Can we please get free downloads Telecom? OS updates are getting HUGE.

Forums › Spark New Zealand (including Skinny and BigPipe) › Can we please get free downloads Telecom? OS updates are getting HUGE.

ahmad

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#80940 6-Apr-2011 13:01

Dear Telecom Broadband,

I have really enjoyed being with your ADSL services and found them to be generally reliable, fast enough, and pricing isn't too bad.

But my caps are being eaten into by the exponential growth in OS update sizes.

Recent Mac OS updates are upwards of 700Mb, and Windows updates seems better but service packs are still in the hundreds of Mb.

iOS updates are heading upwards of 300Mb now.

Would it be possible to operate a site that is zero-rated for us to download these huge updates and not affect our caps?

Would it actually cost a lot of money to have such a service? It would be so useful.

Cheers
A. Broadband Customer

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#455898 6-Apr-2011 13:17

Damn, I spent a lot on this car. How about I get free petrol to work and back every day?

ahmad

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#455900 6-Apr-2011 13:19

1080p meter free downloads have been operating since the beginning of the Internet. How much it actually costs I don't know but the fact it is done suggests that it can be done economically. It was a question not a demand. Troll much?

Ragnor

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#455901 6-Apr-2011 13:23

It's possible they zero rate Tivo downloads for example, it's a business decision not to because it would take time and money to setup and result in less revenue.

As with many large companies, Telecom is glacial at innovation in these types of area especially when it affects the bottom line.

nakedmolerat

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#455902 6-Apr-2011 13:24

we need bigger cap not free downloads...

ahmad

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#455903 6-Apr-2011 13:25

Is national data actually costly between Telecom customers homes and Telecom servers? I don't understand how this stuff works. I have an idea that international bandwidth is definitely costly though.

xpd

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#455908 6-Apr-2011 13:37

Everyone wants the end user to be safe and secure with their PC but noone is willing to cover the costs of transporting (downloading) that security (software updates) around.

I do agree with ahmad, some of these software updates now are getting pretty big and/or regular - everyone says Linux is secure, its only secure because theres multiple updates every day for it and a lot of them arent small anymore.

Autopatcher was great for doing upgrades to multiple machines but MS put an end to that - download once, install many.

XPD / Gavin

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corksta

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#455911 6-Apr-2011 13:46

Agree with nakedmolerat, increase the caps that's all that's needed.

ahmad

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#455936 6-Apr-2011 14:23

Is it more efficient for an ISP to increase caps or have a NZ server for downloads though?

robbyp

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#455944 6-Apr-2011 14:27

ahmad: Dear Telecom Broadband,

I have really enjoyed being with your ADSL services and found them to be generally reliable, fast enough, and pricing isn't too bad.

But my caps are being eaten into by the exponential growth in OS update sizes.

Recent Mac OS updates are upwards of 700Mb, and Windows updates seems better but service packs are still in the hundreds of Mb.

iOS updates are heading upwards of 300Mb now.

Would it be possible to operate a site that is zero-rated for us to download these huge updates and not affect our caps?

Would it actually cost a lot of money to have such a service? It would be so useful.

Cheers

A. Broadband Customer

That seems to be the problem with apple software such as ios. Instead of only downloading the updated parts of the software/patches, like what microsoft does, you are instead redownloading the entire OS each time an update comes out, which is a stupid waste of bandwidth, and potentially energy too. You should probably be complaining to apple, as that isn't really an isp issue.

corksta

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#455952 6-Apr-2011 14:35

ahmad: Is it more efficient for an ISP to increase caps or have a NZ server for downloads though?

Seeing as there's so many iPhone users are the iOS updates cached or does each download from each user come from Apple? I genuinely have no idea or how Telecom/other ISPs decide what is cached and for how long.

timmmay

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#455953 6-Apr-2011 14:37

These updates must be cached on a server somewhere, or there may be a dedicated update server inside Telecom to serve windows updates, so there shouldn't be much of a cost in it. Zero rating it sounds like a nice thing to do. Treating it like any other traffic is also reasonable.

My download cap (on TC) is big enough this doesn't matter.

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trig42

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#455965 6-Apr-2011 14:53

It is a pain if you have lots of devices that need updating. Doesn't iTunes download the update once and the next iDevice that plugs in and needs that update gets it locally? It wouldn't surprise me if it didn't. but we have 3 iPhones in our house and one iPod Touch, downloading their updates would take a big chunk.

Same with Windows Updates - I have 3 Windows PCs all doing their automatic thing. I don't worry about it, but if you had a small cap and lots of PCs (not that that would be sensible) then you could easily blow it with updates. When I used to have a small net cafe (15 stations) I ran a squid proxy server which cached windows updates - nice and fast and bandwidth efficient - also really good when I built a new PC and applied updates - they downloaded instantly straight from Squid. I don't know how easy it would be for Telecom (or any others) to zero-rate the updates as you can't easily tell Windows where to get it's updates from.

openmedia

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#455970 6-Apr-2011 15:01

I have to agree, and not just for Telecom. I'd like to see the big ISPs provide uncapped access to local mirrors for key OS updates including Apple, Windows, Fedora, Ubuntu etc.

Generally known online as OpenMedia, now working for Red Hat APAC as a Technology Evangelist and Portfolio Architect. Still playing with MythTV and digital media on the side.

l43a2

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#455992 6-Apr-2011 15:32

some off peak free downloads would be nice :P for "OS" updates...

davidcole

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#455995 6-Apr-2011 15:42

If telecom had the cache servers for "torrents"when big time was around/ where the first person was really slow and then others not so much, then surely the hardware for hosting patches/os updates etc such as this already exists?

Yes it would be nice if these were 0 rated.

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