You may remember the Halo/NVIDIA movie that was brought to light in the gaming community a few days ago. The initial post was about a camcorder-produced copy of the movie which was shown at the Bungie Fan Fest back in July, and which was hosted on the site of dedicated Halo fan Cannibal Harry. This movie was only known to a small group of Bungie fans until a major PC news site 'discovered' it and posted the information, which spread across the net like wildfire.

As a result, an estimated 100,000 people downloaded the movie, racking up a stunning 4500 gigabytes of bandwidth usage on Cannibal Harry's site. EarthLink, CH's ISP, has issued him a $30,000 bill for the excessive bandwidth usage.

He has summed up the situation in the following post on his website:

Well, my ISP wasn't feeling as charitable as I was. On Wednesday, September 27th, I was charged $5,800 for excess usage fees. No warning, just a nearly six grand bill. I called them to find out what the deal was, and they said that I had had something on the order of 62 gigs worth of traffic for the month of July, hence the huge bill. Now, it gets worse, they calculated the traffic for September, and they say my grand total for this month is running somewhere near $23,600. About an hour later after I came out of my coma, I asked if there was any way to defray the cost. They said I could if I paid them $4,500 dollars by today.

Cannibal Harry's main hang out, Rampancy.net has a thread in the forum following CH's plight against his ISP. He is currently talking to his ISP, trying to negotiate a reduction in the bandwidth bill (and appears to be succeding, although it is still a whopping sum), and a lot of dedicated fans are promising to send him money to help out.

CH's plea for help

Rampancy.net thread

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