New Broadband Capping Techniques?

Posted by Cliff on Monday August 4, 2003 @12:14PM from the stuff-to-watch-out-for dept.

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?"

1 of 101 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

You're getting UNCAPPED uploads at all? by hawkstone · 2003-08-04 12:45 · Score: 3, Interesting

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?