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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?"
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.
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
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...
On Arrakis: early worm gets the bird. Magister mundi sum!
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.
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?
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