So Elia back in the naruto forums brought up an interesting question that I think could stand to be talked about, for shits and giggles.
What sorts of internet connections (speed, type, constraints) are you using, and how much are ya paying for it?
With more and more people talking about how broadband is becoming ubiquitous, I wonder how much it is the case in a relatively specialized community like the gotwoot forum-following anime fan community.
I'm living on campus at Purdue University right now, and we've got 10 megabits from the wall but are limited to 2 gigs either direction per day (rolling limits, if I download 800 megs in this hour, it'll be there for the next 24 -- and on-campus traffic doesn't count toward those limits). This effectively limits us to a constant stream at something less than 85 megs/hour, or about 24 KB/sec average -- though the fact that we can burst as high as 800ish helps ease that pain a bit. We've got a nifty stats page set up to help users track their bandwidth use, and a really crappy little vb.net app that nobody in their right mind would ever use because it does nothing but queries that hourly-updated webpage to see if you're over the "recommended" limit of 1 gig/day either direction.
In about 6 weeks I'll be living in an apartment "off campus" (even though there's academic buildings to the north, south, and west and an administrative building a block east...). My future roommate already lives there and has cable TV and cable internet in a combo package... the connection is capped to about 450KB/sec download and 32KB/sec upload or so, and I think it's about $85USD/month for the combination digital cable and cable modem service (or if we just wanted the net connection I think $50/month). Our other option would be DSL from Verizon, and our local verizon branch offers a 7.1 mbit down 786kbit up connection for about $110/month, or 1.5 mbit/384 kbit for $50/month (pay twice as much for twice as much, pay the same for half as much, or keep what we've got for what we pay for it now).
So what about everyone else?