

Sounds good I was just shooting Numbers out there that were around what Local people get Like our DSL here is considered a 3MB line, but NOONE ever gets more then 150k/s I never really bothered to figure these things out, However I always thought that a T1 was a 10mb/s line but you only ever got 1MB/s Thanks for clearing that up Learn something enw every day

[Pragma]

Just to be educational:

T1 is 1.544Mbit/sec
T3 is 44.736Mbit/sec
OC-1 is 51.84Mbit/sec
OC-3 is 155.54Mbit/sec
(skip a lot)
OC-48 is 2488.32Mbit/sec
(skip more)
OC-192 is 9953.28Mbit/sec

All courtesy of my CCNA book. Divide each value by 8 to get the megabytes/second rate.

[giblfiz]

You will probably find 4 gigs a month to be plenty if you don't do much warez/movies/mp3s and way to little if your into that sort of thing.

Your latency will probably be the best you have ever had, so your gaming will go well.

you should also check if internal traffic counts against that limit. if everyone in your dorm opens up their movies / mp3s its a pretty big library, and 10/1 they won't count it against your bandwidth cap.

[Pragma]

Agreed, giblfiz. At my uni, they don't count internal traffic against your "total traffic" (not that they have anything firm established). After all, you can burn terabytes upon terabytes of bandwidth but as long as it's internal, it doesn't cost them a dime.

[The_Dude]

yeah, the internal traffic is unlimited so no prob's on lan games etc...

[sandeep]

i know some schools around here have firewalls that block ports that certain games run on though, so that ruins the whole online gaming thing. they even blocked it within the network, so you couldn't even play games on the lan with others in the dorms. really crappy deal if you ask me, but that's how it was.

[rocinante2003]

You may want to download this tool now and get some info on what your current bandwidth habits are.

Link