Regarding ISPs, this is a bit of information about Comcast and what they are doing with respect to capping, metering, and throttling . . .
And the company is spending considerable effort to measure the traffic for each customer, to build a usage meter and create a warning and billing system.
Local traffic congestion measures, where Comcast throttles heavy data users for 15-minute periods when local loops are filling up, will remain in effect, now and into the future, [Comcast executive vice president David L. Cohen] said.
[SOURCE:
Comcast Suspends Data Cap Temporarily, Will Test New Overage Fees (Wired.com, May 2012) ]
And this is Comcast's policy regarding "Real world" types of bandwidth consumption that might be considered too much, hence are subject to network traffic congestion management:
First, the local network must be approaching a congested state for our technique to even look for traffic to manage. Assuming that is the case, customers’ accounts must exceed a certain percentage of their upstream or downstream bandwidth (both currently set at 70%) for longer than a certain period of time, currently set at 15 minutes.
[SOURCE:
Comcast Throttling Skype Calls - Rendering Skype Unusable After 15 Minutes (Skype Community Support Network) ]
This is the link to the full text of "Comcast's Protocol-Agnostic Congestion Management System" disclosed in its "Request for Comments: 6057" to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in December 2010:
"Comcast's Protocol-Agnostic Congestion Management System" (Internet Engineering Task Force [IETF]) The local ISP here in the middle of nowhere does something similar but not nearly so Draconian, where for example I did a quick test this morning at 07:30 CST and the initial download speed was approximately 700 KB/sec, which is mind-boggling fast for downloads here, but when the total gets to approximately 100MB, the download speed drops to approximately 250 KB/sec, which for here is peppy, so it is easy to see that the local ISP is doing network traffic management, but the key difference is that once they throttle the download speed to to 250 KB/sec they leave it alone, and depending on total traffic it can increase, but it also can decrease . . .
[
NOTE: For reference, I have done this test three times and only for a few short time, perhaps 5 to 10 minutes, at which time I cancel the download . . . ]
In fact, I am doing the aforementioned third test as I work on this post, and the local ISP throttling started when the total was approximately 200MB, where now after 5 minutes or so the download speed is approximately 230 KB/sec, which was what I wanted to know, hence I stopped the download . . .
THOUGHTSI fully understand that it can appear to be a bit wacky if not Orwellian to suggest that there is a concerted effort to interfere with the timely dissemination of information, but (a) it is real and (b) it is easily observed . . .
One possibility for a practical solution is to separate the single large file into a set of medium-size files using RAR (a.k.a., WinRAR) or WinZIP, where 350MB to 500MB is a good size, because this is approximately the size of standard definition (SD) movie at the Amazon Prime and the iTunes Store, and none of the ISPs are going to mess with Amazon.com and Apple . . .
An high definition (HD) movie will be in the range of approximate 1 to 1.5 GB, which suggests that this is the practical upper limit, because if people had problems downloading movies it would be front page news and the FCC, FTC, and so forth would
not be happy campers with the ISPs, since among other things there are federal laws, rules, and regulations regarding what colloquially is called "net neutrality", and certain types of throttling and other practices are prohibited by law . . .
WinRAR (rarlab)RAR Expander for the MacWinZIP also does this, and there are free versions of WinZIP and RAR Expander that unpack and combine the separate files, where the original file is put in a folder . . .
WinZIP (WinZip Computing)The logic for splitting the NOTION 4 sampled sounds library into a set of segments approximately 350MB to 500MB each is that this is more likely to keep the overall downloading activity "below the radar", where there will be a bit of throttling, but instead of going from (a) lightning fast to (b) slower than a snail, the download speed will decrease but in a graceful way that maps to both successful completion and pretty good throughput . . .
Lots of FUN! P. S. The nice aspect of RAR (a.k.a., WinRAR) is that each segment is numbered, so the set might be {N4BundledSoundsPart1.rar, N4BundledSoundsPart2.rar, . . . , N4BundledSoundsPart12.rar}, and the strategy is to download all the parts to the same folder, where once all the parts are downloaded you run WinRAR, WinZIP, or RAR Expander (Mac), and it assembles and uncompresses the parts to produce the original file, which includes doing a bit of error-checking and so forth to verify that the parts were correctly downloaded, which essentially makes it like downloading 12 large individual instruments, where this could be part of what one might call the "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" strategy, where the goal is to get Goldilocks a symphonic orchestra, which is fabulous . . .
Fabulous!