Bandwidth
On January 27 we installed a new server for our system. We will be monitoring bandwidth use for every user for at least a month and a half and will send out emails to individuals that are high end users.
Our limits for usage are set at 10 gigabytes of download per household per month. Anything over that amount of use would cost $3.00 per gig. The average user probably uses around 5 or 6 gigs per month. However, when users know we have a good connection, we do tend to download things we would never think of doing on dial-up, for example movies, music, streaming video, and programs.
When we all start doing that, we tend to cause the system to be really busy and this in turn causes some users to have difficulty.
The system has an upload restriction and if the system is running close to super busy and someone wants to look at something on the internet such as the weather forecast or some other page they are trying to open, this is an upload request. This gets to the line and is turned down and retries and again is turned down; the user gets a “page cannot be found” message. This system is a good system and each of us is sharing it with around 90 others.
Here is an explanation of how this works: If you do a download of, for example, a movie and the internet is relatively fast, you may be able download the movie in around 20 minutes. That would be about 800MB. So if you downloaded 14 movies in a month, that would come to a total 11200MB (11.2 gigs). That alone is over your 10 gig allowable use and along with your average user amount of 5 gigs would total 16.2 gigs. As a result your cost would be an extra $18.00. In the long run, it would cost you less to rent a movie. Also to be considered are the distribution laws and copyright, which are being tracked by the movie companies.
Here are some more examples:
MP3 files are usually around 5MB
Video clips and streaming video, 35MB
Programs vary from 10MB to 900MB
If you take these numbers into consideration, you can sort of keep a handle on your usage.
Thank you for taking time to read this notice and for your patience.
If you have concerns or questions, please send emails to techsupport@lardeauvalley.com
