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  From: John Edwards <isplist@adam.com.au>
  To  : Toby Corkindale <tjcorkin@sa.pracom.com.au>
        <linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au>
  Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 20:14:51 +0930

Re: Telstra Broadband & Multi-Users

>I don't actually have any broadband at home, and cannot get ADSL in
>Prospect. We were going to get BigPond Cable, but then they brought in the
3
>Gb cap. (actually, 2.86 Gb, because telstra say 1 Gb == 1,000 ^ 3, although
>the rest of the internet says 1 Gb == 1024 ^ 3)

Actually, the rest of the Internet (where bytes are metered) tends to use
base 10 accounting. America (the sadly dominant user of the Internet)
couldn't care less, since they're mostly on unlimited usage systems.

Aside from being simpler to work with for people in a base-10 economy,
Telco's traditionally base their data products on multiples of 1000 bits/s,
and since ISP's buy services from these companies it's easier to stick with
the same standard.

In Australia most of our Internet Services have been built on per-megabyte
charging in the past and Telstra have always used base-10 accounting for it,
something that ISP's have been passing onto their customers ever since.

You also can't download 3*1024^3 bytes to your 3 Gigabyte hard drive,
because hard drive manufacturers caught onto the same k/m/gb scam long
before Telstra did. Ever notice that you can't format your 20Gb (base 10)
drive to have 20Gb (base 2) of space on it?

There's also the consideration that k is an abreviation used in science for
1000, not 1024.

Some systems are careful not to use the word 'byte' when showing accounting
data, instead refering to 'octets' of data to avoid (increase?) confusion
between between the two different measurements.

John Edwards


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