Does anyone here have an Internet Cap? If so, what's the cap?

[dj-gabriele]

ISP's to choose from in your part of Italy

With the liberalization of telephone companies most the ISP are nationwide.
Here in Bologna you can have the same phone company as in Apulia or in Piedmont, the only difference is that in small centers the line is leased from the ex-national monopolist Telecom Italia, while in the big cities major companies place their own landlines. As an example I have Infostrada (Wind Group/Orascom) and they installed their own new line when I requested the telephone, at my parents, the line was posed by Telecom and now we have teleTu (part of Vodafone, voted the wost phone company in Italy!)
Also if you have Telecom you can have any internet provider you like as the ADSL service is sold separately from the telephone one but it's common to have the same operator for phone and data. Also you can have a single data line with no phone capabilities at a slightly reduced price.

The downside is that compared to the other European countries the services here are both slower and more expensive!
As a comparison in Spain, for the same price I have 8MB/1MB ADSL and unlimited national landline calls they have 20 or 24MB ADSL and free phone calls to landlines all over Western Europe. Even better in France, for the same price a friend of mine has all that plus IPTV.

 

[mark_wpduet]

I have something through Windstream (the local land line phone company here) called GreenStreak 6mbps for 46.99/month. Basically, you have their DSL (but you DON'T have to pay for phone service), yet you have a land line phone that can receive unlimited incoming calls, dial 800#'s or 911, and you CAN make phone calls, but each outgoing call (whether local or LD) will cost 10¢ per min. (Basically it's like a pay phone). I never use that phone to make outgoing calls.

The land line phone company here in Lexington used to be GTE, then it went to Verizon...Then Alltel.....And finally Windstream

 

[passatdoc]

A neighbor of mine is "temporarily" (12-18 months) house-sitting a house that is undergoing renovation on the other side of town. Since the owner of that house needs to complete these renovations before house can be sold or rented (prior renters trashed the house during a ten year occupancy), he didn't want the house to look empty or abandoned. He offered my neighbor a free place to live for 18 months, and my neighbor was able to rent his own home for nearly twice his mortgage payment.

He has a cell phone, needs internet, and did not want to establish a landline, particularly in a home where he will spend only 18 months max. He was able to get DSL service via ATT for about $26, slowest speed they offer (like 1.5 or 3 mbs down), no land line service, and he's not required to have a land line account with them. I think they are finally getting the idea that some folks want internet via DSL but not a land line.

On a side note, you may have read about Southern California's blackout last week, affecting about five million people served by San Diego Gas and Electric. This area runs from southern Orange County to all of San Diego and Imperial Counties, up to the AZ border. I have kept my land line because of Cox's bundle discount. If you have any form of internet and tv service from them, they take $8 off your phone bill, so a line that might cost $24 elsewhere is $16/month.

Many people just keep the land line for only $16/month. In my case, it helps me get by with only 450 day mins/month on my mobile phone (note to readers outside North America: we pay minutes to call AND to receive), since I can make local calls from the land line and not use up mobile minutes. Also, I have a home fax (HP all in one printer) that uses the same line.

However, during the blackout, I noticed that the land line went out of service, so I am guessing that Cox's phone lines depend on outside electricity connections and do not work in a failure as ATT's do (at my office, we have a stand alone fax line that can be outfitted with a standard phone in an emergency and that line works off telephone company power). So it challenges the conventional belief that you should have one land line in the event of an emergency. Apparently, while my land line has other benefits (lets me use a fax, helps me make free local and toll-free calls to conserve mobile minutes), it apparently does not operate in a power failure.

 

[gizmo]

we have no adsl where I live, so my options are satellite or wireless.

We had satellite but it cost $44 for 6Gb a month at 512kbps download/256 upload.

The satellite dish electronics died and was going to cost over $2000 to fix so we canned it and went to the Telstra Bigpond wireless, which uses mobile phone tower. (very new in our area).

It now costs us $49.95 per month for 7 Gb a month at 2.8 Mbps. That is a discounted rate as it is bundled with home phone.

Yeah, expensive.

 

[passatdoc]

low and behold

I received an e-mail from Cox yesterday to announce that their account management website now includes data usage information. For last month I used a whopping 8 GB of information. The e-mail said there is no formal cap, but that people using egregiously large amounts of bandwidth would be warned.

I have a question: when you stream a movie via Netflix at highest resolution, how much data does that use??

 

[whirlcool]

I use Clear Communications and they sent out an e-mail a couple of months ago saying that they will randomly select individuals that use a lot of bandwidth and slow their speed down for the next month or so until their bandwidth usage returns to normal. They did not specify where the limit is. I called to ask and they told me that 98% of their users need not worry about this.
I still get 7 or 8MPS.

 

[mark_wpduet]

This is a quote from a site speaking of the AT&T 150 gig ban

If you watch a movie like Moulin Rouge in HD, you’re going to use around 3.5 GB of data. A single episode of Weeds equals about 800 MB when watched in HD. If you were going to use all your 150 GB of AT&T bandwidth to watch HD video from Netflix, you’d only be able to watch about three hours per day — and that’s without doing anything else.