Comments on: The EU backs bittorrent

By: basshead

basshead — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 16:15:37 +0000

Virgin Media cap your download speed (on The 20Mbit XL broadband) at 5Megabit/second if you hit 3Gigabytes downloaded between 4pm and midnight. That’s a download cap.
To put this in perspective, a 20Megabit connection can download at a maximum of 2.5Megabytes/second. 3Gigabytes would take 20 minutes to download. You don’t get the maximum speed so it usually takes 30 minutes.
This means if I use my unlimited connection at its full speed for half an hour between 4pm and midnight the download speed will be cut to 25% of maximum. Since a 20Megabit connection could download 72Gigabytes in eight hours the cap reduces this to just under 20Gigabytes. That’s definitely a download cap.
I download Linux distributions to play with which are often several Gigabytes in size. I would never hit 20Gigabytes in a day let alone eight hours, but am still penalised for using my £37 a month internet connection at a fraction of its capacity.

By: Hermes

Hermes — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 11:59:34 +0000

Virgin don’t have any download caps .

By: Bittorrent » The EU backs bittorrent

Bittorrent » The EU backs bittorrent — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 10:13:27 +0000

[...] basshead wrote an interesting post today on The EU backs bittorrentHere’s a quick excerptThe EU have invested $22 million in the development of an open-source bitTorrent client. The BBC are one of the largest groups involved in the effort, planning to use the new client to stream TV programs. According to the article on … [...]