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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?"
We hav had download limits here in .au for ages... all our broadband providers limit usage.. I am on a 4GB ADSL Plan.. gives me 4GB/month!
1GB per day would be *very* nice indeed.
I know when a new release of any (insert free OS here) comes out on 3 or 4 CD images I want to download them all at the same time because I'm forking out $60+ US to be able to get all 4 of them in a few hours. Not to mention stream a little porn, web radio, or download just about everything I can from file planet.
Putting a limit on downloading to stop software piracy is the same as duck taping a cracked dam back together. The only thing I can see this benifiting is for the company to fuck over the consumer who has purchased a service. If they can't provide 3 meg/s to every person on the system at the same time with "always on" than maybe they need to re-think their business model.
Quite frankly I'm happy that Radio, DSL, and Cable are now offered in my area, makes things like this virtually impossible because of the tight competition for such a still narrow market.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
It's not going to make me popular, but I'm with NLT on this one. I don't think it's fair for bandwidth hogs to expect 100% capacity 100% of the time. I doubt it's even possible. NTL are merely saying that there comes a point when you're taking the piss.
What pisses me off is the "No VPN" rule. Unless I'm doing something stoopid like tunneling NetBIOS there is no additional overhead.
I think it's perfectly fair to ask customers to limit the NUMBER of IP packet that send and receive. But I think it's totally unfair to restrict what I fill those packets with.
We were forced to deal with these clowns in halls at uni because no other ISP dialup numbers would go through the phone system they installed. A really sweet deal from their point of view, and probably for the uni as well, but it sucked for everyone who had to use it.
NTL are the only ISP I know of that had their own hate site in the form of NTHell. Which they then bought out, employed it's creator and turned it into a customer services forum thing.
Cute, huh?
"If being a geek means being passionate about something, then I pity those who aren't geeks." - Pike65
Comcast bans VPN. Personally banning things that are not a burdon to the network should be illegal, but of course since its a private network, they can do as they please.
I sincerely hope they keep removing things. The internet is something we can bring ourselves. I think its time for the people to be the government as it was always intended and do more like seattlewireless and houstonwireless and those wireless groups in Australia, etc...
I think this "No VPN" policy is tough to enforce. How do they define VPN? VPN traffic is usually encrypted, but so are secure payment sessions. How are they going to discern between those? Does it boil down to "no long encrypted TCP sessions"? What about disguising VPN traffic as downloads or online gaming (by using steganography)?
NTL is a merger of some many local cable companies, and half their departments don't even talk to each other (a friend works there so I've heard how disorganised they are).
This is so much so that someone else I know has managed to get away without having to pay for her cable internet for a while (don't know if it is still going on though). All because they initially bodged the installation and it worked periodically (where they gave her a month free because of this issue), but then it worked fine... so she phoned up each month to complain, and they gave another free month... add to that the account wasn't capped at all, instead of being the usual 512kbps downstream!!!
So you have to wonder why they're in so much debt (at least they have a good infrastructure though).
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
Australia specialises on these things.. standard for ADSL is 3GB/MONTH .. many places are changing to 6GB/month, but still.. 30GB/month would be nice.
:P How much of that 30GB+ is legal? 1GB? 2GB?
Of course, most ISPs don't charge for traffic between midnight and 6am, so their network gets slagged then, but it's not during a peak usage time for most people. And after you hit the limit, most ISPs will rate limit your DSL connection to 56/64/72k for the rest of the 30 day rolling window.
Sorry, but if you're doing more than 30GB of month at home, you're really lucky your ISP isn't just getting so pissed off that they report your downloads to the police
Internet ( P ) Pronunciation Key (ntr-nt)
n.
An interconnected system of networks that connects computers around the world via the TCP/IP protocol.
By definition it connects to computers "around the world"
If you are selling "internet" then you should be able to access whatever is pubically availiable over the "internet". Even if this means my work has publically made a VPN endpoint for me, I should be able to access it.
By restricting my access, you are no longer selling "internet" What you are selling is, well, not "Internet" I'm sorry, I just cannot come up with a term for what they are trying to sell, what word could one use to describe a network restricted to only certain type of activity to certain portions of the "internet". Maybe the word i'm looking for is "Shitter-net?"
So when they claim they are selling "internet" when in fact they are selling "shitter-net" wouldn't they be guilty of misrepresentaion of product or services?
-An american POV.
Here in the World's bottom (New Zealand) my download limit is 1GB per MONTH. It's a serious pain... I can get 8Mbit with ADSL as I live just 300 metres from the local exchange, which means I can use up my entire month's bandwidth in literally a few minutes. Not funny.
Never, ever lose a file again. Ever.
erm aside from needing local authority permision (and usualy a telco licence) to cross a public road with a cable..
as for the "setting up wireless access points and running the whole neighborhood (or country)" check out www.consume.net which aims to do just that.
Service is now sold as "max of 1 GB/day" for a fixed rate.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
From a business perspective, this seems like a smart move. If 10% of the customers are using 90% of the resources (adjust the numbers to your liking), then either reaming that 10% with unbelievable fees or disconnecting them all together is a great way to increase profits. Now, from there, I could guess that the 10% mentioned are the users who run p2p software, and since 99% of the users running p2p software are violating copyright on a fairly regular basis, they can't really complain too loudly.
;)]), but I would bet the majority of broadband users don't know that uncopyrighted content exists on the internet (after all, due to copyright industry lobbying, no new content has come under public domain within the majority of internet users's lifetimes).
;) ) their customers as a group -- they wouldn't have a source of income. Maybe there are 'heavy' and 'light' p2p users, or perhaps 'sharers' and 'leeches'?
Here's what puzzles me: why do most broadband users pay for broadband service, which typically costs more than twice as much as regular POTS service, if not to pirate content on p2p networks? I know there are gamers out there that love the decreased latency, but what percentage of broadband users do they represent? I'm occasionally part of that demographic, but I only know a few other people that fit into that category. Some people like downloading and sharing uncopyrighted content (again, I'm one of those people [project gutenberg is awesome
So, really, I'm at a loss as to why people get broadband. Could it be that people really want web pages to load a split second faster enough to pay more than double price for internet access? If not, then what's going on? Clearly ISPs wouldn't disconnect or overcharge (too much
p2p is broadband''s killer app. Are broadband ISPs killing the killer app?
Maybe it's just that I'm under the weather and my brain's been in a low gear the past few days, but this doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
First, the internet became big and we had the first big gold rush--mom & pop ISPs popping up all over the place. Then the big guys got involved and ran the mom & pop ISPs out of business with broadband. Broadband was full of promises: "high bandwidth! always available, always on!"
Once the mom & pops were dead, the "promise" of broadband was quickly squelched. First to go was the promise of "always available, always on!" For DSL users this meant forced use of PPPoE, a non-standard pushed by Redback Networks. Gone was DHCP. Per-packet charging suddenly had a foot in the door.
Next came the peer-to-peer and online gaming craze. The big corps had no problem shutting down home servers and blocking various standard internet port access. It's not like their subscribers had someplace else they could run to!
So here we are--no unlimited bandwidth, various standard internet ports either shut down or "filtered" (how many of you are aware your outward web browsing is transparently proxied?), and you can't do much of anything with the connection YOU are paying for.
Nice racket, eh?
Right, I'd just like to point out that I'm one of these people.
;)
I'm with NTL. At the minute I'm trying to find the right Linux distro to suit me, and I therefore regularly leave my computer on for extended periods of time to download linux distros. On average I'm only getting through about 800meg (est, but I'm a heavy net user, on net for many hours at a time), roughly per day without linux distros, so fair game to them, but when I go on a Linux grabbing session, I'm breaking 2-3Gb per day. But that might only be for a day or two. Every linux distro I've tried so far DOES NOT want to connect to the net through NTL anyway. It sets up my ethernet card fine, but won't allow any connections out. I'm thinking this is NTL's fault and not mine, but I dunno. So I'm still stuck with WinXP.
I'd rather they put the price up by £5-£10 and let me have my promised 'unlimited' bandwidth, rather than be restricted into calculating how much I can get away with.
Does this include playing games too? Cause I play a helluva lot of those too... and the bandwidth for that adds up...
As for porn... well...
The provision of so-called 'residential' services by broadband providers really disturbs me.
Typically in any area (thinking Europe, UK, Australia - true for US too?) there are only one or two high-speed providers to choose from. They offer two tiers of service: one is with a fixed IP, costing $lots per month and where one is charged by the incoming MB; the other is a residential service with a temporary IP -- that is often forcibly expired, killing connections etc. once or twice a day -- with an affordable cost and a relatively high cap before per-byte charging comes in.
These residential services though don't offer the Internet per se, but some sort of diluted version. No fixed IP means no reliable servers. No home-served content for you! I haven't yet seen a mainstream provider that offers IPv6 addresses; if lack of IPv4 addresses were the only motivation for this IP cycling game, then surely they'd offer a stable IPv6 address. The access agreements further compound the situation, with restrictions such as this 'no VPN', or no web serving, or only one computer on the connection, or no multiple accounts, or so on.
The dynamic IP stuff also means that one is pretty much forced to use an SMTP relay for outgoing mail, as so many sites blacklist known dynamic IP blocks out of hand. T-online here in Germany is about to start charging for their SMTP relay service!
The whole point of course is to extract the maximum amount of money out of the market. These service restrictions aren't there to cover otherwise present costs or the like, they're there to provide a differential betweeen their services, so that the providers can extract more money out of anyone who might possibly want to use the 'net for anything serious.
In the same way that major Telcos dragged their feet with ISDN and the like in the UK and in Australia, pricing it per minute _and_ per byte, and thereby siginificantly delaying the adoption of the 'net by businesses at large, the current practices are also limiting the adoption of the Internet as a tool for anything other than passive content consumption.
If there were a level marketplace for internet services, then the situation probably wouldn't last. But of course this isn't the case when there are $10^8 barriers to entry against an entrenched monopoly or duopoly.
I Posted this on my site yesterday along with an explanation of exactly why this is unreasonable (but then the BBC are never good at keeping up to date with tech news) and have since then received an email from NTl: 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.
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If you combine all the trickles of bandwidth you take for granted on an always-on connection it becomes apparent rather quickly that it's not very hard to exceed 1GB/day.
Right now I'm listening to Digitally Imported at 128kbps. Over a 24 hour period that will eat almost a gig and a half (granted, to be kind to their servers I turn it off when I'm AFK, but I'll still be listening to DI or SomaFM 8-10 hours a day most week days, and potentially much more if I'm on some sort of coding binge). Add in IRC (maybe on multiple networks if you're a junkie or have special interests that have their own IRC networks, ie. GamesNET or Freenode), IM (which can be three or four different sessions if you have friends on all the major networks, thank god for gaim/trillian), a SSH session or two that you leave open for convenience, and fetchmail checking your remote mail server every 10-20 minutes or so and you could be using most of your daily bandwidth allotment on things you're not even actively doing, but that just kind of get taken for granted in the background.
If you're a gamer, Half-Life (which has the stingiest netcode I know of in a game that's still heavily played) will typically use almost 200MB over a 24 hour period. I know some people who almost play it that much, too. Other, newer games easily use 2-3x that much, especially if you tip them off to the fact that you have a broadband connection.
Anyway, it's true that bandwidth isn't free, and I don't even think NTL is doing anything particularly wrong by imposing a cap. I kind of wish Comcast would do it, then maybe all these people who keep their connections pegged at the max all day with file sharing traffic (like my roommates before I asked them to stop) would calm down and I could have a decent connection outside of 3am-8am. My likely small additional usage would be worth a reasonable overage charge to me under these circumstances.
I do think all their subscribers should be given the opportunity to bail from any current contracts without penalty, though, since they signed up for "unlimited usage".
Game... blouses.
The popular VPN systems are easy to identify and block. IIRC, Microsoft's PTPP uses an IP-based protocol for its tunneling that isn't implemented on top of TCP (the IP protocol number is different).
One could always invent their own VPN protocol that rides over normal TCP/IP and where you can configure the server's port. That would get around bans like this.
All I want is a kind word, a warm bed and unlimited power.
I've never understood why ISP's, especially in the U.S., don't follow a pricing model akin to U.S. cable television? I.e., sell a "Basic Broadband" package for one level of bandwidth usage, an "Enhanced Package" for another, etc. You get the point. If the customer goes over their monthly bandwidth limit, send them email and bill them per kilobyte for the excess.
Selling unlimited access to all comers for the same price just encourages people to imagine that an ISP is a public utility and that access to bandwidth is a right.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Well IPSEC for instance has it's own protocols (e.g. not TCP) I believe they're called AH (authentication Header) and ESP (Encapsulating Security Payload or something like that) and they're proto numbers 50 and 51...
True you can do VPN over tcp, but at least in my case, tcp/ip runs (transparently to the user) through IPSEC to the other gateway where it's turned back into IP. Sorta like ICMP is another protocol right? Or maybe I'm all screwed and they're just types, I don't recall, go ahead and correct me one this one.
Sigs pose an operational security risk and help the baddies aggregate data. I guess commenting does too, oops.
So how much bandwidth does 24/7 gaming use?
I sure can spot the difference between a lan game, adsl game and a 56k modem game.
Does that mean that you have to stop gaming after 4 hours?
Just block IP protocol 50 and 51. You'll kill most of the IPSEC VPNs out there. While you're at it, block GRE (ip proto 47) and you should kill PPTP as well. As for the rest of the VPNs that can tunnel IPSEC over TCP or just plain run natively over TCP or UDP I doubt they're going to be able to block it or even recognize it. Infoexpress VTCP/Secure, for instance, uses a single TCP session on any port you want to choose.
In the feedback article it says they are only looking at the monthly report that averages under 1 GB per day. This means you would have to dl more than 1 GB per day for the whole month to violate the limit. I really can't see anyone complaining over that. It is perfectly reasonable.
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I see a lot of people griping saying that nobody could be legally using 1gb a day but thats simply not true.
Take anime fansubs for instance. Some people might find it questionable but most agree that distributing unliscened anime to be legal.
You could easily eat up 1gb a day if you downloaded a few episodes of whatever had been released that day.
Of course that costs the isp a lot of money if it's done during the day so I can certainly understand the reasoning. They can't help the fact that telecos still charge huge amounts of money for bandwith. The real criminal here is that bandwith is just expensive and will continue to be so untill the infastructure is improved.
I am curous as to what they really mean by VPNs anyway. If I commit files to a sourecforge project, or any of my CVS servers about the place, using SSH is that a VPN? or do they mean the M$ VPN product that used to floor boo.com's global network about once per day.. or do they mean any IPSec connection? or PGPNet?
what about people who use SSL to check their email, or in fact any private citizen (or 'subject' as they are here in the UK).
they'll have to tear the SSH out of my cold dead hands.
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Quote from his diary
I'm just thinking how he'd react to "I'm sorry sir, I'm afraid you will have to stop using VPN". I sure wouldn't want to be the one making that call.
T1 is 2 way 1.5Mbit, static ip block etc. You gotta be kidding if you think you can compare that to a consumer (A)DSL or cable hookup.
interesting enough where I work (a national lab) does something similar to this. Due to our local govt only allowing a single cable company (somehow this promoted competition, though it must only work out in the politicians head that gets the kickback) Comcast has/had nearly the entiere broadband market where I am at. As such they royally screw over thier customers (high price, speed caps, blocked ports, etc..). So apparently after enough complaints (need VPN to check e-mail from home) everything goes over non-standard ports. They also use some cisco VPN stuff instead of the "standard" windows stuff (works under linux - a lot of linux users at work).
Bell south is slowly moving out DSL (none of the restrictions, you pay for 24/7 bandwidth - you get it to do with as you please) but they still have a small coverage area, direct tv used to be the only outlet but not any more (went broke, they also had a poor coverage area). It is interesting to note that all the crap they put on thier cable network dissapears in areas bell south adds DSL. I know I for one, the day DSL is available in my area, will drop comcast.
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
I work with VPN a lot, and some users think i'm crazy when I tell them their isp is dropping IP type 50 (we use ESP). "They never told me they didn't allow this!" - Funny thing is, most ISP tech support people have no idea if it's being blocked so they tell them "we don't block anything" and the battle ensues, and of course, the idiots believe their tech support agent over someone who does VPN (and other things) as their job.
I do need "high bandwidth" but that doesn't mean I need to be using it continuously.
I like to be able to listen to the occasional internet radio broadcast while still using my link for browsing etc (not possible over a modem).
I like to get something quickly when I download it.
It's nice when friends come over that they can just hook into my wireless network and use my connection without causing significant congestion on the link.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Here in Australia we pay Telstra $111.45 for 3 gigs a month! That said we can VPN all we like.
In this world turning grey, strikes a chord when I say, there is black, there is white, there is wrong,there is right
Easy. A redhat release. In fact I used to download them to home because my bandwidth at home was so much better than in the office, and the usage didn't impact anyone.
Sure I agree. But in my country, the Internet in general and the last mile in particular are very immature. I'd say they're maybe 4 or 5 years behind America in terms of deployment and cost.
I live in the most expensive city in Thailand (which is in turn a relatively expensive country WRT most of its neighbors), and cops here get paid less than $150 U.S. per month plus bribes. To everybody in the US, think about your friend who's dad was a cop and think about the nice middle-class house he probably lived in. The economies of scale just haven't hit here yet because $60 US per month is astronomical for your average joe. Hell, most don't even have computers yet.
If I were still in the U.S., sure I'd be getting ripped off. But not here. Also, most dialup ISPs here don't even give you an SMTP relay, and of course, due to my location, those ISPs are on every spam RBL on the net. So it's still an improvement, and I'm happy to use it.
If I belonged to that ISP in the UK, sure I'd be upset, but remember not to imbue your idea of the average standard of living on to the rest of the world, because it won't fit.
Those stories you hear about "Asia" aren't about Asia. They are about Japan, and probably only Tokyo. That's like saying you can get 10 Mbit connections in "the Americas." Try waving your ethernet card around in Uruguay and see what they tell you.
Errm, because one is dishing out html/gif/php etc files and the other is potentially downloading ISO's, MP3's Wav's, emails with attachments and a million and one other things, mostly of a larger file size than a web server.
You can't work on the assumption that all people are doing is browsing the web.
I've been with them for 5 years. Never been uphappy with the services they offer until now. I've even praised them up on here before. Apart from them closing down all their shops, reducing staffing numbers on the call desks, digging up the roads in my town for 3 years and forcing me to pay them three separate bills each month they are not bad.
The thing that makes me annoyed is that I first found out about them closing down alt.binaries through a friend. I knew they were on about upgrading their servers at some stage, I knew that they were thinking about charging extra for Usenet access - I filled in an online poll telling them I would consider paying extra. I would of paid if they had given me the option. I will now have to pay for another Usenet service which will only make bandwidth issues worse for them.
I found out about the 1Gb limit from Slashdot. Why have I not had a letter, a phone call, a god-damn-simple-email from them explaining this?
Now I'm one of these people that is connected to a P2P server 24/7. I'm not a leech, I don't download flat out at 600k all the time (impossible on most P2P networks). I am an average user. I get a 1 to 2 films each week and I like to evaluate some new software once or twice a month.
I pay a substantial part of my wages (7% of my gross income) to NTL for ALL my communication and entertainment needs. NTL is in the business of providing me with my needs - they don't do much else. What am I going to do now? Can they afford for me, as an average user, to switch to another provider? Another provider who would be cheaper and offer a higher upload speed as all ADSL providers seem to be doing at the moment. I am not getting the service I was getting last week, I am not getting the service I was getting when Usenet was functioning properly... and I'm still paying the same for it. I sorry but there are some simple sums for me to do as well now, even if I'm unlikely to go over the 1Gb per day limit. You get what you pay for, as the saying goes - or not in the case of NTL.
God damit, they even advertise on billboards about offering rich streaming media. More like poor steaming shit now.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
Not necessarily true. Providers paying for peering links (mostly BGP routes) often have per-megabit-or-gigabit deals, and you hear about them being renegotiated often. Bad blanket statement.
And that's not really the point, is it? The provider advertises 'unlimited use.' Hit dictionary.com and look up the term 'unlimited.' Doesn't jive with '1GB/day limit' does it? It's false advertising. If you don't want me using a connection/service/sushi bar without limit, DO NOT ADVERTISE IT AS SUCH. You send me a letter chastising me for using an unlimited account too much, you'll get a call from me asking you, exactly, what the limits are on an unlimited account.
The providers can suck me. You want customers, but you don't want them using the service. Fuck off. You give me a pipe that goes between 500K-1.5Mb, I'll fill that bad boy up. What I will not do is use a high-capacity service the way you want me to: surfing CNN and checking Hotmail. Not for $50/mo. If it comes down to that, I'll go back to dial-up.
>These 1Mb cable connections are contended 50:1, so even 1GB a day is 5 peoples' share. It's not unreasonable, but people who have been treated to cheap peak bandwidth on the assumption that they won't use it all the time are getting a lesson in how much it costs.
I'm just pointing out, in case JamesO didn't make it clear, even if your line to the Cable company is 1 mbps, the Cable Company probably does not have that much throughput to their upstream provider. All broadband providers oversell for their capacity, on the perfectly accurate assumption that not all of your clients will be using all of their bandwidth at any given time. That's why you get 1 mbps for $50 per month: they're assuming you won't use it. That's a hard assumption for a business to make in these times of Kazaa, DIVX, and shoutcast.
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