It seems that previous MeFi post heralding The Year of Net Neutrality may have been frighteningly accurate. Between the recent CRTC and the FCC filings on Bell's illegal throttling practices in Canada, and FCC ruling against Comcast to "Stop Blocking Internet Traffic" in the USA, it seems the issue is finally sparking action, and we may be seeing much more to come. For those interested, there is an open-source documentary called Human Lobotomy which discusses the way this issue weighs on freedom of press and freedom of speech, and also an activist blog, Save the Internet which promises to stay abreast of the issue.
posted on Aug 8, 2008 - View this thread

Timewarner has set a precedent by creating tiered internet use that is capped at certain levels. Pricing will be about $29.95 per month for a 5 GB monthly cap to $54.90 per month for a 40 GB cap.
posted on Jun 4, 2008 - View this thread

ADMIX COCKADE SIGNATION EXPERTS SEPTUAGINT
posted on Nov 17, 2007 - View this thread

Shooting the Messenger (PDF). A new report from Free Press "dispels the many myths manufactured by the telecommunications industry to excuse America's poor broadband performance compared to the rest of the world."
posted on Jul 19, 2007 - View this thread

Coral: The NYU Distribution Network "Are you tired of clicking on some link from a web portal, only to find that the website is temporarily off-line because thousands or millions of other users are also trying to access it? Does your network have a really low-bandwidth connection, such that everyone, even accessing the same web pages, suffers from slow downloads? Have you ever run a website, only to find that suddenly you get hit with a spike of thousands of requests, overloading your server and possibly causing high monthly bills? If so, Coral might be your free solution for these problems!"
posted on Sep 6, 2004 - View this thread

How many cats does it take to screw in a light bulb? Anything to help the cause of Infinite Bandwidth Everywhere for Free... via WebMonkey
posted on May 13, 2003 - View this thread

The Open Directory Project bans TNL.net Tristan Louis's web site can no longer be used to access the Open Directory. Why? apparently they can't handle the traffic, so they banned links coming from his pages in the early afternoon.
posted on Jan 17, 2003 - View this thread

Canadian high speed ISP's are putting caps on downloads/uploads. Could this spell the beginning of the end of P2P? The "basic" DSL package offered by Bell Canada will now give users 5 gigs up and 5 gigs down. For the average user, this is more than they'll ever use for e-mail, surfing, etc. But for users downloading movies and warez, it could be the end for them unless they're willing to cough up $7.95 CDN / gig - and most won't. Cable modem subscribers in Ontario will also be seeing a similar plan put into place in the next several months.
posted on May 26, 2002 - View this thread

Who caused the great flood?
Yesterday, Ernie posted a notice that Steve from Blue's Clues was leaving to become a rock star. Now Steve's web site seems to be down for bandwidth overages. They might be unrelated; still, it raises important questions about the possibility of accidentally overloading someone else's server. Where do burdens lie in this scenario? Does anyone have a historical perspective on this sort of situation? =]
posted on Apr 30, 2002 - View this thread

Time Warner/AOL to charge more for cable bandwidth hogs. No idea exactly what the bandwidth limits will be, but, according to this article, a tiered pricing structure is in the works. Grrr...
posted on Apr 10, 2002 - View this thread

The b3ta server appeal is a desperate attempt by the viral entertainment geniuses at b3ta to stay alive... Almost every seriously connected person has seen one of their flash projects - from Buffy's swearnig keyboard, Cursor Love Bunny and The Cat Game and they've worked with (and helped support) rathergood.com's Joel Veitch in his work - most of us have seen Frightened Boy. And if you need any more proof that they need to be saved, then this should do the job.
posted on Mar 21, 2002 - View this thread

Dump broadband? *gasp* Well, according to this ZDNet article, it's a movement. With price hikes and a souring economy, some people can't justify the cost. Could you let it go?
posted on Nov 7, 2001 - View this thread

Animated GIF's are good for something. PhotoDude's answer to the image and bandwidth theft double whammy. Got a smile out of me.
posted on Jul 17, 2001 - View this thread

The amazing saga of Nosepilot continues -- Discussed here previously, the story behind the story of nosepilot is nearly as compelling as the animation itself. It has everything: Flash, viral content, independent authoring, bad customer service, how web hosts suck, hack threats, falsified documents, and more.
posted on Jun 13, 2001 - View this thread

How to conserve Metafilter bandwidth: I'm sure you're noticing that MeFi's running slow today. Matt posted in Metatalk that he's running it off his DSL line. In the same post, he asked that people try to limit their front page views to three days or under. If you're new here, here's how you limit the views: Go here. Scroll down to "number of days on front page." The default is seven; I've set mine, as suggested, to two. After you've set that number, don't forget to scroll to the bottom of the page and click on "change your preferences." Now you're done! Kaycee fans, if you're not using IE as your browser, or have collapsed the right-hand sidebar, there's also a call to keep Kaycee discussion over at the Yahoo newsgroup. Cheers to Matt for going to all of this trouble. * Thank you, Matt! *
posted on May 25, 2001 - View this thread

The aforementioned "unlimted bandwidth" has very recently become quite limited. What happened?
posted on Apr 25, 2001 - View this thread

The Martian Internet
This is a cover-eyes-and-post post: NASA has made it a goal to improve telecommunications in deep space. This is good since I would hate to get up to my lunar base, and not be able to check e-mail. For a while, it will probably be Arpanet-level bandwidth. Just when we master this whole optical fatpipe stuff, they redraw the amount of territory an ideal network should cover.
posted on Apr 17, 2001 - View this thread

It has to stop! (via rc3) Someone puts up a website, people like it and come back for more, then they tell their friends - and so on. The problem is, the site becomes popular and prohibitively expensive and a valuable resource either gets put behind a pay per view gate, disappears, or the site owner has to bite the bullet and pay a huge hosting fee. (more inside)
posted on Apr 13, 2001 - View this thread

What hasn't been noted much on the DEN and boo.com closings is the high-bandwidth aspirations both sites trumpeted. No doubt this is why much of Metafilter's readership is privately reveling in these failures. They subtly reinforce the Web's "minimum" ideals -- keeping multimedia to a minimum, minimizing file sizes and download times, letting the minimalist purity of HTML reign supreme. Should this really make us happy, though? I'm a big supporter of fast browsing and markup-language standards, but aren't we missing the point when we secretly root for the bleeding edge to fail?
posted on May 19, 2000 - View this thread

The bandwidth speed test over at MSN seems to be the most accurate one I've used so far. It gave out statistics that are very close to what I expected, and didn't choke just because I'm on a T3. (thanks blogblog)
posted on Jan 13, 2000 - View this thread