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?"
They're going to lose a few customers now who take for granted the fact they can leech at 1Mbit 24/7 and are now throwing the toys out the pram - maybe they'll implement a similar pricing structure to DSL - thank God we're not in Australia w/ BigPond cos their prices are scary!
IMO, this is a blow for the British telecommuters out there. All I know is if Earthlink had the same policy I wouldn't be able to work.
I thought technology was supposed to make our lives easier?
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.
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.
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
Come on, this type of reporting is getting out of hand. It clearly states that this is for residential use only. If you are using it for business why not pay more for it. Youll get better quality for one, since you will be on nodes with other business customers. Minus the occasional code red and nimda probes.
I originally had residential cable service, I then outgrew what it offered and realized the cable company was just using it to 'push' content, not a true internet connection. So I simply found a company that offered the service I wanted, I ended up on a business class DSL line with all the features I need, and none of the side stepping you get from residential accounts.
Basically, my point is that you just look like a moron if you only accept whats presented to you and dont look for options to better fit your circumstances.
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.
I can't imagine really what home user would use a gigabyte per day downstream for... but then again, perhaps there are some who use that much. These users need to wake up to the fact that bandwidth costs money, it is by no means free. When an ISP finds that the bandwidth of their routers, backbone, or outbound links falls short of the demand, they have two choices:
- Increase the capacity of their network and pass the cost on to the customers in the form of higher subscription fees.
- Cap bandwidth usage per subscriber so that the total demand for capacity falls within the capabilities of the infrastructure.
Charging for bandwidth is fair, but I would like to see more flexible subscriber plans. Usually ISPs offer only a few limited home subscriptions with very low caps and limits, and business subscriptions that cost 10 times as much. Usually there is nothing in between. Also... not being allowed to run VPNs or NAT networks stinks. I'm glad my ISP has taken a flexible approach: basically they say "We sell you the connection; as long as you do not resell it, do whatever you want". Webservers, commercial activity, NAT networks, everything is allowed.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
So, does this mean that people can sue companies that advertise using pop-ups for using their limited bandwidth without permission?
Denver Isuzu Suzuki
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
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
1GB per day? Bring it on! Optus gives most people 3GB per month in Australia...
Plus we're only able to log 1GB/day or less of your traffic.
So don't use VPN's and don't use more than a gig/day of traffic.
Thank you.
NTL World Total Information Awareness Division
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.
You're forgetting the simple facts:
1) Service is advertised as "Unlimited" and "Always On"
2) Service is sold as "Unlimited" for a fixed rate.
Now granted, in the TOS there is probably a statement to the effect that NTL is authorized to change the terms of the service agreement at any time.
Of course, and I highly suspect it, I may be talking out of my ass. -oqti
Secondly, there is no way a person could legally download more than 1 gig in a day.
:)
You obviously aren't running Debian unstable and getting daily updates of Gnome, KDE, Mozilla, and OpenOffice.
On the other hand, the reality is that ISPs don't budget for everyone to have their connections maxxed out all the time. The only expect people to use a small fraction of the allotted bandwidth. Doing so allows them to offer generally high speeds, for a relatively low price.
Around here, a T1 connection (1.44 Mb/s) will cost you around $1000CDN per month. Why do these people seem to think that they should be able to get the same service for $29.95/month? Don't they understand WHY T1's cost so much more?
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
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.
Poor frikkin babies. I get 5GB/month aggregate bandwidth on my residential broadband access. They get 1GB/DAY. Quit whining!
------- "From bored to fanboy in 3.8 asian girls" ----------
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.
Service is now sold as "max of 1 GB/day" for a fixed rate.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
* The cap is exactly the same for all 3 tiers of service (128kbps, 600kbps and 1Mbit).
* The prices for these services are £14.99, £24.99 and £34.99 respectivly.
* This is coming from the same ISP that recently did away with most of the binary newsgroups because it was easier than investing in some new hardware to cope with the demand.
NTL's network can't cope with the demand, and that's a fact. Rather than update their network, servers and infrastructure, they find it more cost effective to charge their mostly loyal users the same price for an inferior service. I'm sorry, but that just doesn't wash with me. Broadband is being sent back to the stone-age.
slainfu
"I can't be a terrorist if you're sucking my bum."
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.
Two things:
Firstly, ntl support NAT setups. 1Gb a day for me isn't bad. 1Gb a day between me and my three housemates, with a bit of streaming audio, a bit of movie trailer watching, a bit of game playing, a little bit of Xbox Live (3Mb/min, I am told, that one), keeping four installs of Windows, two of Mandrake and two of Debian up to date... now that looks rather more intrusive. Even keeping a single copy of Win2k in patches can consume gigabytes a month!
I pay for a 1Mb cable modem connection that can saturate my 1Gb limit in under three hours. That doesn't sound like the "unlimited internet" I was sold.
Secondly, this is almost certainly the thin end of the wedge, as many other people with capacity limited broadband around the world have discovered. 1Gb/day now, 750Mb tomorrow, 250Mb next week. After all, no matter how many users you kick off, 80% of bandwidth will always be used by 20% of the users because of the shape of the bell curve. And those 20% of users are always in a minority, and that 80% of bandwidth sure is expensive.
You win again, gravity!
When I was a lad we had to use 300 baud, and sleep in cardboard box on tip.
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?
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.
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
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
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"
My doctor has just told me I need at leas 8 hours of sleep a night. This is totally unfair. What use is existance if you can only use it for two-thirds of the time.
;-j
This is not what I paid for, and I will be writing to my MP. Just because Good is an omnipitent entity it does not give him the right to impose such limits on me.
Do you mind, your karma has just run over my dogma.
One GByte is insane. I would have to really try hard to use up that much in one day legally. One can only download so many Linux distributions per day.
My own connection has an unofficial limit of 5GBytes/month. Per month people! Not per day.
According to ipacsum, I average between 1 and 2GB per month here.
There is a quote about using up your time in 2.5 hours. How often have you ever sustained a 110KB/s download for 2.5 hours every day?
Yes I have downloaded game demos and linux dists but I have never exceeded 5GB in a month. I am a bit of a light user since I don't video conference, listen to net radio, or pirate.
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.
-You may license this sig for only $6.99.
Why not charge people by their usage + some basic overhead.
It would be tough for anyone to complain if they were charged $20/mo plus a dollar a gigabyte downloaded (or whatever is the bandwidth cost for your provider plus some fair markup).
I understand how the broadband companies don't want to raise prices on 90% of the users for the extra cost that 10% of their users incur.
So charge by use. I don't think anyone would argue "No, I shouldn't have to pay more just because I use more." There may be a few people out there that think bandwidth is free and unlimited, but.. well they're dumb.
Imagine paying $40/mo for gas. No matter how much you use. If you drive 4000 miles a month or 40. It doesn't make much sense does it? Bandwidth has cost per gigabyte just like gas has cost per gallon. It's not like 'pirating' software, where there's no additional cost incurred. When you use bandwidth, you are causing a cost to your ISP. You should be responsible for that.
That said, they shouldn't be bothering me with WHAT I do with the bandwidth I pay for.. that stuff bugs the crap out of me..
That's the whole reason behind banning VPNs, etc. They just want to be able to charge you extra for a "business" account. They figure plenty of telecommuters work for large companies who have already afforded sophisticated IT, so they'll have plenty of money to pony up to support their telecommuters. It's not uncommon to see static IP or "business" accounts sell for 2-3 times as much as standard. This really sucks for freelancers and contractors, because it comes right out of their own pockets, not The Corporation's. But if it's any comfort, Earthlink in the US sells static IP accounts for $10-20 more than standard, so they're not as bad as most.
I am curous as to what they really mean by VPNs anyway. If I commit files to a sourecforge project, or any of my CVS servers about the place, using SSH is that a VPN? or do they mean the M$ 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.
I used to have a better sig than this, but I got tired of it
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.
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.
My electricity supply is "always on", that doesn't mean I should be charged the same if I leave all my appliances on all day as someone who doesn't.
If people using more than a gig a day are in a minority then it is they who should have to request special pricing from an ISP. There's no reason a majority of people who fit in some 'normal usage' bracket should subsidise extreme users by default.
To me it makes sense for an ISP to offer a broad range of pricing options to consumers but if an ISP wants to go down the "one size fits all" route then it makes sense for the size and cost to fit the majority of users.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
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.
Quotas and caps are not the answer. What they really need is a flexible and *reasonable* billing system based upon fair usage. The problem is that the pricing is based upon overselling available resources. At any rate, the market is self correcting, it will adjust. In the end, users will flock to the system which makes the most of them happy.
This problem reminds me of the late '80s when the phone companies wanted to charge modem users extra since they couldn't multiplex as many modem signals across the same line as they were using all available bandwidth (miniscule though it was at the time).
-- Good judgement comes with experience. -- Experience comes with bad judgement.
"I just use it to download Red Hat ISO's" is a explanation often heard when ISP's try to get their residential customers to stop abusing their service. Second only to "I only use it to get free, open distributed MP3's"
:
These people seem to download Red hat ISO's 4-6 times a week. Why not just come out and admit that 90% of the time you are downloading copyrighted material ?
The biggest bandwith hogs are
Pirate Software
Pirate Music
Pirate Video
If Red Hat ISO's didn't exist, it'd be OS service patches, or redownloading the virus definitions every 20 minutes being used to justify massive data bills.
No pure residential user in this world can justify 30 gb of data / month. And if you are using it for CVS or streaming video, bite the damn bullet and purchase a Business plan, and claim it on tax. You are ruining it for the true residential customers.
'Always on high speed internet' is not necessarily 'always on high volume internet.'
Get a clue. Quit whining.
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
The bottom line is if your service is xG/time then SELL IT AS SUCH!!!!. The issue is broadband ISP's are trying to sell the "perception" of 24/7 but only delivering a limited product.
Cut the crap and sell what you can deliver....
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...
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
Not at all. Leave a video stream connected to your family (monitor a residence, invalid family member, pet, just keeping in touch). You can suck 30GB/month easily.... Isn't that what "broadband" is for???? If the ISP's are getting into the "judgement" business than they need to advertise the products as such: 1. Browser use only 2. Browser use & e-mail client (no attachments) 3. Browser use & e-mail client (with attachments .5 Meg).
I think you can see where this is going....
They only should be allowed to advertise what they can truely deliver. No more, no less...
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.
It's real simple, if you want to download 1GB per day regularly then PAY FOR IT!
Geeze, why some people get all flustered when a cap is introduced on a low cost service is beyond me. Quit freeloading of other customers and pay for what you use.
An ISP in Australia has just released some unlimited data ADSL plans.
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http://www.ozforces.com/pnews.php?page=resident
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.
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
At first (as a 1Mb NTL customer) I was really rufious, but actually sitting down reading the comments and thinkning about it, it really isn't as bad as it seems. The official line is if you consistently break over 1Gb a day for 3 days or more, you will get a warning. You will not simply get cut off mid download! Now unless your the local warez kiddie running a warez ring on your house your gonna have trouble. I spend hours downloading useless crap, but when I think about the amount of time I spend, during a working week, its so little, get in from work at 6pm, download a little bit, maybe leave something over night. Once every two months download Oracle setup (2Gb) or maybe a new RH release every quarter. This is a crack down on people running a six machine share over a single IP, student types and business' not willing to pay for business rentals. Jeez, at least we haven't got to put up with 4Gb a month, now that is hard!
"I kill you! You no good 56'ing!"
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.
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.