Interessante rapporto di Wagner e Felten. "To help prove the bandwidth hog was a mythical creature, Wagner and Felten put out a request for raw data from any ISP would like to participate -- or who wanted to contest their argument. They only got one substantive volunteer, an anonymous "mid size company from North America" selling DSL, but they've issued a new report after thoroughly parsing the data received. In a blog post, Felten notes that the pair took real user data for all customers connected to a single aggregation link and analyzed the network statistics on data consumption -- in five minute time increments -- over a whole day. What they found is that capping ISPs often don't really understand customer usage patterns, and are confusing data consumption (how much data was downloaded over a whole period) and bandwidth usage (how much bandwidth capacity was used at any given point in time). What they discovered is data that runs in stark contrast to a lot of the claims put out there by some familiar, larger ISPs when justifying caps and overages. Among the pair's findings is that the top 1% of data consumers (which they call "very heavy consumers," instead of the already adversarial "hog") account for 20% of the overall consumption. Data consumption for these "very heavy consumers" was 9.6 GB, while the average for all users was 290MB -- roughly equating to data consumption of 288 GB per month and 8.7 GB per month, respectively. Data caps as currently implemented may act as deterrents for all users at all times, but can also spur customers to look for fairer offerings in competitive markets. Looking deeper into the data, they also found that about 61% of very heavy data consumers download 95% of the time or more, but only 5% of those who download at least 95% of the time are very heavy data consumers. While 83% of very heavy data consumers are amongst the top 1% of bandwidth users during at least one five minute time window at peak hours, they only represent 14.3% of said Top 1% of users at those times." <http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/The-Bandwidth-Hog-is-a-Myth-117230> Ciao, Paolo