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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?"
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
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.
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?
Maybe this topic should go in a new discussion, but it's definitely a form of broadband 'capping'.
A Good Intro to NetBS
If you read their fricken AUP before you buy their product, you know what your buying. If you don't, you're stupid, and deserve what you get.
If their AUP differs substantially from their advertisements it's called "bait and switch," (aka fraud).
If you went to an all you can eat buffet (to use your analogy) and after you got there they told you that after the first plate full you could only have one bite every five minutes (i.e. you were rate capped), they would be commiting fraud since this is not "all you can eat."
-- MarkusQ