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New Broadband Capping Techniques?
doublea16 writes "Upon calling my broadband cable company to see why my modem's upstream was so slow as of late, I was told I had been capped due to excessive uploads. When I dug deeper for more details, I was finally told by a manager that any upload in excess of 35 minutes (size of file or type, etc have no bearing) would result in an automatic capping of the user's upstream. The Terms of Service provided are very vague when it comes to their rights to restrict speed. I was wondering if anyone else out there's broadband company had resorted to tactics like this? Is this fair to the consumers or even legal?"
shift providers then...
Fair? Hardly. Legal? Depends on your terms of service, but almost certainly so, due to the weasely nature of most companies.
What to do? Time to go DSL, of course. Not as fast as most cable connections, true, but DSL providers are on the losing end of the Cable vs DSL "war", and tend to provide more services & rights for their higher cost / (usually) slower speed / harder to get service. Hopefully you can _get_ decent DSL service where you are.
A more important question: Is this worth posting on Slashdot to whine about?
Hardly.
(Cliff, what were you thinking? (yes, hit my karma - I don't care))
We _really_ need to be able to moderate the editors.
the limitations that they gave you for bandwidth? It states that there are limitations and that you agree to abide by them, but did they provide them to you?
"All I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power." - Ashleigh Brilliant
Look at Charter Broadband's EULA....it's states that Charter can take action for "excessive bandwidth usage". The EULA doesn't specify what excessive is, but you can bet they'll set it as low as they can get away with.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Up here in Canada we went throu a period where everyone who used more then about 5Gig a month( a lot of people, easy to do ) on DSL provided by Bell moved to other providers when Bell capped people. (Apparently they have taken off the cap now that all the major downloaders are off their network...) And I can understand why... Looking at my usage graphs on my router shows that I have a 30 day max both ways of about 6.25GB and for the past week I have averaged around 5.5GB both ways, with most being more than 3GB/day outgoing...
They want to cap you because bandwidth, while cheap, still costs money, and money is what every business is about. If they can find a way to reduce their costs without significantly reducing their income, they will. Convince a few people to download or upload less and they save money, but usually the customer is still paying the same amount. Some will leave, but that probably saves the company more money to a point. And they can live with the loss of a customer.
Anyway...
On Arrakis: early worm gets the bird. Magister mundi sum!
ISPs buy symmetric links to the Internet, but provide mostly highly asymmetrical service to customers, through the design of cable modem systems and the structuring of DSL.
This technology has always gone against the spirit of the Internet, that every node is a peer, there's no such thing as a "server node" or a "client node" except in the context of a specific connection.
The irony is that while you are being capped to POTS speeds on your upstream, the ISPs outgoing link is probably nailed on the download, and 10-20% usage on the upload (assuming they don't do co-loc or something to balance things out).
I feel this effect particularly badly, being on satellite with up to 1000kbit/sec downloads, and 30-40kbit/sec uploads. Yeah, that's right, slower than a modem. The satellite ISPs have more of an excuse, but not much more.
Just make sure to tell them exactly why you cancelled your service if you do. Tell them you aren't an information consumer, you are a node and a peer on the internet.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Yeah, and you can usually find better deals if you buy them in bulk.
Your ISP probably has metered connections to whatever backbones they use. They pay for excessive traffic. They probably limit downlink speed but don't bother to tell anyone about it. Upload speed is capped to save leased-line money as well, but they're telling you about it to attempt to get you to use even less. Bastards.
Last time I checked, Optimum Online had higher upload and download speeds than most other cable/DSL providers. Did they cap the upload to something normal, like 256 kbit/s, or something actually low (like 64 kbit/s).
Capping by time is pretty stupid - it just encourages people to use more bandwidth, so their transfer will complete quickly. Or to use protocols like BitTorrent, which will use all of your upstream, but could handle connections being dropped every 10 minutes (patching the source to do this would probably be easy).
I wonder how easy it would be to fool this system. One thing that might work: after 20-30 minutes, send a RST packet (or FIN packet, or ICMP error) to the peer using a low TTL, so the other end never sees the packet, but your ISP thinks the connection has closed.
What they're doing here is preventing their customers from operating servers. It's perfectly reasonable that they should want to do this: why should they provide commercial service for consumer prices? Their solution is pretty procrustean though.
Anyway, if you need unlimited uploads, you need a provider that allows it. Might cost more than you're spending now, but that's how business works.
Quick question: what are your upload rates before the 35 minute period? What do they drop to? (Or am I misunderstanding, and they cut off any uploads after 35 minutes? If so, that's much worse.)
Just for another point of reference, I have an AT&T cable modem (though they just switched to comcast).
I get something like 2-3 Mbps download, and the upload is capped to 256 kbps, all the time. I think it takes about 1 second for the upload cap to kick in, assuming the delay is not just my perception and inaccurate progress dialogs.
My terms of service explicitly had that upload rate in it, and it was part of the service I knew I was buying. What do your terms of service say?
That, and midgets, pisses me off, since my ISP tried to pull the same kind of trick on me.
If you pay $50 or whatever per month for a 512 Kbps connection or something close, you are literally paying for 1.8 Gb/hour speed, which at the end of the month comes down to some ungodly bandwidth totals that you've been charged for and paid for. Now, through network blackouts and what not you're only getting partial bandwidth of what you paid for, about 10% if you're lucky.
Isn't that considered a fraud? If I pay the baker to bring me a dozen of doughnuts to my house daily for $5 per dozen, and I pre-pay the $150 per month, I expect the doughnuts to be there. If the baker delivers less than promised dozen/day speed, then I can justify some refunds coming out of his pocket.
So why does the telecom or cable company have the guts to sell you the 512 Kbps connection and then suddenly make it "512 Kbps for the first 6 hours, 64 Kbps for the rest of the month" deal? I'd say contact your state's Attorney General for this, MCI is now being investigated for crap like that, only in telephone market.
I have Time Warner in Chapel Hill, NC and my speed has dropped from a steady 3.1Mbps to 1.7Mbps. You are not alone
The award for the most outrageous bandwidth cap so far must go to BTopenworld, the ISP division of British Telecom.
BT is widely disliked for not providing ADSL in rural areas. Solution? They launched a satellite service costing 900 pounds for installation and then 60 pounds per month subscription. (Why the hell does Slashdot not let me use a pound sign?! Okay we're a small country but we DO still have a currency!)
They waited until they had around a thousand subscribers, the most they were expected to get and all of them locked-in to a 12-month contract, and then they capped the service to near-dial-up level.
They had previously signed-up hundreds of thousands of people to a 24/7 dial-up plan and then capped them to a couple of hours per day. (I was one of them. I cancelled, they continued billing me for five months. It's a year later and I'm still fighting them for the 80 pounds they took. Court looks like the next step.)
And don't get me started on 2-hour cut-offs...
Have you considered getting broadband?
So you decide to play an online game for 35 mins and you get capped? What's the point of the service then?
No pound sign? I'll be damned, you're right. I tried £ (), £ () and just embedding the character directly (). A pound sign of each version should appear in each set of parentheses. I wonder why they're blocking HTML entities. I can understand not allowing one to type the character directly as a character set concern, but why block entities? Heck, looks like I can't even do umlauted vowels: ä (&amul); ouml (ö); ü (). Mumble. Time to check the SoureForge bug list.
You like splinters in your crotch? -Jon Caldara
I meet this girl on irc, and I thought we were hitting it off great. We were talking dirty by the 3 convo, cybering by the 5, then she said you wanna me IRL by the 7th. I thought cool, I'm getting laid....
Well miss thing capped my advances once I was sliding my hand down her pants. I said, "baby, it's just like IRC, the only difference is you get to reach out and touch some one." Then she slapped me. So yeah, I've been capped by broad-band.
=)
Buy a T3, wire up the neighbors with Ethernet. It's every nerd's dream.
...
21. Prohibited Uses of Optimum Online: Subscriber shall comply with all of Cablevision's standards for acceptable use with respect to the Optimum Online Service and the Services and shall refrain from any and all illegal and/or inappropriate activities, including without limitation as outlined in the Acceptable Use Policy.
*SNIP*
In addition to the prohibitions outlined in the Acceptable Use Policy, Residential Optimum Online users may not:
(a) Run any type of server on the system. This includes but is not limited to FTP, IRC, SMTP, POP, HTTP, SOCKS, SQUID, DNS or any multi-user forums;
I think "any type of server" is the relevant phrase, not the amount of upload traffic. This policy was only implimented because of abuse. I'm not sure on all the minor details, but a couple years ago one Jersey neighborhoods connections slowed to a crawl between 5 and 10PM because just about everybody had some sort of server running.
The last I heard, the limit was 4 hours, but they may have changed it since my friend had to call.
My advise, do what you should do, get a real IP service, DSL, or something similar that provides a decent TOS. Will it cost more, of course - after all you get what you pay for
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
Maybe this topic should go in a new discussion, but it's definitely a form of broadband 'capping'.
A Good Intro to NetBS
For a while I lived in the boonies where a dialup line got up to 21K on a _really_ good day, and nothing else was available unless I wanted a dedicated T1 for a couple $Gs/month. DirecPC became available, and I signed up first for one-way, then two-way.
I quickly learned two things: One) Bandwidth is not particularly relevant unless you're downloading big files. Latency is what controls your effective speed for interactive applications (everything except big file downloads) - DPC one-way is about 45ms; DPC two-way is about 800-900 ms on a good day. (For comparison, IIRC a dialup modem will run from 30 ms to 300 ms. I think cable is around 11 ms but I forget.) For most web surfing the effective speed is somewhere between dialup and single ISDN, especially during peak times. Latency varied wildly though, in some cases as high as 10 seconds without a packet. Actually I recorded delays of over a minute several times.
Two) Shortly after I started, DPC unilaterally and without warning instituted their "Fair Access Policy" (FAP). 'Tis true, some folks were abusing the system by essentially downloading nonstop 24x7, or something close to it - probably why my bandwidth sucked! Unfortunately, their software did not have a bandwidth limiter in it, so any big file could trigger the FAP. (IIRC it was 100 MB in 60 minutes.) Once you were FAPped, you got less than 28K for 24 hours - truly egregious since their software had no way to control download of a big file.
Some folks did build 3rd party download limiters to keep you under the cap, and tweakers to improve the TCP performance. The DPC software leaked memory like a sieve, only ran on Windows, so I had to buy a PC just to drive the satellite dish. That brand new PC (not a cheapie) crashed about every two days due to the DPC memory leaks if I didn't restart it daily. That was the only app running on the box most of the time - nobody sat at it, it just routed packets between my LAN and the net.
Service was abysmal - I threatened to sue them twice, once just for failure to meet the terms of the service agreement (I naively thought that 10 minute packet turnaround was insufficient.), and once because due to a glitch in their software I had no service for over a month - plus I spent over 30 hours on the phone with them during a one year period - time taken from billable hours.
Since then moved back to the big city, mostly left consulting and gone back to school, and I'm now on a friend's Comcast cable connection. I was able to D/L the complete Oracle 9i dev version installer without problems - something I was never able to accomplish on DPC. Using DPC I got about 1/2 way there by D/L the package onto a server at my ISP, splitting it into chunks and then using rsync to move a chunk (too small to trigger FAP) at a time. But I got bored with this after a week.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
But where did he say he was running a server on his home system? Maybe he was uploading to USenet. Maybe he runs a web site (hosted somewhere else), and he was uploading files to it. Maybe he was sending a huge email or the mail server was slow. There are plenty of reasons for a 35 minute upload without running a server.
Checking the site I'm not sure that's what these guys do. Clicked on Organisation and got a page full of weird PHB stuff like directors and committees...(shudder)
I feel your pain. All the lines in my apartment complex pass through a MUX that limits modem connections to 14.4. Multilink gives me 28.8 but I can't have more than two lines ($45 a month for the telco service + 40 a month for two accounts with my ISP and dedicated connectivity = more than 90% of slashdotters with home broadband are paying to be online).
Broadband people sure are whiney: "My connection is only twice as fast as 56k! I'm gonna call my lawyer!"
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
That's why it's important to shop around. Where I live, XMission.com (my ISP) has several options. With a DSL account I'm allowed burstable quota of 3 GB/week each way, and DSL has 640k/256k up/down. Other options allow 4 GB/week for $25, or more amounts for fairly cheap. Also, DSL accounts have a fixed IP address, no server restrictions, and no bandwith accounting on Sat/Sun or from midnight to 7 AM.
It really pays to shop around for Internet access. You might have to pay a little bit for a high-quality ISP, but it's well worth the money.
frob
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
> Broadband people sure are whiney: "My connection is only twice as fast as 56k! I'm gonna call my lawyer!"
1) they promised 1.5 down and 256 up for x$/mo - they're in breach of contract if they deliberately provide you less
1a) technically, at least here in Fremont, CA, their commercials promise faster downloading of "your favorite music"; is this grounds for a false advertising lawsuit, or maybe entrapment.
b) when we're paying more than 5x the cheapest dialup, we expect service commiserate.
c) if you don't like it, you fucking whiner, MOVE
"They probably limit downlink speed but don't bother to tell anyone about it."
No they don't limit download speed at all. Many people download 20-30GB a month on OOL and they don't care at all. I've seen downloads which run overnight at the modems max speed and OOL never bothers.
For some reason though OOL is really pissy about uploading these days. A year or two ago you could upload all you want(ie many gigs), but with the rise of P2P OOL has literlly put the brakes on uploading. I don't know if its a liability thing or what, but things sure have changed.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
I've heard about this arbitrary disconnection by BTO after 12 hours of use as well, but it seems very odd. Considering that I must be on-line for very close to that boundary typically one or two weekend days each week, it's amazing I've never hit it.
As for BTO's policies more generally... I don't think BT or BTO are particularly great, and yes I've have had bad experiences with them in the past. OTOH, I've also had generally good service aside from the occasional screw ups -- better than I've had with alternative providers, who also screwed up from time to time. I still use both BT and BTO today, and I'm the sort of customer who will quite happily vote with his wallet and switch to an alternative company when I consider that the situation merits doing so.
Since they imposed the two-hour cap, it's much easier to connect, and they've recently raised the cap to 4 hours at once. The only time this is really annoying now, given we're talking about dial-up anyway, is if you're playing a long on-line game. You can resume broken downloads or other activities pretty much immediately with minimal inconvenience, so it's no great hassle.
I found the 150 hour cap offensive when I first heard about it, too, but decided to give it a fair chance before taking my business elsewhere. To date, in spite of being a pretty heavy user, I have never even been warned I'm near it. And I have my PC connected for several hours most evenings, download 20-30MB+ installations for Mozilla/OOo/etc. frequently, etc.
So I have somewhat revised my opinions of ISPs capping dial-up connections. As far as I can see, there's definitely an element of truth to their claims that the only people who'll really be hit are those using it very heavily for things like P2P, and those people should be paying more for a better package anyway. Why the hell should I, or any other user, subsidise the line rental for people downloading illegal copies of music and games all day?
I would much rather all ISPs were up-front about what restrictions they place on the various services they offer, and didn't try to change the deal after you'd signed up. In fact, I'm in favour of legal action to require this at present, since misleading advertising by several of the big names is hurting a lot of people right now.
However, I don't find the restrictions themselves to be unreasonable in practice, at least on my dial-up line. If they were honest about the limits of the deal, what the alternatives were and what everything would cost, then I'd probably still have picked the deal I currently have over similar packages offered by competitors. I will continue to use that package until it no longer meets my needs, either through limited functionality or non-competitive pricing, and then I will drop it and move to a more appropriate one.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
If there is no DSL in the area, and there is only one cable provider, then who has six figures USD to relocate a family just to shift providers?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Another argument sometimes presented is that uploading somehow costs the cable company more in bandwidth than downloading.
This is, in fact, true. Time Warner Telecom sells web hosting services, and it doesn't want Road Runner customers to interfere with the transfer rates of its commercial web hosting customers.
If this were the case the cable modem network would cap bandwidth leaving it's system but not the connections from one customer to another.
This is, in fact, true. Internet connection providers in Australia and New Zealand typically cap inter-ISP transfer at 3 GB per month.
Will I retire or break 10K?
it is Time Warner itself that is the first party to separate out the upstream and downstream and charge for them separately.
Only because Time Warner is forced to set those prices by the market. If Time Warner allocates more upstream bandwidth to residential customers, it pays an opportunity cost in lost web hosting business.
(If you don't know what an opportunity cost is, please study this definition and then read a basic economics textbook.)
Will I retire or break 10K?
the only reason I pay for broadband is to get to the results of the last decades experimentation (i.e., slashdot and P2P networks).
Warner wants to sell web hosting for sites such as Slashdot. Warner wants to keep its customers from easily distributing infringing copies of its works over its network.
is really just to admitt you haven't thought about the cost of your own path.
The point is that Warner can make more money by following the path that leads to offering web hosting than by following the path that leads to offering symmetric connections to residential users.
Will I retire or break 10K?