Hiram, if you aren't sending or receiving any data, there is no bandwidth used by leaving your computer connected.
In fact, @Home *encourges* people to leave their computers on and connected 24 hours a day. They have fewer support problems that way.
The Roadrunner service (competition) uses a "login" program that disconnects after 20 minutes. The reason they do this is that they do not have enough IP addresses to go around. They assign you a new IP address every time you "log-in".
This is inferior to the permanent IP-address setup that @Home has. @Home was thinking ahead, and made an extrodinary deal when they first started up to get a large supply of IP addresses assigned to them.
The problems with dynamic IP:
1. Very inconvenient for video-conferencing, etc. services. There are work-arounds, but they are kludges.
2. You CANNOT use software that works off a timer. If you try to schedule Pointcast, off-line browsers, etc. to update at night (which, you must admit, is being "nicer" to the net than doing it during the day) IT WILL NOT WORK. You could probably set up a macro recorder to login and then run the software to do the update, but most users aren't going to know how to do that. |
