Bandwidth????

To narrow the digital divide you have to educate users.

You know how much your cell phone plan costs, because they tell you that for X pesos you can talk for Y minutes. Easy.

If I use X kilowatt-hours of electricity they will cost Y pesos, and you get it.

Same with water, gas, the phone, even cable: if I pay CLP 16,000 or something like that, I get 50-some channels, 24 hours a day for 1 month.

But what about what you’re charged for bandwidth? How much do people know about what bandwidth means?

The famous 10 Mega

Let’s look at VTR’s famous 10 Mega product, advertised with the slogan: you used to surf, now you fly.

If we’re going to fly, let’s work out how much flight time we get...

The plan consists of

Speed
Download
Upload

10 Mega
10 Mbps
512 Kbps

After
128 kbps*
64 kbps*

using up 5GB

of transfer

Bandwidth is measured in megabits per second**

Simple arithmetic: 5GB is 5120 (5 × 1024) Mbps**, which means that at a speed of 10 Mbps the 5 GB are used up in 512 seconds, that is, 8 minutes and 32 seconds!!! After that the bandwidth drops to 128 Kbps, that is, to ** 1.25% of the initial bandwidth!!**.

Let’s suppose that when they say 5GB they mean 5 gigabytes, which is what gets measured when you have a web host. Then, instead of 5120 Mbps, the 5 GB are 5 × 8 x 1024 = 40960 Mbps, which at 10 Mbps is 4096 seconds, or 1 hour, 8 minutes and 16 seconds :).

All for CLP 39,900 (Chilean pesos, about 73 dollars) a month!!!

The VTR plan for Mi Primer PC offers 128 Kbps for CLP 11,990 (22 dollars), see http://www.vtr.net/promo/mi_pc.htm.

Are the extra CLP 27,910 worth it, for 8 minutes of flight?

Notes:
(*) I’m going to abuse the asterisk too. You don’t always reach 10 Mbps, because it depends on where you browse and on many other factors, so you may be browsing for more than 8 minutes at 10 Mbps, and it may take a good while to use up the 5GB, but it’s the equivalent of owning a ferrari and getting stuck in a traffic jam.

(**) the basic unit of information is the bit, which corresponds to a 0 or a 1. In very simplified terms, 8 bits together form a byte. A letter of the alphabet can be expressed in 1 or 2 bytes (it depends on the language). In an image, 1 point of the image can be expressed in 1, 2, 3 or 4 bytes (it depends on the quality of the image).

1 kilobyte corresponds to 1024 bytes (2 to the 10th).
1 megabyte corresponds to 1024 kilobytes (2 to the 20th bytes)

When we say we have a bandwidth of 10 megabits per second, it means that 10 megabits can be transmitted/received/processed every second. Normally the communications channel has a capacity of 80% (for various technical reasons), which means that 10 megabits per second are roughly equivalent to 1 megabyte per second. 5 Gbits per second would be about 512 megabytes.

A cdrom holds 650 MB on average, about 74 minutes of music.

Suppose you decide to download the contents of a cdrom, for example the ISO image of Ubuntu Linux, or of Knoppix, or even the latest version of windows 2003 service pack 1, using VTR’s famous 10 Mega. Then the first 512 MB will be downloaded in 8 minutes 32 seconds, and the other 138 MB will be downloaded in 1104 seconds, that is, an additional 18 minutes and 24 seconds, for a total time of 26 minutes and 56 seconds.

With my current link, about 640 Kbps, it will take me some 17 minutes and 20 seconds!! And it costs me about CLP 15,000 less.

If the GB means 5 gigabytes, then there’s no comparison, because I can comfortably download some 10 CDs.

The bad part is that the plan as published on the internet always says 5GB, 10MB, and never makes explicit whether those are bits or bytes.

We demand clarity in the labeling of our food, or of the toys our children use. We must demand the same from ISPs: clarity. Will we have to call SERNAC, the consumer protection agency?????

I don’t want to fly under those conditions. I’d rather keep on flying.