ISPs Are Going To Hate Joost

Everton | May 09, 2007 | Comments


I spent the day working at home yesterday and I had Joost (get a Joost invite) running all day.  Even when I wasn’t at my PC or when I was on a conference call Joost was still running in the background.  I’ve only been using Joost for two days and already I’ve been hooked.

Unfortunately, as an employee of an ISP I’m now starting to worry about the impact Joost will have on our bandwidth costs, and it’s one of the first things I will be discussing with the team when I get to work today.  Joost uses up an estimated 350MB/hour, so my session yesterday would have used up around 4GB of bandwidth.  If other users become regular users of Joost or like me just have it running all day in the background in a window, then ISPs could be looking at an extra 100GB of transfer per month/per user.

This could pose problems for broadband users who have a monthly usage cap, as Joost will very quickly use up their allowance.  Even users who have so called unlimited packages could find themselves having to deal with traffic shaping or speed caps because of their usage. For instance Virgin Media M tier users who download more than 350MB between 6 and 10pm will have their speed reduced, and L tier users who download more than 750MB will have their speed restricted i.e. after only 1-2 hours spent on Joost.

If Joost haven’t already started talks with ISPs about what they can do to help, I hope they do soon. One thing Joost can do to help ISPs which will probably help to reduce their own costs is to time sessions out, or to ask users occasionally if they are still there. This would stop any bandwidth being wasted on users who aren’t actually at their PCs anymore or aren’t actually watching the programming.


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About the Author: Everton is based in London and has worked in the internet and mobile space for over ten years now, and before that worked in corporate strategy and consulting. He has a degree in Economics from Cambridge University.He also writes for Windows 7 News, Windows 8 News and One Tip A Day.

  • sKz
    Lucky me, that I'm living in Unlimited internet access country ^^
  • Mr Nobody
    I;m sure your employer would be happy to hear you spend the day installing Joost when you're supposed to be working from home!!!!!!
  • Lol sKz, our cheapest unlimited connection is 256k which means u cant view Joost videos, we have quota options, the cheapest one is 9 gb which means you can only watch joost a few hours, or two day :(
  • @Mr. Nobody my boss reads my blog and I had it running while I was working. I actually work better when there is some background noise, be it the office, music or TV.
  • Session timeouts would probably be the best way to go about it. Maybe it would be a good idea for me stop running Joost in the background. I keep it on for most of the day too.
  • Dan Brickley
    Hi there! Regarding outreach to ISPs, there's a presentation from Joost here:
    http://www.uknof.org.uk/uknof7/MacCarthaigh-Joo... (updated version http://www.stdlib.net/~colmmacc/slides/Joost-ne... ) that might be of interest...
  • I downloaded Joost last night and I'm scared...There are enough things that distract me from what I should be doing without TV on demand.

    Damn you, Joost, and your easy to use service...

    Not looking forward to my next ISP bill either :(
  • Interesting...I probably use up a lot more with Torrents though.
  • Well, they may have to charge more for uncapped internet. There is no other way out for them really. Video content is only going to get more and more popular. And dont think that its only Joost they would have to deal with.
    Streaming vidoes on websites like Veoh, Dailymotion etc also use up fair amount of bandwidth. 3 min clips are often about 20mb. So thats 400mb per hour.

    Anyway, ISPs in India dont have to bother about Joost for sometime. Uncapped connection at anything over 256kbps are atrociously priced.
  • That sure is a lot of bandwidth being eaten down. Joost will never work out here in India, because if you have unlimited accounts, then you have slow speeds, and faster speeds have major bandwidth caps.
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