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UK ISP Imposes Download Limits
Richard_at_work writes "The BBC news site is reporting that NTL have announced it will be imposing 1GB download limits per day for its users. As you can guess, reactions have not been mild :) One thing to note, NTL has said that they will only be persuing persistent offenders, so i guess they understand you cant track your usage to the byte! Also with NTL, they appear to ban the usage of VPNs, citing that their service is for resedential use only. Does this mean I can't email work now?"
Many countries have been living with monthly download caps for a while now. For example, Videotron (the largest cable ISP in Quebec, Canada) limits its users to 10gigabytes/month, which is 1/3 the amount NTL allows. 1GB per day is MORE than enough for anyone, even hardcore warez downloaders (30gb/month!) If someone has to download more than 1GB worth of software/music/etc it is easily possible to schedule your downloads. Even with 15 hours of streamed audio at 128Kbps, someone would only do about ~850megabytes. Stop putting your panties in such a fit for something other people have suffered through and accepted to live with already.
Now the best they could do is to sue for false advertising on "unlimited access". But once the cable company takes it out of the ads... everybody is screwd.
Didn't read the article did you? It's averaged over a month so go ahead and download your distro and porn. Just don't do it every day.
That's the point of limited broadband, as you ask. It's not that customers sit on an always on service they never use, it's that customers sit on an always on service with normal use.
I doubt this move is to stop piracy or anything else except to stop them bleeding cash. It's kind of like flipping the closed sign on your buffet restaurant when the Klumps pull into the parking lot. Not that nice but good business sense, especially when too many of your customers are like that.
I've been staying on top of this right over the weekend (and had a /. story about it rejected 36 hours ago, grrrrr), so for those new to it, some links:
Massive thread on nthellworld.com, a offical ntl gripe site.
Complaint site
Basically, ntl are somewhat losing their nerve. I've exchanged emails with the MD of their home products range who claims to have only found out about this key strategic business decision on Saturday morning; he's either lying or incompetent, I suggest. The biggest gripe amongst the sane posters (barring all the "I pay for 24/7 and I'm going to damn well get it" breast-beating") is that the 128bps, 600kbps and 1024kps services all have the same download limit, making you wonder why you pay for the higher speed service.
It should also be pointed out that, unlike many other ISP's schemes, NTL offer no FTP mirror service with "free" bandwidth and recently started dropping alt.binaries groups from their newsspool, which is in any event so slow as to be unusable. So for big alt.binaries downloads or Linux ISOs, for example, customers are forced to external sites, pushing up ntl's bandwidth.
The biggest fear is that this is the thin end of the wedge. In the last two weeks, ntl have dropped a few warez newsgroups and introduced a fairly generous cap that won't inconvenience too many people. That's all well and good, but many think it won't stop there; once you get the caps in place and the groups erased, you can squeeze them down and down. ntl is desperately short of cash, newly emerged from Chapter 11 protection, and this would appear to be a beancounter-led efficiency drive that is turning into a PR nightmare.
I was part of a similar revolt over a no-servers line in the AUP a few years back (more info) and ntl backed down and clarified their position with a set of clear-cut and sensible rules. Let's hope that happens again.
You win again, gravity!
If you like listening to online radio all day long, a constant 56k stream can quickly add up to your 1gb limit.
FreeSWAN with some patches allows you to wrap the ESP packets inside UDP packets.
Then all you have to do is get around the initial udp/500 IKE stuff.
I assume you could edit the ports that pluto listens on on both ends.
If ISPs blocked udp/500 and protocol 50 and 51, that would stop IPsec based VPNs.
Of course, there's always CIPE, and SSH tunnel, etc.
Get your own free personal location tracker
Did you read even the slashdot story? NTL has said that they will only be persuing persistent offenders - I hope this clears up the fog in your brain a bit ;-)
Cheers!
Ooops. Forgot to select the Plain Old Text option. Sorry. Oh, and I forgot to mention that they've cribbed the text of their T&C update entirely from the BT OpenWound T&Cs.
Here it is with correct formatting:
Dear Sir,
I will be sending an update out within a day or so. I am sorry for the
manner and way this has happened. I learnt of it on Saturday morning and
have been managing it since. Our problems is that there are a few users,
under 1% of our total, that are setting up such heavy usage patterns that it
is affecting the quality of our other 550,000 customers. You may not notice
it, but it is coming through in different localities.
You need not worry. There is no daily cap to speak of, our goal is to
manage the customers who are using the service for consistant and prolonged
periods of time especially around peak hours. This can mean that a few have
set up mini-data centres from which large-scale file sharing is taking
place.
Further clarity will follow, but we truly value your custom and hope that
your fears of restricted service fall away -- our typical customer uses 20X
less capacity than the recommended usage level (and even that level will not
mean you are disconnected or service stopped).
Many Thanks,
Aizad Hussain
PS. I have also copied this email to Bill Goodland, our internet director
who can address some of your specific points.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The overall monthly cost of broadband here doesn't seem to be prohibitively more expensive here than non-broadband internet. I pay $79.95 a month for a 4 gig plan. Previously I was paying $35 a month plus phone costs for unlimited dial up.
Overall I think I get quite a good deal. I have a static IP so I can run my own little web server without hassle. My ISP runs some gaming servers that don't count towards the bandwidth limit and also host copies of Linux ISOs. Only incoming data counts towards the limit (the ISP says they may have a word in extreme cases).
The 4 gig limit is certainly reachable if you consume a lot of "heavy" media. But even then there's enough to download several hours of video a month and have plenty left for general use. If I hit the limit then I get charged 11c a meg which isn't bad if you just use it for mail and web browsing for the rest of the month.
You are right that high bandwidth applications will become more prevelant over time. Hopefully this will be tempered with new technology (eg improved codecs shrinking video further) as well as bandwidth costs being driven down.
Over all the broadband market in Australia seems quite healthy to me. There seems to be enough players to avert a monopoly situation and with ISPs like the one I use offering contract free broadband hopefully there will be enough fluidity to keep competition strong.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
I use Eclipse Internet for ADSL here in the U.K.
Around GBP 25/month buys me a connection to the second fastest ADSL provider in the country.
There is no fixed term contract (I pay month by month), no traffic restrictions, no closed ports and very little downtime. Static IP addresses are standard and more are easy to obtain. In addition, all the usual webspace, mail and news stuff are included in the standard price.
I share the 512kb/s uplink with the three people I live with and two of our neighbours via a 802.11b. Between us we have a number of servers running so pretty much max out our bandwidth all of the time.
I suggest that anyone considering a switch from NTL consider them.
A friend of mine told me that the current system in Portugal of broadband internet, by cable, was beyng looked at with much atention by other countries, which seems true reading this article.
Here is how it works here.
We have two cable ISP's.
- Netcabo gives, per month, a limit of 10 Gigs National and 1 Gig International. Limit means what you get for your monthly fee. After that limit, you pay 2 $ each 100 Megs you download more.~
And they also don't allow VPN.
-Cabovisão gives, per month, a limit of 3 Gigs, be it national or international.
Mate, if you are in Australia, like I am, you'll have to put up with download limits for any pipe thicker than a 56Kbps Dial-up. The typical "Broadband" plan for households have a limit between 1 and 3 GB (depending on the plan) per month (yes you heard right, PER MONTH). Any extra download is charged at an unbelievable 15 cents/MB. The whole thing just sucks - all the ISPs are in collusion (it's an open cartel), there is no competition, and consumers have no choice. The Average UK bradband user is "UltraWideBand" by comparison.
The price of a T1 is artificially high. Has been for quite some time. It's obvious they can provide the same throughput for a small fraction of the cost of a T1 and still make a profit.
Companies ALWAYS gouge when selling "business" services/products. Take a look at what a hospital pays for something as simple as rubber gloves. You'll be amazed.
'Always on high speed internet' is not necessarily 'always on high volume internet.'
Get a clue. Quit whining.
Actually you're wrong. If you look at their website they are still selling the service as "Ulimited" and "Always On".
Of course, and I highly suspect it, I may be talking out of my ass. -oqti
Unlimited nationally, with 1Gb (default, you can get more) limit international. After that, you pay by the MB. Otherwise, I guess we are getting pretty good service...
Not likely... VPN in this case is banned because it would be considered something not for residential use. Banning of SSH for that reason would be harder to justify.
That's still not a valid reason for VPN, IMHO, because the only thing that would be non-residential would be running a VPN server off of your home connection. Running a client to connect your home machine into a VPN, on the other hand, makes more sense. After all, it's great for telecommuters and most of those (a couple years ago I could have said "us") work from home... residential use by definition of the word.
All I want is a kind word, a warm bed and unlimited power.
An ISP in Australia has just released some unlimited data ADSL plans.
i al _dsl_prices
http://www.ozforces.com/pnews.php?page=resident
Redhat is copyrighted. All GPL/BSD/LGPL/MPL/QPL/etc licensed software is. If it wasn't copyrighted, it would be public domain, and no license would apply.
Streaming audio can easily go over that much. Streaming audio and video is something that broadband is explicitly advertised as being capable of doing by ntl and telewest. "Always on" is another popular term in their advertising.
In fact, I prefer they do when necessary, otherwise everybody ends up heavily subsidising a very small group of people.
Actually, it's a lot worse than that. It's more like the investors end up heavily subsidizing a very small group of people, because ISPs that provide "unlimited" bandwidth tend to do so at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars a year. If they don't fix this leak, then noone gets broadband because the company goes out of business.
Think of it this way: you could run an FTP or leech DCC bot 24/7 at a maximum upload speed of 640Kbps. That's 6.75 GB a day and 202 GB a month. If bandwidth is insanely cheap at only $4 a gig retail, then that amounts to an $808 bandwidth bill, and you haven't even touched on downloads. Subtract the $34.95 the customer actually pays, and you're losing $773. Per month. Multiply by 1,000 for the 1% of the customers that are using bandwidth like this at a large DSL or cable provider.
Suddenly you're thinking "wow, ISPs are getting bent over the barrel." It gets better. Between 10 and 20% of broadband customers use more than 20 gigs of bandwidth a month. If you figure that they have to be using less than 8.75 to even break even just in terms of bandwidth, then they're paying twice as much in bandwidth costs as they're getting back in service charges. Oh, and by the way, that doesn't even touch the normal overhead costs like paying for systems administration or even customer service.
I heard from my boss that in 2001, Telus figured that the cost of providing ADSL connections to their residential customers averaged to $55 a month each. Unfortunately, they were selling it at $39.95 at most (so they could compete with Shaw Cable), and they had somewhere around 50,000 residential ADSL customers. Most ISPs are competing like this - bleeding money to gain market share, and the one that dies last gets to raise rates by 3 times (at least in theory).
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
512mb means five hundred and twelve millibits. Big M for mega on Earth, small b for bit.
That was classic intercourse!
It's been clarified a little in this article on The Register. Apparently, NTL "will ONLY contact customers who exceed the daily data limit for three or more days in any consecutive 14-day period". I was concerned that merely downloading a 3xCD image distro of Linux would get me cut-off, but that's not the case. Unless I do that day after day, but that's not going to happen.
Anyhow, it's all a bit academic now, seeing as I've had to move out of an NTL serviced area. I'm waiting to see if BT consider me worthy^H^H^H^H^Hwithin range of an ADSL service.
It costs ntl comparitively peanuts compared to a normal OC3/T3 provider.
Tim
Backup not found: (A)bort (R)etry (P)anic