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?"

Comments

Charter does it

[DesScorp]

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.

Blame partly on technology.

[GigsVT]

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.

Bandwidth caps

[Andy Smith]

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...

Pound signs (OT)

[OldMiner]

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 (&ouml); ü (). Mumble. Time to check the SoureForge bug list.