100 GB is a vast amount of usage, enough to download 40 feature length movies, thousands of songs, and to browse the Web for as long as you want. In other words, 100 GB is more than enough for anything other than the kind of extreme usage described above.
Zen are restricting usage to 100Gb because some naughty users are actually using the Internet, and they believe that if they are "extreme users" they must be doing something like constantly downloading movies from illegal sites. A fair assumption. Or is it?
Let's do a quick calculation. Say you work from home and listen to Internet radio while you are working, cooking, playing. The BBC make feeds available in RTSP format for streaming. There are stereo feeds and very good quality, much better than you get over DAB. ~8 hours per day, 5-6 days per week, because a lot of time it's in the background, and you aren't really listening to it. And let's say that you listen to some of the shows with your partner when they get home and you are reading, and doing other things, or even watching Multicasts from the BBC and ITV. So let's say an average of 10 hours per day of legal, streamed content for a household. Ok. Make that 300 hours per month.
How big is a 30 minute radio show from the BBC's RTSP stream?
I know that a typical MP3 is about 1Mb per minute, but it's slightly harder to work out the RTSP feed size. Spooling it to a WAV file gives a staggering 10Mb per minute, which given that a 650Mb CD holds 80 minutes of audio, isn't that big a surprise. But if that's the case, how much bandwidth does that simple streaming internet radio actually take?
300 hours = 18,000 minutes
180,000Mb or 180Gb per month.
Ouch.
Which I only mention because I was thinking of signing up for:
Zen is pleased to be participating in the Multicast Technical trial where the BBC and ITV are testing the technical possibilities of streaming more of their TV Channels via Broadband.
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