Not familiar with your specific agreement so you need to look at whether they distinguish between upload, download.

*Most* folks don't upload that much, but youtube et al might all count as downloads.

bandwidth activity exceeds 2GB per month.
The above sentance is meaningless...these companies bamboozle you with meaningless terms which even they don't understand.

Do they mean GBytes? GBaud? what?
One is an amount of data one is a speed.
You have no control over the speed of the link, only the amount of data you download, which has nothing to do with bandwith.
Don't panic, the whole telecoms industry is bonkers, and the probability of you talking to someone who actually understands what they are talking about is zero.
Del

Thanks for your replies.

Actually my ISP is Bell Canada, they indicated in their monthly statement :

$12 extra charge for " Total Bandwidth Activity Cost" during one month period.

I have a DVR board inside my computer (as surveillances )with a camera connected to it.

I did port forwarding for one port of my router to make it work.

Is that the cause of the extra charge ?

Thanks

I agree with you Del, but when I visited my daughter and family in New Zealand earlier this year I found out that they also charge for bandwidth there too. It seems inane to me, but the charges are frustrating my grandson bigtime because he likes to download videos.

We agreed that the charge system in NZ is nonsensical.

The service I have at home is capped at 20Gbytes a month, and we hit that on a regular basis with 2 teenage girls and one old camel trader. Once we hit the bandwidth cap we get the speed throttled back. Which only annoys the girls.

So 2 Gbytes is nothing, in these days. The things that chew your bandwidth are myspace, facebook, anything you download or torrent be it music, videos, documents and the daily microsoft windows updates. Just about anything you do constitutes as "traffic".

With the ISP I'm with, they have a list of "gratis" services/content we can use which doesn't cost us any bandwidth. Not that you'd be bothered using it, which is why its free.

I have a hub which has local wireless connection, That feeds 4 laptops, and a desktop computer of which 3 will be on at anytime.

I settled on the A$100 20Gbyte cap after making the mistake of being on the wrong plan, A$750.00 a month for internet access was a little expensive.

If you want to keep below 2Gbyte, hmm, only accept text emails, don't surf the net randomly. Don't download or torrent anything. It's a bit harsh but that's the way it is.

Note when your "surfing" just clicking onto a web page with its embedded advertising soaks up a lot of bandwidth, your paying for them to advertise on your computer stuff you don't care to know about. That's how the net makes money.

I'd be evaluating what you use the net for, then find a ISP that will/can deliver what you want, for what you can afford. A 2Gbyte floor is just ridiculous and aimed at gouging.

My threepence worth.

Cheers

Perry

I'm assuming you're talking 2 giga-bytes. Is this broadband or DSL? In either case, you must be moving an awful lot of data across their network, which means your a problem customer because you're keeping them from over-subscribing the line. So you pay the premium for using too much of their pipe and not letting them make more money on it.

they are describing a metered supply, in other words you are allowed 2GB of Internet fluid per month and if you exceed 2GB of fluid you will be charged an excess fluid use fee...

Ouch and I thought ISP's were bad here in the State!! I am hoping there are more isp fish in the sea where you are at. I would call up your current isp and threaten to move to another isp. In today's economic situation, anyone hates to lose business even less than ideal customers. And seriously.. 2 GB of data is pretty damn tiny this day and age, even if you have to go to a sat provider you should have more than a 2 gig limit

dan

I think the 2 GB is not the bandwidth but the downloaded data amount. If you exceed it you have to pay an extra fee and/or your bandwidth (the speed of your connection) will be lowered.

I'm confused about the total bandwidth used.

As far as usage, instant messaging and online gaming (interactive player competition ) take up a lot of monthly usage. You indicated you use a video camera feed. Video streaming is definitely high use. I'd almost guarantee it to be your big problem. You might try to use compression on it, but you'll probably have to limit it to occasional use.There are free tools that will allow you to monitor your bandwidth if you search for them.

Time Warner just gave up ( at least for now ) plans to charge for actual usage because of mass complaints to them and to regulating organizations. It's a constant battle.

I'm certain your video is precisely the culprit eating up your data limit. However, without knowing what kind of image your video contains, any offers for data compression will be speculative at best. While 2GB is a very low amount of data today, particularly for streaming video. Here's just one example. You Tube limits their upload video size to 100MB per file. This means that if you down load a maximum size file from You Tube every day of the month, on the 21 of the month you will exceed your down load limit. But these are not continuous streaming feeds you get from You Tube, like what you implied in another posting. For surveillance video a frequently used compression, H.264, a useful explanation can be found at http://www.sibgonline.com/public/userlisting/wpaper_upload/3285_36_wp.pdf

With this compression a nominal data rate of 1Mbit/s they claim a low latency over telecom. So 2*10^9 byte*8 bit/byte/(1*10^6 bit/sec)=16,000 sec. 16,000 sec/(3600 sec/hr)≈4.4hr. You will consume your data limit in less than one work shift, let alone 30 days.

OK. First, were talking total throughput of data over the billing cycle. ISPs offer different plans (12Mbps, 16Mbps, 50Mbps, and so on). Typically, the lower your bandwidth, the less they'll allow for overall throughput.

So, if your ISP agreement is for 12Mbps or below, 2 giga-bytes of data over a billing cycle isn't all that stingy. They expect you do do some surfing, watching YouTube videos, and downloading some files. However, the way "your" ISP is set up, they're definitely over-subscribing "your" line. In other words, they've put more subscribers on "your" line than would be possible if each subscriber used his/her connection 24/7. They calculate (guesstimate?) how many people will be on line at any given time. Light user contracts with your ISP indicates to them that you (and everyone else) will not be online all THAT often.

However, if you're sucking or spewing data all the time, you're going to screw up their over-subscription strategy, and they can't assign extra over-subscribers to that line. In their minds, this means that you are a customer that should be paying for a bigger piece of the pipe and a plan that the ISP over-subscribes less. In essence, while you may be on the $30.00 per month plan, you're requiring the bandwidth that they offer their $79.00 (or $150.00) per month customers.

So, it's either charge you more for using too much bandwidth per month or they can get the money out of you by offering you a higher-priced plan with higher bandwidth, more total data-flow per month, and fewer subscribers competing for the same resource.

Over-subscription is simply the name-of-the-game in broadband and CMTS.

Hi All

With my company, "Voice.net.au" in South Australia, I opted to reduce the speed when when I exceeded my capacity and I receive the same bill every 3 months. I haven't noticed any change in speed to be honest.

Tony