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

fair or legal?

[Tumbleweed]

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.

Been there, had that problem...

[dJCL]

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...