Slashdot Mirror
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.
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...
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
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.
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...
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"
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 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.
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.
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.
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