Internet sharing

The problem with teaching your mom how to use internet is sharing bandwidth with her. But what's worse is that she does not stop, which makes a gamer very angry!

So it seems that every time my mom streams, Optimum Online caps our bandwidth so that I spike up to 10892ms latency when I'm trying to play with my Warcraft III. It is horrifying to watch my irresponsive hero die, despite my effort to click it back at 500 clicks per second.

She is a stay-home mom so she is either on the internet streaming those HD Chinese videos or talking on the VoIP. Either way, she eats up all the bandwidth. Not only does she stream HD videos, she thinks the videos load slow. So while she waits for the stream to buffer, she goes to talk on the phone or do some household chores. Because we pay for VoIP, she complains that the other end of the phone hears jitter. Maybe if she noticed the effects of streaming, she will stop for a while? Seriously, how can someone possibly stream videos for the whole day?

I prefer her not to stream HD videos, but finding another site to satisfy her streaming addiction is hard. On top of that, I'd have to teach her how to search for the videos, find out the English name of the HKTV series through research, click on the links, and verify that she's a human through CAPTCHA's turing test. Not gonna happen.

Instead of her calling me through the telephone's intercom all the time to teach her how to download her media, I thought of another plan. I figured since all my friends paid $30 for their 3Mbps line from Verizon DSL, I should just fork out $30 a month so I can actually use the internet without having my Shoutcast buffer every 10 seconds and getting dropped from every Warcraft III game. So I went on the Verizon site to check what they have in store for me. I found out that $30/month service is only available to those who already have Verizon phone lines! The 3Mbps service costs $40 by itself. FML!

Optimum Online promised us with unlimited bandwidth but it is apparently capped now. Wiki says,

"After being throttled, there is no notification by Optimum Online other than reduced bandwidth performance. The customer must call Optimum Online to find out what has happened. Only then does Optimum Online inform the customer of the cap and tells its customers that after the fourth incident of throttling, your service will be terminated permanently."

So the initial cause of the bandwidth capping is all because of her excessive streaming. (Great!) At least we know that Optimum Online is smart enough by not terminating our service because they are still making an extra $50 revenue by providing $30 service.

Sharing internet with people in the same household sucks!