Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

Knowing how many gigabytes a month you’re using can be important if you have a metered internet connection, or your ISP measures your bandwidth and charges you if you go over. I know many Universities in the US have implemented bandwidth-overage charges (which students decry as unfair and stifling) to help combat bittorrent P2P filesharing, which will sap even a wide broadband connection. So, whatever your reason, you may want to see what applications are using bandwidth on your PC. The following instructions are for Windows XP / Vista.

The solution is to download and install NetLimiter 2 Monitor, a free application for bandwidth monitoring. If you like it, and want the ability to shape your internet traffic (limit the bandwidth used per application), you’ll need to pony up and buy the full version. Note that it uses the Win PCAP libraries to capture internet traffic, you may need to install them if you don’t already have them.

The main monitoring tab shows you how much you’ve uploaded and downloaded per application, in real time. For example, in my screenshot I refreshed the firefox tab I was working on, so you see Firefox using 99% of the activity. Steam, a gaming platform from Valve, is always chittering to their servers, so you see a .01 kbs from them.

The statistics tab is where it gets useful, telling me I’ve downloaded 95 GB this month, and uploaded 49 GB. You can also click on an application or time period and get detailed statistics across either of those dimensions. Fantastic!

According to the FCC, the term “broadband” now means 768Kbps, up from the previous definition of 200Kbps. Under the new definition, “basic broadband” defines download speeds between 768Kbps and 1.5Mbps. Other changes in how subscribers are reported includes a breakdown of upload and download speed and additional gradations of speed. News dot COM notes that “ISPs will not have to report the prices they charge, yet.”

For comparison’s sake, an average movie download is 700 MB (5872025600 bits), and would take 8.16 hours to download under the old broadband definition at 200Kbps. However, at the new faster rate of 768Kbps, an American with basic broadband will be able to download a movie in just 2.12 hours.

Broadband reporting is a problem for America, because up till now we could only point to useless studies indicating that 12.5% of internet users are still on 56.6k or worse speeds. Once politicians and the industry realizes how bad broadband penetration in the US really is, we’ll see better internet service and connectivity.

Right now I’m having 15Mb / 2 Mb Verizon FIOS high-speed internet service installed. It’s $49 / mo but available in my new home in Staten Island. Time Warner’s road runner, which I had before, cost me the same after their 6 month introductory price expired, and only offered 7 Mbs down / 384Kbs up. They also had some service issues, occasional downtime, and once they “accidentally” physically disconnected my service.

FIOS is interesting, because it’s fiber optic high speed internet. This means they have to physically send people to your home to string fiber. The guys that are here now are nice, fairly professional guys. They strung black fiber down the hallway, drilled a hole in the upper corner of my studio room for the wire, and then strung and stapled the black wire around the room to where they’re going to connect it to their router-like endpoint. After that they just have to splice the wire they strung into the main system running into this building and I’ll have super fast internet.

Looking around the internet, all I see are glowing reviews:

• “Well I finally had FIOs installed at my house, and let me tell you it is well worth the money!” [src]
• DSL reports has 637 positive reviews to 22 negative, with six month rating of 85% [src]
• “If you can get FIOS, its definitely worth the time and hassle to switch. Dealing with their 800 number can be frustrating, but the service quality is still good.” [src]
• Macworld can’t shut up about how great it is, heh.

The bad reviews are hilariously empty of any real information or complaint, and read like bad trolls:

When it’s working, it’s nice … but right now my 14.4K modem over a noisy tin can string would have better throughput.

In a few minutes when it’s installed I’ll be able to run a speed test for you and let you know if FIOS can, in the short term, deliver the download speed it claims.

Update: It can. Not only does the NYC Speakeasy speed test report 10 Mb/s down and 1.8 Mb/s up, but a popular application like Azureus confirms that you can attain these speeds in real life. Don’t believe? Here’s the proof:

And that’s with a firewall turned on! Niiiice.