Australian Man Uses 1TB of Mobile Data in a Single Day (stuff.co.nz) 164
An anonymous reader cites an amusing article on Stuff: When Telstra offered its mobile customers unlimited data for two separate days this year as compensation for network outages, some customers took it as a challenge to download as much as they possibly could in one day. On Sunday, 27-year-old Sydney resident John Szaszvari outdid himself and everyone else by ploughing through almost a whole terabyte of data. That's more than double what he managed during the first free data day in February -- an already mammoth 425GB.
This. (Score:5, Funny)
This is why we can't have nice things.
Re:This. (Score:5, Insightful)
No, this proves that my phone provider's ridiculous cap of 200 MB per month truly is ridiculous!
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Am I the only one to have downloaded a linux ISO using 4G? It's south of 1G, but around 0.7 or so I think...
(I'm on a 4G/month plan, so I shouldn't do it every day, but I can do it every week if I want :))
Re:This. (Score:5, Insightful)
To stop morons from you from using wireless
Why is it always just when you insult someone that your proof-reading skills disappear into the abyss... Now you just look plain silly, AC. ;)
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>> To stop morons from you from using wireless
> Why is it always just when you insult someone that your proof-reading skills disappear into the abyss... Now you just look plain silly, AC. ;)
Yeah, but that's not the core point here. He can insult others if that makes him feel some kind of weird satisfaction.
The one thing he can't do is say BS -- and that's pretty much what he has managed to accomplish. Because he has been brainwashed into believing bandwidth is some scarce thing, I had to endure a d
Re: This. (Score:2, Interesting)
If you don't know what you're talking about, you might as well just stop talking.
The air only has so much bandwidth, the tower is only fed with so much bandwidth.
Yes, mobile providers oversubscribe. There's no getting around the fact that it makes sense to do.
If you want every customer of a mobile provider to have their own time division slot in the air in the available frequency bands, then each sector (oversimplified to hell) can support somewhere around 250 concurrent customers. (I forget the exact numbe
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Technology keeps making equipm
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also why feed each tower with only 1gbit, 10gbit or even 100gbit optics is already available, biggest part of cost is putting cable in ground anyway cable itself is cheap
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Why is it always just when you insult someone that your proof-reading skills disappear into the abyss... Now you just look plain silly, AC. ;)
Not sure if /. does it or not but on Reddit when someone posts something the admins dislike they can use a "wand" to screw up the grammar in order to make people perceive them as idiots.
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Reddit is the "modern" slashdot, the 2010s decade equivalent, less marred in ancient 90s themed software. A feature that "advanced" won't exist here because it would be too difficult for the imbeciles responsible for such things here to code.
Anyway, it isn't even necessary. People with such stupid things to say tend to fuck up the grammar all on their own.
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Nope. They all left. That means you got stuck with me. Sorry 'bout that.
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Anything that can go wrong will go worng?
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Anything that can go wrong will go worng?
Yes, that was indeed the joke. Well done.
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Wireless networks are no where near short of bandwidth. There was an article posted on Slashdot a few months back stating as much, at least in the US. Three in Ireland/UK offers unlimited (they throttle after 5GB) and back when I lived in the US I was on Sprint's unlimited plan. It's more than possible.
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Three in Ireland/UK offers unlimited (they throttle after 5GB)
If they throttle after 5GB, it's not unlimited.
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If they throttle after 5GB, it's not unlimited
You may want to check a dictionary before posting. Just saying.
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You may want to check a dictionary before posting. Just saying.
If it's throttled at 64kbps, then there's a limit of 21GB per month.
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And if it's not throttled then there's a limit of XX GB per month, depending on your download speed. Still limited, by your definition.
For me, unlimited internet access mean 'all I can download' Full stop. For you it seems unlimited means 'all I can download at maximum speed'.
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For me, unlimited internet access mean 'all I can download' Full stop.
If it's throttled at 64 kbps, or even 128 kbps, you can't download everything you want. Most web sites will time out before they're done loading, and video streaming becomes impossible.
For you it seems unlimited means 'all I can download at maximum speed
Not maximum, but a useful speed.
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Well. I don't stream music/movies, I download them for later viewing, so even my old dial-up modem does its job :P
As for the rest, browsing the web with ublock and noscript takes care of sites timing out.
So I get unlimited 'internet' even if I'm capped.
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Strange, but I used to use video conferencing on dial-up at 30 kbps up / 56 kbps down kbps. Now, I'm not going to claim that it was 4k ultra-def 3dTV standard (or whatever this weeks buzz word is). But it was adequate for conversation with colleagues, and hooking the webcam up to the microscope to show them what I was talking
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Nice how they aren't rolling out landline broadband so they can get away with per bit billing isn't it?
Re:This. (Score:5, Insightful)
There is plenty of bandwidth to go around.
That depends entirely where you are, and how many people are sharing the same cell tower/sector with you.
Re:This. (Score:5, Funny)
There is plenty of bandwidth to go around.
That depends entirely where you are, and how many people are sharing the same cell tower/sector with you.
We have no room for your "physics" nonsense around here, buddy. Go back to YouTube with all those ridiculous evolution and other psuedoscience videos. People come to Slashdot to discuss real science. Come back when you've finally learned the earth is flat.
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There is plenty of bandwidth to go around.
That depends entirely where you are, and how many people are sharing the same cell tower/sector with you.
And if his tower/cell had been crowded then he wouldn't have gotten the throughput that he did. 1 TiB during 24h is on average ~102Mbps (+ protocol overheads)
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Exactly! And that on a day when other people were doing the same thing as he: binging on downloads. Had there been true infrastructural limitations on what he COULD download, his speeds would have slowed to a crawl.
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And that on a day when other people were doing the same thing as he: binging on downloads. Had there been true infrastructural limitations on what he COULD download, his speeds would have slowed to a crawl.
Or maybe he's just lucky to be the only one close to the tower in a certain sector that's interested in binging on downloads that day.
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Re:This. (Score:5, Funny)
This is why we can't have nice things.
You just need to get an ISP with a rigorous electron/photon recycling program.
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After your recycling program is implemented, you also need to dig up Claude Shannon and convince his dead corpse that it is possible to transmit an unlimited amount of data over a noisy channel using a finite chunk of spectrum [wikipedia.org].
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But now that he's done downloading and has a backlog of things to watch, the network is less busy than it would be and you can have nice things.
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I wonder how much 14 seasons of MythBusters, 24 seasons of The Simpsons would set you back in Australia?
Or did he just admit to something he shouldn't, just to claim his 15 minutes...
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Actually it shows that the bandwidth that we all paid for is sitting mostly idle, in order to use the artificial scarcity for market segmentation. Remember, bandwidth cannot be saved or stored. None of that 1.4TB of data which that man transferred on those two days was borrowed from some other day or slowed anything down before or after those two days. That bandwidth was available right then and there, and had he not used it, it would have gone to waste.
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This is why we can't have nice things.
Starve a person for years and of course given an all-you-can-eat buffet he's going to binge eat until he busts a gut.
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People in Australia have been able to download 1TB per day on wired HFC/Fibre connections for years. You could even do it on ADSL if you're dedicated and close enough to an exchange.
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True, It's a shame that they're using the limited amounts of gibibytes, we should save some for our children and all the children to come!
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This is why we can't have nice things.
It's also a great way to help Telstra figure out who they need to throttle more carefully in the future.
Way to stand out John!
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Observation from 25 years of network and WANs:
Your top 5% consumers this year are pushing about as many bits apiece as your average consumer will next year.
Use them as your canaries. If you can't cater to their loads then you're already on a path to pain and mass customer loss.
Re: This. (Score:2)
Got a few examples of that?
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They're referencing something known as "fiduciary duty" which, as near as I can tell, nobody actually understands that comments about it. They're convinced that it means a company must make as much profit as possible and at any cost. I am not quite sure where this notion comes from but, I can assure you, no such regulations exist. Yes, there's a fiduciary duty. No, it's not even remotely like what people claim.
Hero? (Score:2)
Remember John Szaszvari! (Score:3)
All ye who would piss and moan about capped network plans: Consider how much of your unlimited internet plan's cost would be subsidizing some stoner's gigantic Simpsons hoard. Hint: It's bigger than yours.
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Begs the question... (Score:5, Interesting)
From the article...
And then the downloads began: 14 seasons of MythBusters; 24 seasons of The Simpsons; the entire Wikipedia database; Microsoft software for his job; updates for his Xbox games; and "a lot of random other stuff". He also synced all his Spotify playlists offline..."It's always movie/TV night at my house at the moment."
With all that binge-watching, when does he ever has any time to do his job?
Re:Begs the question... (Score:5, Funny)
His job is posting pro Msft comments on Slashdot...
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With all that binge-watching, when does he ever has any time to do his job?
What makes downloading = watching?
He said it himself. "It's always movie/TV night at my house at the moment". Maybe he does his job during the day.
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In keeping with your lack of user ID you seem to have no idea what you're talking about.
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I think most programmers actually like silence or very specify types of music at low volume.
I am not sure how someone could concentrate with video and human dialog playing in front of them unless it was completely tuned out and ignored... but then what is the point?
That said, I have somewhat learned to live with the TV on in the background since my computer is in the living room. I would not call myself a programmer, but I have written some complex Perl and PowerShell scripts... and I find it much harder to
11.6 MBps over 3G ??? (Score:2)
Do the math: this works out to an average of 11.6 Mbytes/s . Just about the same as a saturated 100baseT. He must have used a fleet of [cloned/family] devices, each on good towers.
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This is doable on LTE.
Re:11.6 MBps over 3G ??? (Score:4, Insightful)
Which is why every time they roll out new networking technology and tell us a) how awesome it is, and b) that we should splash out on a new phone to use it ... that I have no choice but to think "yeah, sure, in theory, but you'll never upgrade your system to allow anything like the demo".
Every time they tell us how awesome the network is, how fast it will be, and all of the cool things we'll be able to do with it, they then turn around and say "but you can't really use it because if everybody did that the network would collapse".
This stuff is pure marketing lies. They're never going to give you even a fraction of what the marketing campaign about how awesome it is tells you you're going to get.
If they showed you what you'd really be getting, they'd be advertising a Ferrari, and giving you a Ford Pinto. It's all lies. I just have no idea how such blatantly false advertising is even legal.
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Every time they tell us how awesome the network is, how fast it will be, and all of the cool things we'll be able to do with it, they then turn around and say "but you can't really use it because if everybody did that the network would collapse".
This stuff is pure marketing lies. They're never going to give you even a fraction of what the marketing campaign about how awesome it is tells you you're going to get.
Except we have no problem getting the advertised speeds, so FUD much? Yeah it's got a limited download capacity but faster is still faster, and not waiting for a page to load is a shitload better than waiting for a page to load.
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Well, except it's not FUD. It's fact.
What they fail to tell you is they have no intention of letting you use those speeds for anything more than a trivial amount of data.
The ad campaign is always "look at all the super awesome stuff you'll be able to to", and the fine print basically says "well, you can only do a little of that before we change our minds and restrict it".
They say "wow, you can totally stream 4K movies" or whatever the lie is this week, followed by "well, streaming on 4K movie will go over
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What they fail to tell you
They don't fail to tell me anything. The listed speeds as well as the data caps are listed in the advertisements in full. No one lists anything as unlimited here. Also no one lists things you're not able to do because we have a consumer watchdog which ensure that companies are punished for misleading advertising.
They tell you how much faster downloads are when talking about speed.
They tell you how much more you can download when talking about caps.
They tell you you can stream movies from select services whi
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If they showed you what you'd really be getting, they'd be advertising a Ferrari, and giving you a Ford Pinto. It's all lies. I just have no idea how such blatantly false advertising is even legal.
More like a leasing service where you get a Ferrari but only 1 hour per day. Which would actually be a great deal. If it actually worked out that a number of people didn't have to commute at the exact same time and each of you could commute to work in a Ferrari for the price of owning a Ford Pinto.
Network Bandwidth is such that it is beneficial to have extremely high speed in bursts with caps. Imagine the scenario where you want to watch a Movie. It is 5GB and you can't stream it. You either have to
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With proper scheduling, you can fairly distribute bandwidth on a millisecond basis. Why not let "hogs" makes use of idle bandwidth?
Because then everybody would be hogging, and there would be no idle bandwidth left.
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He must have used a fleet of [cloned/family] devices, each on good towers.
Or just one LTE-A connection which according to the article he has. I'm not sure about you but at the moment I've got 1 bar signal strength and I've no problem getting getting over 100Mbps.
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Nope - single phone tethered to his laptop apparently. He was using Telstra's 4GX network which can easily give in the range of 200-300 Mbps downstream if you're close-ish to a tower. So averaging 11.6 MB/s is perfectly doable.
Here's another article with some more info on this guy and some speedtests etc: http://www.canberratimes.com.a... [canberratimes.com.au]
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Do the math: this works out to an average of 11.6 Mbytes/s .
Industry-standard best practice when talking about networking throughput:
Use bit-oriented units of measure, such as Mbps, Mbits/s, Gbps, etc.
Permissible, non-standard practice when talking to everyday Joes:
Use byte-oriented units of measure, such as MB/s, GB/s, etc.
Unacceptable practice to any sane person anywhere:
Watch the world burn as you use the lowercase "b" that's reserved for bits, which is what everyone is expecting when talking about networking, while actually spelling out bytes.
I went to the effo
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Rereading my comment, I came across like a jackass and would like to apologize. My comment was meant to be thoroughly tongue-in-cheek, but as I read it again, I have no idea what I was thinking, since my comment doesn't convey that intent at all. Again, I apologize.
994GB of Horse Porn (Score:2, Funny)
994GB.
neigh!
Porn? (Score:1)
That's a lot of porn.
It is called Pareto principle (Score:4, Interesting)
1. Download the list of users.
2. Sort by the usage
3. Select the top user
For the selected user publicly start shaming, start puffing cheeks and rolling eyes.
Well, that is statistics... You will always have a percentile that uses more service than others. The question is why this is a surprise.
Mr Vilfredo Pareto discovered this phenomena 120 years ago.
Re:It is called Pareto principle (Score:5, Funny)
Mr Vilfredo Pareto discovered this phenomena 120 years ago.
This was all the more impressive considering the limited 4G coverage at the time.
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TIL another name for the "80-20 rule"
Instead of real downloads... (Score:3)
He should have had a way to just pump /dev/random across the cellular network and into /dev/null on the receiving side.
His mistake was actually downloading real data instead of just trying to see how much crap he could push through the network.
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He should have had a way to just pump /dev/random across the cellular network and into /dev/null on the receiving side.
Which is why plans have caps.
Re:Instead of real downloads... (Score:4, Insightful)
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/dev/random slows way way down after a few megabits when it runs out of seeded random numbers pulled from mouse movements or whatever. Been a while since I read up on it. /dev/zero is much much faster for filling up hard drives et cetera.
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/dev/random slows way way down after a few megabits
That's why there is /dev/urandom. It uses a lot of CPU though. On my system, /dev/urandom to /dev/null runs at 21MB/sec, whereas /dev/zero runs at 7GB/sec.
Japanese Man eats 59 hotdogs in one day (Score:5, Funny)
World amazed by new record.
"I never thought he would do it," said one spectator.
"I came here thinking I would win, and then this happened," said a contestant, followed by several expletives.
"You've gotta respect that," explained one of the judges.
"I agree. This is big important news," said a Slashdot editor.
The unrelenting march of technological progress (Score:5, Interesting)
This 1 TB/day threshold rang a bell as I remembered a BSD trumpeting a similar record, albeit in the opposite direction, in the late 1990s... and sure enough, Slashdot covered it back then:
Wcarchive Does 1.39tb In 24 Hours [slashdot.org]
Back then people had serious discussions about what sort of storage controller, network interface, and upstream connectivity was needed to achieve this result. Nowadays we can stuff that same performance in a trouser pocket. What an age to live in.
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Awesome find!
RIP, Walnut Creek. Loved picking up CD-ROMs of the archive at Micro Center when my download speed was 50Kbps...
What a pig (Score:2, Insightful)
Balancing act (Score:1)
Marketers have a dilemma. Advertising "unlimited data" is simple and enticing as a sales pitch. However, a small percentage of customers WILL take full advantage of it.
If the marketers counter that by stating limits and disclaimers, which they have to do if they don't want to be sued, then they get less sales because the conditions and disclaimers scare away a fair amount of customers.
They are trying to decide if having more customers is worth living with a few bad apples (from their perspective) who run up
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For consumer products that often backfires in practice because too many will test the limit and the legal system tends to favor consumers under vagueness (at least outside of Texas). It's better to spell it out, and not call it "unlimited" unless it really is.
Stargate Atlantis needs to come back! (Score:2)
Stargate Atlantis needs to come back!
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I am an avid sci-fi fan (books mostly) and have always meant to watch SG but never have.
I know that there are hundreds of episodes of untapped sci-fi if I ever get really bored.
It's like my emergency escape pod... just sitting there waiting... but if I watch it, I lose the safety net.
...and "a lot of random other stuff" (Score:1)
That's a lot of porn!
This is why caps cannot be justified. (Score:2)
They're just another money-grab promoted under the name of "decency" and "fairness".
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Maybe a just a lot of pr0n.....?
Re: Let me guess (Score:2, Funny)
4K porn should die. The lower resolutions smoothed out those little skin imperfections. Now every wrinkle is a canyon. And 60 fps? What's wrong with Reverse Cowgirl Anal at 30 fps?
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What's wrong with Reverse Cowgirl Anal at 30 fps?
Looks crappy in slow motion. Also VSync :)
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Or just one LTE-A phone. Telstra's network supports Cat 6 LTE (300Mbps)
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Trivial on LTE-A. Telstra has a theoretical maximum of 300Mbps, Optus has 180Mbps.
Maths? (Score:2)
1 terabyte in 24 hours comes to 41.6 gigabytes an hour.
Is this AT&T billing rules?
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Which comes to over 10 MB per second.
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Yep, that sounds about right. Telstra's 4GX network (which this guy used) regularly gives in the range of 200-300 Mbps downstream if you're close-ish to a tower. 10 MB/s average is quite doable on this network.
Australia's wired broadband isn't particularly great by global standards, but it does have some of the best/fastest wireless out there.
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Are you sure that's MB and not Mb?
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Take one terabyte per day and divide by 86,400 seconds per day. It's a little over 10 MB per second.
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Looks like it would have been roughly $10,000 AUD otherwise. (about $7500 USD)
It would take me about 12 days to hit that amount on the cellular here maxed out 24hr/day.