Anti-Green ISP Conspiracy Theory?
A bit of background...
In Australia, "Where the women glow and the men plunder", an ISP (Internet Service Provider) generally offers you Internet connection packages with data quota limits. If you are a heavy user, you generally either:
- Consume your quota of data within a month and pay extra to keep downloading and using the Internet, or;
- Consume your quota of data within a month and have your download speed hacked down to something like 64Kb/s.
As a side note, Australian 'wired' broadband ADSL generally caps out at 1.5Mb/s. you can get theoretical 8Mb/s - but unless you living above your local Telecommunications Exchange you will not get too close to that speed, you might average half. Oh we also have ADSL 2+ ... in selected suburbs ... and this offers theoretical 20-25Mb/s ... again, theoretical. High tech.
Anyway! ... To my point.
So *my* Mr. ISP offers both Peak and Off-Peak periods within a day in which you can download data.
- Peak = 12pm to 2am ... 12GB downlaod quota
- Off-peak = 2am to 12pm (*yawn*) ... 60GB download quota
Simply put: with so many people using download software clients like uTorrent with sweet plugins like the download Scheduler... Mr. ISP must get absolutely hammered my customers at 2am when all of their Schedule download programs suddenly come online and download furiously until switching off at 12pm for downtime. I know mine gives them a good run for their money (or my money?).
After thinking very hard about this it suddenly occurred to me how anti-green Mr. ISP is! After every full day of workers, at-home-lay-abouts and online-self-made-celebrities pounding away at their keyboards sucking sweet power from their outlets and into their life sustaining computers - Mr. ISP then has the hide to encourage people to leave their still power-hungry computers running all through the night so that they can download everything they can possibly think of just to avoid coming near their Peak period cap. Never mind also that where people simply *can*, they will.
Therefore, I've decided that Mr. ISP is definitely at fault and should just resort to unlimited download quotas whereby customers will simply not be able to think of anything more to download after a solid week and everything will even itself out.
Computers will finally be able to sleep and the Earth and all it's inhabitants will be saved.
World Peace.
Listen: "Land Down Under" by Men at Work (read lyrics here)
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Anti-Green ISP Conspiracy Theory?
Comments
Steve wrote on 10/17/09 8:08 PM
Thanks for the comment man :)Totally agree it ultimately comes down to the customer. In the end it is the person that is actually lining up the downloads of course. Just thought I'd have some fun with the idea :-D
I know plenty of people that don't understand the concept of data being downloaded/uploaded just to display the page they want. It just *happens*.
freelance web developer wrote on 12/28/09 6:55 AM
I think it's more about balancing the load rather than simply using less. Just like electricity and phones, there is an off-peak time which costs less money. It costs less to entice people to change the time they dry clothes and make calls - because the on-peak time sees too much load.Daylight Saving Time... now there is a true conspiracy for you. It is actually intended to make us use less fuel.
Steve wrote on 12/28/09 11:14 AM
@freelanceha! That's interesting about the DST reasoning! I agree with the load balancing too. Would be interesting to see just how much load ISPs get when the off-peak time starts compared to peak.
zu wrote on 10/16/09 4:41 PM
ineresting post man - never thought of it that way but good point there!If you think about how much power we chew up by doing google searches, watching crap on youtube etc it gets pretty crazy! All those servers churning away non-stop...
Having said that, doen't the ultimate responsibility lay with the consumer? If they care about the environment, they shouldn't try to download the whole internet overnight. I guess it comes down to educating the public about the consiquences of their actions. I think majority of people don't make that connection between doing a search or download as consuming energy from somewhere...the net is a cloud in the sky for the layman.