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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?"
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
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.
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...
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
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/
I have the same provider. The download rate is 10 Mbps (no joke) and upload is normally 1 Mbit.. it's not unusual to upload things at a consistent 125 KBps, until you hit the 35 minute limit, and then it drops down to ~10-15 KBps.