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Have You Fought Your ISP Over Bandwidth Limits?
serutan asks: "Recently, a DC++-related mailing list I subscribe to has been buzzing with posts about letters from various ISPs in the U.S., UK, Australia and NZ, warning customers to curtail their download bandwidth usage to an 'acceptable' limit (generally 200 hours/month for three straight months). These are people who thought they signed up for unlimited access. Some of the letters hint that high bandwidth usage may imply illicit activity. All are vague on possible consequences, and nobody has mentioned actually being cut off by an ISP. One guy received an apology after talking to a supervisor about the meaning of the word 'unlimited.' Is this a growing trend? Have you received similar threats from an ISP? What was the outcome?" Of course, would it be so difficult for ISPs to stop advertising "unlimited" access, and instead include in the small (or not-so small) print exactly what the "acceptable" bandwidth usage is? If you did sign up for "unlimited" services and find yourself in this predicament, what have you done to get your bandwidth issues resolved?
I was paying speak easy for 768/384 and they where giving me 1536/768. The bastards.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Apparently "unlimited" has been redefined w/o our knowledge. I wouldn't mind paying extra to have really "unlimited" access if that's what it took to not have to worry about this. I have "unlimited" newsgroup access which I pay extra for, and it is well-worth every penny.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Cox.net clearly states their bandwidth limits and their definition of "unlimited", which means:
-always available, no dialing
-no hourly usage limits
-no tying up the phone line
-no content restrictions
looks like only one of these really applies to "unlimited"
Rogers has been doing this to a lot of my friends, I haven't gotten 'the letter' yet.
The facts:
1) The service is advertised as 'unlimited'
2) They are unwilling to tell customers how much they've transferred
3) They are unwilling to tell customers what would constitute an acceptable amount of bandwidth
Judging by postings here, they seem to be going after some areas and no others. Here is an interesting thread.
Supposedly, Cox has a bandwidth limits of like 10GB of downloads a month. I know for a fact that for the past 6 months, I have definately exceeded that. And it's not necessarily illegal activity. I've d/led various linux ISOs for a Linux Installfest. I've downloaded "safe" music through mp3.com, dmusic.com, etc. I'm also always downloading new software to try out in Linux to see what's out there. Add this all to my regular surfing, and I wouldn't be suprised if I was over a "limit" of sorts. The thing is, I've never once received a letter, but other people I know have. I'm curious how they go about deciding who to send letters to.
We are 'little people'. They are big corporations. They could redefine 'unlimited' as 'up to 1GB of traffic per month', and frankly, none of us on here have a snowflake's chance in Hell of seriously combating it.
Let's not get any delusions of grandeur here. Eventually, this is going to be the Standard Operating Procedure for all ISPs. Then what are you going to do-- "vote with your wallet" by going to another ISP who'll be just as bad?
Sorry to be so pessimistic, but this is the way things are, as far as I can see.
And if you think I'm being unrealistic: Well, I can remember a time when you'd call up an ISP and actually be able to talk to a knowledgeable techie... that's obviously in the past now. And don't tell me about your wonderful local ISP. You know damned well how rare those are now.
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
proposed a bandwidth cap on "abusers" of their system, but the subsequent outcry made them reconsider...
IIRC, the amount of data allocated would have been exceeded by downloading (for example) the Redhat CD's as ISO's...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Some of the letters hint that high bandwidth usage may imply illicit activity.
Like it or not, 90% of those people who have high bandwidth usage are using it for illicit activities.
Should include this link here on DSLReports:
r oo t=comcast~mode=flat
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,8737754~
"My experience with Comcast bandwidth suspension"
...although I never pay my bill on time so what do I know? :)
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
I havent been targetted to get capped on downstream and I do download alot of items, but my upstream got the cap locked on at 15k/s where for a while it was 110k/s... Damn Bittorrent!
Perhaps you mean hours worth of downloading, or uploading? I can be connected for 200 hours and mostly idle (ie checking email every few minutes) and not use much bandwidth. I can also connect for 20 minutes and fully use my connection.
You know how hard it is to sell Dish TV off my home server when Comcast only gives me 30KB/sec upstream?
-- Bird in the Bush: The Renewable Energy Blog http://www.birdinthebush.org
I've never had any problems with my ISP. I download more games than I could ever play and more software than I could ever evaluate in a lifetime. I guess there is some satisfaction to the hunter-gatherer in me to add another cd to a stack that will never be used. I doubt the average p2p user, porno watcher, or even obsessive downloader will be that impacted if the free bandwidth lunch is over.
"Unlimited" is almost always defined by the ISP. If there is no explicit definition (read the fine print--there might be one), you may want to get it in writing.
Of course, anyone who is over their limits by an amount high enough for their ISP to notice is probably running some sort of public service off their machine (FTP, Web, etc). Many ISPs disallow this, so check your contract.
One of the mobile phone providers advertises "UNLIMITED" minutes in one high-end package. In the submicrometer-sized print at the bottom of the ad it states that usage above 3000 minutes "is subject to review".
Reminds me of the old Dennis the Menace episode where Dennis sets up a lemonade stand with the sign "All you can drink, 5 cents". A thirsty customer gets a small paper cup, empties it promptly, and asks for more. Smart-ass Dennis replies: "That's all you can drink, for 5 cents!"
unlimited ( P ) Pronunciation Key (n-lm-td)
adj.
Having no restrictions or controls: an unlimited travel ticket.
Having or seeming to have no boundaries; infinite: an unlimited horizon.
Without qualification or exception; absolute: unlimited self-confidence.
I have a 200mb/day upload limit on my computer in my dorm via the school's policy. It makes it hard to run a decent warez server! Downloads are unlimited though. Not that it matters, sharing my connection with 30,000 other students kind of limits the speed. I have a nice yagi antenna on my Christmas list though. If I point it out of my window, I should be able to hit the access points, which aren't on the residence hall network. That's 200mb/s of untapped bandwidth. They won't notice if my room mate and I are using a mere 11mb/s!
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
Here in Alberta, Canada, I was initially using Shaw cable but received "the call" pretty quick. I changed to Telus DSL and it appears they either don't care/don't monitor usage. I easily use 100 GIGS up & down each month and have never received notice.
The funny thing is that they do advertise a cap, but just don't enforce it.
"The market alone cannot provide sufficient constraints on corporation's penchant to cause harm." -- Joel Bakan
Simple, I stopped using dialup about 5 years ago when ADSL became available.
:)
What's more interesting is the change from "unlimited high speed" to "always on" when advertising broadband. Could a similar semantic change be in the works for dialup.
Of course the solution is to have your regulatory body mandate a better rollout of broadband, ensuring it it available to 90+% of the population. Boy, what would that do to the backbones around the world?
Most TOS say they have the right to revoke your account at any time, and probably mention something about bandwidth limits. I know when Ameritech.net (my ISP) was merging with SBC Yahoo!, the new TOS said something about bandwidth usage. Because of this, I didn't upgrade (they can't force me to upgrade either).
Yes, the fine print DOSE matter.
Fortress of Insanity
So the people there are probably engaging in illegal activity.
;)
What's your point?
clifgriffin > blog
Some of the letters hint that high bandwidth usage may imply illicit activity.
Haven't these guys ever heard of videoconferencing or streaming media? There are legitimate uses for high bandwidth.
Is Videotron, owned by Quebecor, which owns Archambault, the biggest record store around. They're pissed at P2P.
Ph33r.
I know being a subscriber to EarthLink that they say it is unlimited time while you are in front of your computer. So trying to claim you were in front of your computer for 3 days straight wouldn't fly. (not even with enough caffeine. )
Comcast is starting to suspend and cancel the accounts of "bandwidth hogs" who use too much. The problem is, they don't tell you how much is how much, and THEY'RE the ones raising their throughput caps. So they're basically saying "here, we're upgrading you from 1.5k downstream to 3k downstream, but stop hogging all of our bandwidth!"
It makes no sense. They can do it, though, because their terms of service has a generic clause about them being able to shitcan your account if you do anything that "degrades the network." Last time I checked, downloading ANYTHING subtracts from the overall amount of bandwidth, and "degrades" the network.
So, basically, they want to lure you in with the promise of unlimited bandwidth, but they aren't going to let you use your "always on" connection to its fullest. A win for the Comcast monopoly and their shareholders, a loss for the consumer.
See Cox.com's Limitations of Service.
Personally, I regularly consume quite a bit more bandwidth than I am "supposed" to. However, I've yet to hear from Cox regarding my excessive use.
*twitch*
If they do this, why not return the threat. Something like that if they keep sending you letters instead of e-mails, you will sue them for the risk of indirectly transmitted disease, structural damage to the house from the weight of the letter, paper cuts, and damaging the environment by cutting down trees and making paper out of them.
See, the whole "it's always on" thing doesn't apply. It's NOT unlimitted. We don't know what the limit is. We aren't told. We aren't allowed to know. Customers are not allowed to know what this 'limit' is unless they go over it. Do you know why? Let me tell you why.
Because this limit only applies to those who are in an area where there are a lot of people. If you are on a headend with very few people, you can download to your heart's content, because it just won't affect that many customers. If you try to do the same amount of activity on a node that already has too many users - UH OH! You're being excessive!
So, by not naming a limit, they can impose one as they see fit - not by your actual usage, but by how you work as a unit within your geographic area.
Working for Comcast (though not for much longer) gave me some interesting insights into ISP mentality.
Several DSL and other boradband businesses changed their contracts to include limits on the amount of download. Looks like nobody expected people to actually use all that bandwidth (how smart).
There are even some companies who always had the limitation on their default contract, but never enforced... Let's see how long it'll take until they change their minds.
But anyway... This means there'll be no option for those who use a lot of bandwidth, and hopefully, there will be new ISPs offering unlimited access in the future (for a higher price of course).
I've had my comcast internet connection shutdown becuase of the number of code red attacks on my bsd firewall. At one point I was getting 3500 attacks a minute.
But I also serve a small website on the same box and Comcast has also shutdown my internet connection after I upload more than 1.5 gigs in a few days.
As far as I am concerned, I have no problems with Optimum online when it comes to bandwidth limit. My connection is up 24/7/365. I download linux distribution iso's for myself and my friends who are not fortunate enough to have a broadband connection.
All it takes is a few greedy P2P users to hose the business model for home broadband. The reason you pay a lot less at home than a business user for the same circuit is expected usage rates. You can argue that this is false advertising "UNLIMITED" but unlimited really means that you are not cut off after X MB download in 30 days. (or charged at $.Y per MB over X)
I don't want to start a war here but I would love to know how people are running into bandwidth limitations _without_ doing file sharing?
.iso's and documentation, handle email for a number of people and do a variety of other things with my connection.
I've had 768 SDSL for three years, and before that I had ISDN. I host a number of sites, download
Despite this, I have never come close to maxing out my line for anything more than a few minutes. Traffic usage for me, according to MRTG, amounts to an average of about 100kb/sec during daytime hours and less at night.
What I am curious aout is what are these people doing that is getting them noticed by their ISP's?
Having said all this, if a company is going to offer unlimited service, they sure as hell better be prepared to deliver it.
-sirket
Due process only applies to government actions (when it's not overlooked altogether). I'm not saying it's moral, but your ISP has every right to terminate your service for any reason they want. It's in the contract, and as long as they pro-rate your monthly fee, there isn't much you can do about it.
My father was booted off Shaw cable for 1 month as punishment for using too much bandwidth. I'm not exactly sure, but from some techy at Telus whom he switched too, aparently he had his internal network mis-configured, such that all his internal bandwidth went to Shaw and back before reaching the destination comptuer inside his house.
Regardless, we both thought he had unlimited access, but they warned him once, then booted him. No illegal activity here, just the unwritten policies at Shaw (which lost them a customer).
speakeasy changed the unlimited dialup policy about a year ago so unlimited = 150 hrs. If you wanted an extra 50 hours you could buy them for $20. The unlimited account only cost $15 a month.
No where was this 150 hr policy written. They claimed it was was considered exessive usage in the contract.
Yes, there are legitimate uses of using that band, but the vast majority of people are simply doing something that breaches their terms of service, or they are unaware of some kind of computer virus.
It seems to me that the companys are just fishing for guilty persons to stop what they are doing, and do not mean to use any force since the letters are sent without consequences listed. But in this day and age of RIAA suining 12 year olds, the majority of people will be spooked into stopping.
My advice is, ignore the letter. In the unlikely event that they actually do cut your service, raise hell, you may even get a couple months free!
Speakeasy does nice things like have a truly "unlimited" policy. For around US$60 a month, I get a 640/128k pipe, and two static IPs. That's it.
The really cool unlimited part is this:
* I can use as much of that bandwidth as I want.
* There are no content restrictions.
And this is the big one...
* I CAN RUN SERVERS. Yes, I realize that a lot of broadband providers don't stop you at their routers or anything, but most of them have it in their AUP that you can't run your own servers. Speakeasy just asks that you don't make money.
Oh, and I get free nationwide dialup. It's not bad.
Oh, and one other cool thing: They even explicitly say that you can set up a WAP and share your access with anyone you want, so long as you don't charge money for it.
...but it's being eaten...by some...Linux or something...
This is why allowing ISPs to have access to cable infrastructures and central offices is so damn important. If the RBOCs or LECs can muscle competition out, we'll get to the day when bandwidth is billed by the Megabyte. If competitive ISPs are allowed access to broadband infrastructures - then they can come along and offer true unlimited access and the market will react. The problem is, a little ISP used to be able to service a large population with a T1 and a modem bank. Now, with broadband, becoming an ISP means you better have good peering and a couple OC3s, just to start. As a result, competition is squeezed out, Covad and Comcast will own the world, and then you are screwed unless you want to go T1 to your house.
I am OUTRAGED! This, and they can't even be bothered to limit which ports I can use or tell me I can't run servers. . .assholes. . .:))
You are not the customer.
This is common in Western Europe. P2P doesn't hit the ISP's Squid and costs a bundle when it's transatlantic. In Belgium, Telenet limits you to ISDN-like speeds once you used your monthly quotum, and Skynet is simply throttling all P2P traffic on their main Cisco routers.
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Only time I've ever been involved with something like this was when I needed to upload a gigabyte of data to my web server from home, over RoadRunner. That obviously took a long time with the upload bandwidth restrictions and such, but it got done.
Less that 24 hours later I get a phone call from the RoadRunner police, warning me about excessive usage of upstream bandwidth and obviously implying that I'm running some sort of server out of my house and had better stop. I told him why I was uploading data but that fell on deaf ears, and I was basically told that the only reason they were going to let it go this time was because I was paying for an additional IP address anyway. I got the distinct feeling from this rude guy that they wouldn't care if I'd downloaded a hundred gigabytes of data, but that if I used a hair more of their upstream bandwidth than they thought I should be they'd cancel service in a heartbeat.
I remember there was a company (that shall remain nameless) in NE Ohio awhile back that had promised uncapped speeds (which seems to be the 'unlimited' debate here) -- however there was such a boom in business that their infrastructure couldn't support it, so they capped the bandwidth to 20k upload and (i think) +-100k download. There was a huge uproar about it but it seemed silly to me for people to bitch about the temporary cap whilst that company was upgrading their infrastructure.
That's one of the problems in our "sue-happy" country.
Damages far in excess of actual or even theoretical damages.
What legitimate need does a single person have when downloading 40 gigs of data over a short period of time?
I would suspect that the ISP may also know what port all the traffic was taking place on. It's quite reasonable to suspect that if 40GB of data was taking place of the port Kazaa uses, that he's not transfering a family photo album or business documents from his office network.
Regardless of due process, common sense still exists and it is Ok to call a spade a spade. While you may unfortunately have to defend it in court, you can still say what you want without a 500 page report and permission from a judge and jury.
It's advertised and part of the sign up agrement but man does it suck. Your basicly given a "bucket" filled with 165 MB of data that you can do what ever you want with for 8 hours. If you use it all up your screwed down to dialup speed while the "bucket" refills over the next 8 hours.
I've had my Verizon DSL now for about 2 months 1.5down 128k up and I've been very pleased. . no complaints from them regarding my use.
I'm a HEAVY gamer and I dl quite a lot.
has anyone who's had them longer comment?
Videotron here in Quebec, I have 4mbit/640kbits cable (get those speeds all the time). I often download over 130GB a month and haven't had any problems yet. The price is quite decent too 80$ canadian all taxes included (about $55 US). This is the most expensive residential service they offer. They have other types of accounts suche as a 40$ a month 15Gig download 10 gig upload @3.5Mbit/160kbits.
Imperium et libertas
Autocracy and freedom
I use a local ISP called FastQ Communications. They do DSL and Dialup. Their attitude is, "You're paying for the bandwidth, use it." Of course, the fact that they have static IPs available cheap and only block Windows NetBIOS and Sun RPC (for security), allow registering of DNS servers, running of services like FTP, HTTP, SSH, SMTP, POP3, and delegate reverse resolves if you want to go on top of it makes them rock. Being inexpensive too is a nice perk...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I chose my ISP specifically because I knew they don't care. Velocitus (formerly RMCI) doesn't do bandwidth monitoring or any other blatant tracking. They are the laziest ISP in my area. Frequently, I peek out at speeds faster than I'm paying for.
I think the trick to finding an ISP is to find the most apathetic company out there. The only problem with this is that I'm down about 4 days a year. I find it a reasonable trade off, and it is increadibly better than AOL, MSN, or Qwest.
Shaw's (in Canada) been doing this for years. At first they never stated bandwidth limits, but if you uploaded too much they fired off an email saying to tone it down. Then after a while they started doing it with downloading. If I remember correctly I think their "acceptable" download limit for a month is something around 2 gigs (which is obviously ridiculous).
First they email you, then they demand you phone them, and finally if you don't comply they'll shut your service off for a week. After that if you repeat the "offense" they'll cancel your subscription.
Back when I was in dorms, they decided that the traffic was getting to high in the "Computer-Interest Dorm" building.. so they capped the whole building. As anyone can imagine, this didn't stop the dozen people from doing unlimited bandwidth sharing but just made it so everyone else in the dorms couldn't open web pages.
After talking to the sys admin, he said they weren't willing to send out warning letters to the worst offenders.. and he even said there was plenty of bandwidth for everyone after the cap if people would just be responsible.
Of course now that I'm out of the dorms and paying for my bandwidth, I expect to be able to use every last bit (pun intended) of it.
It's just a tragedy of the commons.
I've had a several lengthy phone conversations with people from Comcast regarding my account being disabled for downloading a lot of data. Apparently they like to send letters to the top 1% of people who download the most, and then cut them off the next month. Their justification is that it interferes with other people's use of the resources. But frankly, if their network infrastructure were capable of supporting the speeds that they advertise for the number of people they supply then it wouldn't be a problem.
Bottom line, if you call them on their bluff of unlimited fast internet access, then they cut you off.
They did, however, claim that content wasn't being monitored, though I have no way of verifying this.
Mfire advertises unlimited access, and then their user agreement states you agree to connect no more than 150 hours?!? At least they do specify in their agreement what they provide. P.S. Yes, they do actually cut off your access after 150 hours until the following month....
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I went from Sympatico to Rogers to Sympatico and now looking elsewhere here in Toronto. About 4 years ago, they were offering the same speed at the same cost with no limits. Naturally bandwidth costs fall over time but theyve frozen between the two monopolists in Ontario.
Whats funny they quitely implemented bandwidth limits that are pretty rediculous, and Sympatico has even blocked port 25. In another incident when I was trying to explain network problems to a customerservice rep at Sympatico, I kept switching between win98 and linux to exhaust all their over-the-phone tests so they know the problem is on their side. Well, when he heard "Linux" he went bonkers and told me there was no way he is helping me with any further issues and I shouldnt waste his time.
So now we're paying an average of $65 per month for our usage, which does not support Linux, let alone the openvmx, solaris and openbsd that I have at home.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
There are accounts for people that move a large amount of data. They are called "business accounts" and cost more.
High bandwidth speed doesn't mean you get to max your connection all the time. If you look in your SLA, I bet you find a provision for reasonable use.
If you don't like it, buy a business account where they won't care how much you use.
l8,
AC
Maybe I'm weird, but I haven't fought with my ISP about anything, let alone bandwidth/traffic issues. When I paid for my internet account, I knew exactly what I was getting and I was willing to pay how much they were charging. I don't care if I only get X gigabytes of transfer a month, as long as they tell me up front, let me check out how much I've transferred at any time, and let me get more when I need more at a reasonable price. Isn't too much to ask of an ISP, is it?
There are plenty of legitimate needs for downloading/uploading large amounts of data. If I pay my monthly fee for "unlimited" access, I should be able to stream high resolution live video 24 hours if I so choose.
Bandwidth: If you utilize any of your Speakeasy services in a manner which consumes excessive bandwidth or affects Speakeasy's core equipment, overall network performance, or other users' services, Speakeasy may require that you cease or alter these activities.
http://www.speakeasy.net/tos
I use shaw cable in Canada, and they advertise 'unlimited usage'. And I download alot of stuff from the net, so twice I've been called by the customer service (service, yeah right). Guy: sir, did you know you network usage is above normal? Me: what is above normal? Guy: well your package do have a quota of 50G per month. Me: Don't I have unlimited usage as you advertised? Guy: No sir, by that we meant you are connected all the time and can use it whenever you want to. Me: oooh... well I'm switching services unless you stop harrasing me. Never got called again.
I'm on Sasktel and have found them to be more than acceptable to the point where I know my TOS agreement prohibits me from running "any server" but I have a small web/ftp server running and they don't mind. However Access Cable in Yorkton services my in-laws and several of my friends and I've taken to calling them Bandwith Nazis! They turn off your internet if you are running Kazaa (they check the ports) as well as if you have any virus that uses bandwith at all! This isn't necessarily a bad thing but when I go over to fix it I have to download all the removal tools at home and burn them onto a CD because if I call them asking them to turn it on to grab a removal tool they tell me that they will not turn it back on until the system is clean and suggest a format!! When my in-laws complain about having to pay for an ISP that shuts them off whenever they feel like it they are told that it's all in the contract and there's nothing they can do about it. Luckily I've convinced them to switch in January but I just hate dealing with these people so anyone in Regina/Yorkton SK area PLEASE DON'T GIVE THEM ANY BUSINESS WHATSOEVER!! I really wanna see this company fail. Every one in Saskatchewan would do well to switch to Sasktel, Shaw, or Image and let's put an end to the Bandwith Nazis!! In a side note, they offer a news server but filter it so horribly that you can't connect to over half the newsgroups! This is just my 2 cents.
Kleedrac
Sure we wang, can.
You will find that unlimited has some very odd meannings, with sprintpcs has unlimeted 3g, but if you read the TOS you find that you are not alowed to use it unlimited, you are not alowed to use it as a modem. Here is the text "PCS Vision Packs are: (a) only available with a Vision capable PCS Phone or PCS smart phone device; and (b) not available with Connection Cards, Aircards, or any other device used in connection with a computer or PDA - including phones, smart phones or other devices used with connection kits or similar phone-to-computer/PDA accessories. PCS Vision Packs are also not available with Bluetooth Vision capable PCS Phones used as a modem in connection with other devices. Sprint reserves the right to deny or to terminate service without notice for any misuse."
on the other hand t-mobil does not have that in their contract, but I am not sure what the exact rules there are, I am sure to find out, I have been using it to stream internet radio stations to my laptop, then retransmit them to my car radio. But when I bought the service they said I could do it, and they have instructions on their site how to see your bluetooth phone up for use as a modem for a laptop. NOw if I can get a player for my palm that can do all the internet radio stream formats.
He agreeded with you.
I have a friend that uses a local Alaskan cable modem company and after a long month of not-stop movie downloading off Kazaa he got a bill for $1000 (or around there) for going over his like 5 gig limit.
Ouch!
Fortunately they didnt push the issue at all. He called to ask what this bill was for and feigned innocence and ignorance and they just comp'd it. But it does make you look at the terms and conditions a little closer. They never hid the 5gig limit, but none of us ever took it serious.
I know for a fact I was over my limit on several months, just not by like 100gigs so it never was an issue. Honestly I have never heard of anyone actually paying for their exceeded limits but the ISP is fully within their rights.
If you put up enough XMas lights to be seen from the moon and get a huge electric bill next cycle you most likely wouldnt get off, certainly not be able to deny it after confirmation by an blinded airline pilot!
Just tread lightly on their kindness or willingness to please their customers. Don't screw it up for us all.
p.s. there is no such thing as 'unlimited bandwith' there are limits on everything, you just might not ever reach them.
Boredom's not a burden anyone should bear.
but your ISP has every right to terminate your service for any reason they want.
Totally correct. It is their legal right.
However, it's not a great strategy for them. Good businesses protect their customers, and assume the best. Take safety deposit boxes, rented storage space, and many other examples. They can be used for illicit activities, but such businesses do not go around snooping on their customers. They prefer to keep them.
Hopefully, technology companies will figure this out one day.
-t
http://unmoldable.com W:"No one of consequence" I:"I must know" W:"Get used to disappointment"
I have no ISP at home. I don't agree with any broadband providers "terms of service"... you insensitive clod.
Canada saw this long ago.
Unlimited Access can be construed to refer to time, not bandwidth. Thus, ISP's claiming unlimited access aren't offering no download caps.
Think of it this way
Access buys you the key to a car, which is parked in your driveway. You can get into the car through any door, and for as long as you want. You have unlimited access to the car. You are not, however, allowed to drive it anywhere, you do not have unlimited usage.
Rogers Cable (Ontario, Canada) is trying to implement this type of soft cap, and it's not working too well for them. The major issue is they won't define the caps, and people are being cutoff for completely arbitrary amounts of usage. The other huge problem is that they specifically advertise 'Unlimited Usage' (consumers having wised up to the 'access' wording) and this is quite contrary to it.
They have suspended people, only to reconnect them when asked. This lead to a good exodus of people, and recently Rogers have been calling people saying 'all is forgiven' and asking them to return, saying the caps are completely gone.
Whether this proves true or not is yet to be seen.
I got my cable-modem 5 years ago in Montreal and it was quite a new thing in Montreal. At the time I was hitting 350KBytes/sec (KBytes, not Kbits) for download and upload with good servers or close friends. But a few months later they limited the bandwith for uploads... down to 20KBytes/sec.
I sent a complaint and was answered swiftly with some really polite excuses but that's it. I could still download at 350KBytes/sec (about 70 to 100 times faster then conventional modems) but when it came to sending anything it was 20KB/sec (about 4 to 7 times faster then conventional modems).
When came the time to be hosting internet games I could not provide enough bandwith then for more then 4 players without starting to feel some lag going on. Same occured when I tried to host a voice server.
Somehow Internet habits have changed so now they made the limit at 40KB/sec but it's too late for me, I got bored with gaming.
Corporate decisions sucks.
I just got a letter from Comcast a few weeks ago regarding this. It states: "According to our aggregate bandwidth usage records, during [month year] your Comcast High-Speed Internet account exceeded Comcast's bandwidth usage limitations. The activity associated with your account was more than 100 times the national median." The letter then goes on to list the "different activities" which could result in this - commercial or business applications, peer-to-peer networking, file sharing, newsgroup downloading, streaming music/videos, and voice and/or video services. The letter recommends I upgrade to a "business use" account. Argh. 100 times? Why would anyone get broadband if they're doing 1/100th of the transfer rate that I am? Silly national median.
I think the problem here is that the geeks think "unlimited" means "without bounds" whereas the ISPs think "unlimited" means "the amount of bandwidth a reasonable person would consider unlimited." That is, when your average person is using their high speed access, they're not saturating the pipes both ways 24/7, 365 days a year. They're using their internet access a reasonable amount every day and even making big downloads here and there. To them, this is "unlimited" since they don't have to constantly worry about how many megabytes they're transferring and budgeting accordingly (that is, since they make reasonable, and not excessive, use of the internet access).
Now hardcore geeks on the other hand will tie up their connection constantly downloading who knows what and demanding that their ISP give them truly unlimited access for $50 a month. Not gonna happen. Just use some of that common sense. Do you really think the ISP means that their unlimited access is "unlimited" in the strictest sense of the word? Of course not. They'd go broke, fast. Are you guys the same kind of people that would demand that an "all you can eat" restaurant bring you more and more food and never close so long as you're still hungry?
What do you guys want? Do you want ISPs to stop offering access that, to 99% of their customer base, is "unlimited" just so you can avoid being burned because you lack the common sense to realize that no ISP can truly offer unlimited access? They're trying to appeal to a customer base that will view the ISPs service as, for all intents and purposes, unlimited. They're not going to change their advertising to state bandwidth limitations just to appease the hardcore nerds who insist on raping bandwidth, sorry.
with mine - there's only so much you can do with dialup. If I need to nove iso's of something, I can always snarf my friends cable modem for an evening.
C|N>K
A cool solution would be for someone to set up ISP-Specific Direct Connect hubs, like those that exist underground at most large univerities. ISPs/schools care much less about how much you download if you're downloading from other people on the network, instead of someplace in Sweden. For example, northern New York State only has Time Warner's RoadRunner for cable internet with the 66.67.*.* ip range...
I downloaded 8 gigs in the course of 3 days, and I had my internet turned off, I used the cable service provided in lawrence kansas.
I had absolutely no warning, no phone calls.
The only reason I know I had been cut off was because I figured that my excessive downloading for the last 3 days had probably triggered it.
I called the cable company and they said that I had been turned off for grossly exceeding standard usage amounts. It took me 2 days and about 4 calls, but I finally got the service turned back on with a verbal agreement not to download more than 3 gigs a week.
So, I had to skimp, but i survived!
I cant imagine someone only allowing 2 gigs a month though, i have downloaded more than that just off of demos and things from gametab.
Buzz OUT
If you don't vote, you don't matter, so don't waste your time telling me your opinion
I would think that selling "Monthly" access instead of "Unlimited" access would solve the ISP's problems.
Monthly doesn't imply an unlimited amount of bandwidth but it does suggest a months worth of access. Seeing as how most people consider utilities to be charged in monthly chunks, I would imagine that most users would be put off at all. Then the ISP could throw in fine print about bandwidth and burst speeds and all the other hoohaa.
Oh no, I've just give them the answer. Must not hit submit, must save the word...
I'm tired of bombing the universe
*years* ago, I couldn't have cable/dsl in my area, so I took a 56k subscription, a second phone line, and a little utility to reconnect when disconnected. After having used more than 600 hours in a month (and more than 3Gb of download), my ISP cancelled my account :). I then took another 56k ISP who didn't care and kept it a few years, until I took cable.
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
Comment removed based on user account deletion
from the tos:
If you utilize any of your Speakeasy services in a manner which consumes excessive bandwidth or affects Speakeasy's core equipment, overall network performance, or other users' services, Speakeasy may require that you cease or alter these activities.
http://www.speakeasy.net/tos
They can cap your bandwidth if they want. They do for unlimited dialup. 150 hours = unlimited with dialup. You have been fooled
I had that problem. They thought I was downloading movies. I fixed that thought. Told them the truth. I was downloading porn. Solved that prolem right away and haven't heard a peep out of them.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
It's all very nice to advertise with unlimited bandwidth, or free porn, or free beer, but in the end, they're all oxymorons, since people simply want to make money.
The whole problem I see is that an ISP that provides a 1Mb downlink, shouldn't be surprised if that is used for 86400Mb per day. Although it seems rather reasonable that no one can ever view that much content, or for that matter will be able to store it.
As for accepted use policies, they all state the same between the lines: If we think you're using up too much %'s of our backbone bandwidth, you're not using it acceptably.
Mad.
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
While I have not yet received any warnings about my bandwidth usage I have heard about other people here in Ottawa that have gotten some nasty emails and even one who had their account temporarily disabled supposedly due to high usage.
I have no idea how much they were downloading or from where but it got me wondering about if the source matters.
I routinely download 5+GB/day from the Rogers newsservers and have never had a warning. I usually only stop downloading when I'm refreshing the lists and start up again.
I also do some uploading (approx 2-5 GB per month) to a couple of friends computers who are mostly outside the rogers network.
when I told this to a Bell rep who came to my door he told me to keep Rogers since Bell Hi-Speed would definately limit me. 2GB a month I think was his number.
I've been patiently awaiting my letter from Rogers to stop but it has never arrived. If they added a new tier of totally unlimited for a few more dollars a month I would be willing to join up to pay my fair share but it does not look like thats going to happen any tmie soon.
Either way, I don't know how they are determining who is abusing their systems since I'm sure by any standards I would be on that list. It could just be a scare tactic hoping the few people they contact will spread their experience through word of mouth. Maybe their just hoping this will cause people to slow down without them having to go through too much trouble.
Of course that's just my opinion...... you could be wrong!
I've had not dissimilar problems with Netflix, they advertise 'unlimited' rentals, but that's not really what you receive, they have a number of tricks they use to try to throttle the number of DVDs they actually send you if you are a heavy user. For example they will just decide not to credit something as received for a full day. Or after having received something and crediting you, they just randomly wait a day or more to send you your next DVD, even if #1-10 in your queue are 'available'.
'Unlimited' to these companies seems to mean slightly more than what the marketing people say the average user would use.
We did this in like 99 at the ISP I used to work for (until I was restructured out of a job). I rewrote the TOS as such;
No unauthorized use. Trespassers will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Unlimited is basically 'Unmetered'. At the time it started being used, most people were paying by the minute or hour for Internet access. (Prodigy, Compuserve, AOL). Unlimited just means you are not paying a metered rate, doesn't mean you get 'Dedicated' access.
Pretty much all ISPs have a user agreement that defines what they mean by Unlimited. This usually says that you won't be charged by how much you use but if you turn your PC into a 24/7 downloading machine they will cut you off.
There are real damages that you suffer. But it hardly makes sense to say that a company should be able to cheat people and when and if those people take them to court and win that the worst the company could suffer is to have to make things fair. That gives them a horiable incentive to cheat people. Instead there are punitive damages too. If the wrong was deliberate, the compamy should be subject to punative damages too, as a way to make it clear to them that there can be a downside to cheating people, and that the punishment can be more than just having to give back the actual damages.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Traffic can be tracked by port if the ISP so desires. I was simply pointing out that the ISP in the original post may have been comparing data to movie size because they have more detailed information about what was happening that they may have spelled out in a brief public statement.
I live 27000 feet from the CO, so no DSL. Too many trees for satellite, and town has no cable. The best our squirrel-infested phone lines can do is about 28.8K, and for that I get to pay $20/month, plus the cost of a second phone line. I'd basically pay a premium for even a BW-limited service, if it were available, even at say $70/month. I'm not the only one in this boat; I wonder if the remaining market that isn't yet served by broadband will have an effect on service levels -- we are at the moment at least willing to pay more for less.
However, the ISP needs to have listed what it will take to have your acount cut.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Have you ever seen direcways policy? 2gbs a day is a blessing
What happened to my robot, I was promised a robot.
>that use large amounts of bandwidth are automatically tagged as pirates.
>what happend to due process?
So you would feel better if the ISP said, "You downloaded the files XYZ.avi and when we play it its an illegally copied movie!".
But then they would show they can and will monitor user downloads. And perhaps they then have a legal precident.
Then people will start shouting about "big brother". ISP's can win.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
I just got an email today from my ISP telling me I'm using 30 - 40 times the normal bandwidth, and they suggest I stop using filesharing programs! /. is stealing my brainwaves.
That is way too weird.
I think
(puts on a foil hat)
I should say first that IANAL. I should say second that I think it's a pretty disgusting practice. But unfortunately, the contracts with ISP's (mine at least, Comcast) allows the ISP to terminate the contract at their discretion. The best thing to do would be to cause as big of a stink as possible. Tell your friends. Write letters to the tech help pages of newspapers. Post unfavorable reviews about the ISP on the web.
I use Time Warners Road Runnner service. I've had it cut off several times and recieved a phone call from them where they decribed how I was over using the access, sometimes I have to call them. Most of the the work was telecommuting stuff so it's really easy to rack up the gigs.
They give me a story about how I am inconvienceing other people and how downloading mp3's is illegal. The irony is I have never(past several years) downloaded mp3s from a p2p over this connection.
I have often wondered how much of Time Warners downtime was really a bandwidth throttle.
What really cracked me up is when I had to call SpeakEasy and have an Unlimited Dialup account added to our already existing T1 account with them.
Apparently their 'Unlimited' dialup is really just 50 hours in a month. They put the limit on to prevent users from dialing on with a router and staying online even when its not in use.
My response?
Me: "Let me get this straight, there's a limit on your unlimited dialup?"
Her: "Correct"
Ok, so then measuring your bandwidth usage in terms of the number of movies it represents would be a fair comparison, correct?
>What legitimate need does a single person have when downloading 40 gigs of data over a short period of time?
actually, as a graphic designer regularly dealing with uploading AND dowloading files in excess of 600MB, and frequently closer to 1GB; transferring more than 40GB of files in relatively short period of time is quite common...and a very legitimate need...
The fact is that even if they do not say it up and loud, they can restrict your bandwith usage very easy without even you to think that they did it.
I had been seeing a case in which my friends modem got suddenly desynchronized after starting dc++ over and over again. And it wasn't like they were blocking his access or something like that, they were just "teasing" him.
Another easy way is to restrict bandwith base on service accessed, and frankly you'll never know why it's going slower than expected.
Regarding the definiton of "unlimited access", that's easy to interpret... had any of you call his lawyer to look upon the contract when you signed it. I guess not. So read your contract if you still have it and you'll see that's made by a lawyer which means they might be actually covered for that.
At least in my contract I saw, a week after I signed it, that was a little, tiny paragraph which said that if i go above 5G traffic monthly they can restrict/reduce the availability. And right in the title it said "Unlimited Access".
It's like prenuptial agreement when you don't read it... to much prOn and you are fscked...
>I was downloading porn. Solved that prolem right away and haven't heard a peep out of them.
Now the techies know exactly which user's bandwith they should mirror.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Back in dial-up days, unlimited was magnitudes less than what your cable/DSL line can push through. The phone networks were pretty well developed and the load could be handled.
But now, unlimited bandwidth is not possible - you can't afford to pay for unlimited bandwidth (if you can, its probably not running to your house). More practically, I am not sure if the networks could actually sustain users with unlimited bandwidth out of their homes - at least not at acceptable levels. I am not privy to this kind of information, so its speculation. But unless ISP's are prepared for it, everyone's bandwidth (especially at popular Internet times) could go down because of a minority. And I don't pay so that a minority can slow down my Internet.
False advertising? - yes and pretty much outdated. You should be informed that your bandwidth is capped at reasonable levels based on some average use scale or something. This scale or metric should be available to you online, updated regularly and frozen at a certain time for billing the next month. A system like this would at least take into account the majority/minority of users in a hopefully objective way.
My understanding of 'unlimited access' is that you have a no-restrictions 24/7 ability to access your ISP (dial in or turn on your cable modem and be able to connect to them) and not unlimited internet access.
It's all a matter of interpretation...
What legitimate need does a single person have when downloading 40 gigs of data over a short period of time?
The single most obvious answer is videophone. Someone streaming the high-res output of a firewire camera can generate gigabytes of new data every hour, copyrighted only to him.
Another possible answer: He may be downloading music and movie files, and he could've paid for them. Or (more likely, today) he could be collecting hundreds of huge, public-domain movies
While it's currently true that no major legit service offers decent digital movie downloads, the ISP industry shouldn't assume it has to stay this way. If they advertise unlimited, they should try to provide it, or change the ads.
It's quite reasonable to suspect that if 40GB of data was taking place of the port Kazaa uses, that he's not transfering a family photo album or business documents from his office network.
If criminal activity is suspected, they should contact the police.
An ideal guinea pig would be someone who downloaded a bunch of ISOs (say for 3 or 4 different linux distributions) and then got hit with one of these letters. However, I don't see that happening. I also don't see people who get hit with these letters mentioning exactly what they were using the bandwidth for. Surely if they're not at fault, they should say what they were doing so that the EFF or other groups could help them fight the cable companies. I'm also betting they care more about outbound traffic than inbound traffic.
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
I've only come across one truly unlimited ISP and that is Demon in the UK. Using their Premier Plus for a signtificant monthly fee you do get 24x7x365 access on ISDN only.
Its not cheap but you do get your moneys worth for those who can't get broadband
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
Earthlink caps newsgroups. I think it is about 3 gig in a 30 day period before they throttle the connection to 1/2 speed for broadband customers. This effects everyone who uses the binary groups. I switched to a dedicated new server, Astraweb.
The real problem here is lack of competition. Most broadband is handled by only a few companies. The only new competitor I see out there is speakeasy, and I've been giving them a real close look, and so far it looks good.
I'm not saying that everybody who has high download bandwidth usage and low upload usage is innocent; there are a lot of leechers who do just that. However, there's so many file sharers that with my low upload usage I dropped off the list of people my provider was after.
My campus network recently went to a network-usage-based billing system, where you get the first 2GB for "free" (you're already paying ~$20 per month for access), and then every megabyte over that is 0.3 cents. Although I was a bit wary of the system originally, I think it's helped a lot. Students who used to just let Kazaa sit uploading all day have learned to prevent or limit sharing music (probably helps get the RIAA off everyone's back here), and it helps find viruses on computers of people who are not as computer-savvy. Case in point is my girlfriend. The second month here, she supposedly had 30 GB of traffic. I realized this was ridiculous because she only had a 40 GB harddrive, and it was still half-empty (and she wasn't sharing anything on Kazaa). A quick investigation on my part led to the discovery of a trojan horse, using her computer as a porn server. Although IT has no refund policy for such occurances, they are willing to forgive a month's traffic for each user once in your life, so she didn't have to pay the $80 that the virus would have costed her.
On the whole, I have not noticed an increase in speed this year, as opposed to last year, but the network was pretty fast to begin with, and I'm not a very heavy user. The nice thing is that if I don't go over (which has only happened once), I'm paying half as much for the connection, and people who actually use a lot of bandwidth are paying for it.
This side up.
I've used cable modems from Time Warner's Roadrunner service in the Austin area for several years, and sometimes have been impressed with the bandwidth we (2-4 housemates) got, regularly sustaining several hundred kB/sec over long periods downloading ISOs while some of the housemates (not me, of course) were P2Ping.
With a recent move, I switched to Earthlink, because they could be billed with the cable, presumably (i thought) used some of the same infrastructure as Roadrunner, and were *cheaper*. While we're now in a different neighborhood, our connection is significantly worse. Besides things seeming to slow to a crawl now and then, our connection regularly fails once every day or three, requiring a reset of our connection.
I guess you get what you pay for...
Even if you transfered those files over a Kazaa port, they would still be those same, legitimate files. The transport method doesn't make them illicit. Which means anyone who trasnfers files over kazaa could be doing it with nicey nice intent. Holy cow, a legitmate use for Peer to Peer!
Th
You would be able to pay per bandwith used. IE sign up for 5 Gb a month, your ISP is nice enough to give you an Online Tool that will calculate how much you have left and allow you to buy more at a resonable cost. O way i expected ISP to act resonably. Nevermind move along
A psychopath can't tell the difference between right and wrong. A sociopath knows the difference - he just doesn't care.
How much does an ISP actually potentially "lose" if a few clients are using their full bandwidth almost constantly? I mean, that's one high-bandwidth user for every ten that are low to average at best? In my community there about about 30 low bandwidth users to 1 high bandwidth users. By low bandwidth I'm referring to Grandma and Grandpa who check their e-mail at Yahoo once a week on a good week; Mom and Dad who check their stock quotes once a day; and a small business that checks inventory prices once a day. If everyone was a "Normal User" by ISP standards, they'd probably be putting out more bandwidth than what they are now. Right?
-----
Make Love not [Browser] War!
This is a completely bass akward way of looking at it, which was the original poster's point.
Your line of arguing might extend to the pleding the fifth. "If he has nothing to hide, why doesn't he say anything?"
No, innocent until proven guilty means exactly that.
I don't see anyone arguing against bandwidth limits, rather that they need to be spelled out.
Examples of legitimate use might be playing online games, streaming online video, doing X over the network, etc.
Until you know *exactly* what is being done, you can't argue whether or not its legitimate (especially since you never define legitimate).
- Serge
The most common approach taken is the "Well, the only way you could be using this much bandwidth is if you are doing X, Y and Z, all of which are prohibited in your terms of service agreement."
And you know what, I think they're correct. The only ways I can think of to be using this much bandwidth are:
Servers, which are generally prohibited. I'd say most of the ones set up in homes that are using excessive bandwidth are probably transfering some form of copyrighted content. If you hold the copyright and you're giving it away in mass, you're most likely charging for it; in which case you should be using a busines class and not a residential class service.
This also applies to transfering large files regularly back and forth between work. If the files are hundreds of gigs large, they're probably offsite backups of some sort, and not word documents, spreadsheets....drawings.
These are really the major ones that I can think of excluding P2P which is really just another form of a server.
Yeah I know...you all want a T1 for $40.00 a month, and you feel wronged when you don't get it.
-Chris
--an unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys--
here in cozy little denmark we have two majoy ISPs, Cybercity and TDC, and theyre having a pricewar at the moment so all customers are receiving free upgrades, i think they are somehow encouraging us to be more online in denmark
example:
tdc lowers prices, cybercity upgrades all 512Kb/sec acounts to 1MB accounts (only 128 KB/sec upload though)
*resistance is futile, or fuzzy, i dunno*
I am running a webserver off my cable modem for some friends of mine. (A mechanism for downloading stuff and a application server running a chat forum).
Since getting cable modem access, basically since the first day it was available, I've noticed my ISP has gotten "smarter" and I would have to work around their attempts to clobber my webserver.
1. They said in the TOS we are not allowed to run servers. (HA! NICE TRY!!)
2. My cable modem 'resets' whenever I upload for a random period of time
3. They blocked popular ports 80 and 8080... and probably ports like 21, 2121 for FTP also.
4. And the latest, they blocked HTTP requests starting w/ "www" either in or out. Meaning, when people type www.domainname.com which is DNSed to my cable modem, they get nothing.. but main.domainname.com is reachable.
I fear that they may get smarter and start blocking all HTTP requests into the gateways. But im gonna use all the possible bandwith i can possibly get. Word.
That's fine, I realize there are market realities to being an ISP, but don't advertise it as unlimited if it's not. In other words, don't advertise a service you aren't willing to actually provide. Novel concept, I realize.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
What legitimate need does a single person have when downloading 40 gigs of data over a short period of time?
Obviously, you don't use Windows XP. How big is a Service Pack these days?
A long time ago.. (6-7 years ago)... Unlimited meant for me "unlimited time on the phone", before broadband and I had a one year contract with my isp at the time.. At the end of the year, the guy basicly told me I was hogging his modem all the time (which wasnt entirely false..). So I just went to another ISP.. and that was it.. he lost a client, too bad for him...
;) ....
;)
Another little story, at my school we have places where we can plug in our laptop and have a login on to the network.. and they'd email us when we go over 500megs/day.. This is not in a dorm or something, I mean downloading 500 megs/day in a "public" place.. school cafeteria and some classes.. And that's only downloading from outside the school network, so it doesnt count Linux distribution isos and other stuff for which we have a local mirror.. And I know quite a few people (big kazaa users) who received the email everyday for the whole year and there never was any sanction.. But I know that someone looked over those logs because one day I downloaded debian/sparc isos and I got an email from a sysadmin telling me he had a local mirror of deb, but he hadnt noticed I was downloading the sparc edition
This comment is boring.. sorry..
of England we have it real tough. I'm paying 60 (~$90) a month to Brutish Telecom for a 64K ISDN line. Then there is another 15 a month to an ISP who has just capped me at 150 hours per month. They threaten to cut me off if my usage is not reduced over the next month, but give me no way to monitor this. In a household with 2 teleworkers, a porn-addicted student plus a ticklish router it is waaay too easy to exceed the 'limits'. It looks like Freeserve will be getting my dosh after Christmas.
Measuring *his* bandwidth in terms of movies, perhaps yes.. but for measuring mine? Not at all...
Maybe this is a bit offtopic, but talks about how ISP do whatever they want.
I live in Argentina, i pay for a crappy 256k/s ADSL connection and I had several "fights" with my ISP. The download and upload was slow, so I picked up the telephone and called the ISP (Speedy). They show how fast you can download a file from THEIR SERVERS.
I said "Hey, but i never download files from your servers", so after a lot of calls, they told me that they only ensures the 2% of your bandwith! So you can't say anything if your download works worse than using a modem.
I asked them to tell me where they inform the people about this, nobody answered me.
ajf
Right now many ISPs are vague about upper limits. This is good. Here's why: consider the alternative. If an ISP needs to choose a hard limit then they need to choose a bandwidth that they can guarantee. If they make such a choice then they weill calculate based on the worst case scenario of many people using that bandwidth simultaneously and everyone will get throttled to a very low bandwidth cap. But when the ISP uses the vague approach you can use the bandwidth of other people who aren't saturating the cables. Another approach would be for customers to pay for bandwidth per bit - but that would make things expensive for the heavy users. By having things vague the low bandwidth users effectively subsidise the high bandwidth users. So if you're a heavy user it's in your interest not to complain about the status quo too loudly - you're the one who benefits.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
downloading and printing out investment reports, all of which are in .pdf form (my bedtime reading). On a normal day, just there I can run up to 2GB of downloads
.pdfs every night?! That is one hell of alot of dead trees!
You print out 2GB of
I had problems with my ISP over this, but when I explained that I was a Ninnle Linux developer, and spent time downloading the latest Ninnle CD iso's, they let me have at it. Turns out that these people use Ninnle on their servers!
No. If he pays for unlimited bandwidth... they shouldn't be comparing it to anything. It's none of their business.
It's pretty dumb to accuse your own customers of breaking the law. Especially when the law protects your business from any resulting liability.
It was my impression that "unlimited" meant you could connect all the time, compared to previous hour-limited contracts. It never meant unlimited up/downloading bytes.
I don't personally care how they measure my bandwidth, because "unlimited" doesn't depend on units.
I disagree.. What happends if you are a student and you are building a research project to crawl all news papers on the web.. you download 1.5GB a day of news / images.
There..
The legal term for this is Bullshit!
If they advertise an unlimited home account, that's what it is, an unlimited home account. If you have unlimited local calling on your home phone, you might only use it for a hour or so a month but still pay the monthly fee. If you suddenly change your calling pattern and start talking to friends 12 hours a day, seven days a week, you don't expect them to tell you that you now have to get a business line; you have unlimited local calling! The same is true for an Internet connection. Unlimited was advertised, unlimited is what you paid for, anything less than unlimited is fraud.
And I'd really like to hear if any of the victims of this fraud are downloading lots from the ISP's own news servers. Does the legal term "attractive nuisance" come to mind?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Pacbell DSL does not limit my bandwidth.
Pacbell is not a company affiliated with movie studios. Pacbell does not care how many movies I download.
If you go with Cable broadband, you get what you deserve.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
(Acceptable Usage Policy / Terms of Service)
There's normally some sort of clause in there, about how they have the right to refluse you service. It's true in almost every industry out there. [I think medical, and insurance have some issues, where they're not allowed to reject you outright, but I'm not in either of those industries, so I'm bound to be wrong].
ISPs are not in the business to lose money. If they have someone filling their pipe 24x7, it's costing them more money than what they're bringing in. It doesn't make sense from a commercial standpoint to provide service to these people, and it's entirely possible that those people are detrimentally impacting the service for the rest of the customers.
I used to work for an ISP, but before the days of DSL, and I know our main issue was people staying dialed up all the time (a phone line was costing us $70/month, we were charging $20/month). Our AUP had stated specifically 'unlimited personal interactive use'. Now, we didn't go after those people who were sharing with their family, or stuff like that, but if you were up 24x7, we took issue -- you had to sleep sometime, and that was not part of the 'unlimited' plan.
[that's not to say that someone downloading a software update overnight, they weren't, unless they were doing it every night (we had a user who had less than 1 hour offline, over a 3 week period, and we had a plan for dedicated line, and it was more than $20/months).
So, let's look at this from the ISP's side -- they let you get away with it. They let your friends get away with it. They lose money. They go out of business. You have to find a new ISP, that might be even less forgiving.
So, my message to you -- get over it. There is no such thing as a free ride, and you shouldn't ever expect to get one. Talk to your ISP. Talk to a supervisor or manager, explain what your usage pattern is, and why you're doing it. Ask them if they can work with you. Odds are, they will, if you make some concessions. They might tell you what their off-peak times are, and so, if you run all of your massive downloads at that time, it won't impact them as much. Maybe you can agree to traffic shaping at the really bad times.
[we had users that we agreed to leave on, even with them online for 16+hrs/day, with the understanding that should the modem banks fill up, they'd be knocked offline to make room for other users]
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
If you did sign up for "unlimited" services and find yourself in this predicament, what have you done to get your bandwidth issues resolved?
You can use the built-in traffic control capabilities in the Linux kernel. It's call 'tc' for traffic control.
A more reasonable solution, that some ISPs are looking at is to throttle P2P traffic so that it never takes up more than say 30% of their bandwidth. They use layer 7 packet inspection from guys like P-Cube and Ellacoya .
The rationale? always-on users want to use their P2P stuff, but are not sensitive about the speeds that they get it - they'll just queue up a load of files and come back next morning.
It seems to me like the least worst approach, and is certainly better than hard caps. One benefit for the customer is Web traffic will usually still fly, even though P2P is crawling. I believe Telenor in Sweden is using this stuff.
That might get into ISP restrictions on how you use your account. Some, especially the Cable Broadband providers, specify that you cannot use your account for business. You have to get special "business accounts" with usually higher fees.
They're doing the same thing here, in Brazil. Speedy (this is how Telefonica, Sao Paulo's telephone company, calls their ADSL thing) is being limited to 3GB/month in the 300kbps plan. You're supposed to pay US$0.03 per megabyte that surpasses this limit (!!)...
Hopefully this is only for new clients. Older (like me) gets unlimited access...
They don't want Michael Sims for a customer.
Anyone who does not want him is OK in my book. Your post only confirms my high opinion of Speakeasy.
It would be the bank's fault for making it easy to punch through to the other boxes. They are supposed to provide secure storage.
So why can't ISP's learn to regulate their customers' bandwidth usage if its such a problem?
Not knowing all the details, I might assume that this person is a taper (someone who goes to a concert and legally tapes a show) and then shares their collection with others. After doing this myself I could easily see how you could transfer 40gb without pirating anything.
I rather risk getting a nasty letter, then have slow service, because there are too many bandwidth hogs on my node.
Why are advertisers allowed to say one thing in a commercial loud and clear, but then contradict it completely with fine print? Why is this OK? There's the example you give. There are the weight-loss pills that say "You'll lose weight!" but claim "Your results may vary" at the bottom. There are the male enhancement pills that claim "Increased size" but then say "These statements not evaluated by the FDA" at the bottom. In other words, we're talking out of our asses here.
So I'm allowed to flat-out lie in big bold letters or audio on a commercial so long as I tell the truth somewhere else? Can I say "Free car with purchase of a value meal" and then say "Car actually costs $20,000" at the bottom?
What's the limit with this crap?
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
They'd never dare to limit my bandw~!@@#
NO CARRIER
However, it's not a great strategy for them. Good businesses protect their customers, and assume the best.
.02.
Your kidding right? Haha, you must be. Let me explain how it really works out there.
For those of you lucky enough to have freedom of ISPs you better be thanking your lucky fucking stars. There are people (like me) that have had multiple types of Internet over the years (dialup, 640/160 DSL, 768/128 DSL, 3000/384 Cable, 1500/128 Cable, 1500/256 Cable, 1800/256 Cable and soon to be 3000/256 Cable). I have had a handful of providers and a wide range of acceptable connections, speed, and tech support.
I currently live in a suburb of Minneapolis. We have two choices currently (where I live)... Comcast cable (which raised the rates on those that don't want their CATV to over $50 if you have your own modem) and Wireless (which has a $500 setup fee and slow speeds (640/640 IIRC)).
Comcast comes in and takes over an area, raises prices because there are no other options for HSD, and then sets these invisible caps...
Do you really fucking think that Comcast gives a flying rats ass if I go over my invisible limit and they dump me (mind you, they refuse to tell you what the cap is, how they determine it, how you should determine it, how you should protect yourself from it, etc)? They don't for one simple reason... MORE MONEY. If I go over that limit I am hogging bandwith money from others that only check email and a few webpages a day...
With 25 million subscribers, moving to a 3mbit speed cap, and needing more money, they are doing exactly the best thing to save their bandwith costs, dumping those users that use the service the way it should be.
Sadly we have no recourse. 90% of their users aren't going to start pegging their bandwith usage and they are going to keep dropping off the high-end users until they are satisfied they are raking in enough dough.
Sad but true... Just my worthless
What legitimate need does a single person have when downloading 40 gigs of data over a short period of time?
If he ran rsync between his home PC and a work PC to maintain file state across two systems, the first time he could easily send 40GB to the home PC as quickly as the bandwidth would allow.
Maybe there are better ways to do this, and maybe most people would just ssh or vpn in to the work PC, but if you're told your usage of the bandwidth is unlimited, why not use it as you want?
I suppose he could have also downloaded a bunch of ISOs all at the same time, but unless he got the latest and a few historic versions of all the Linux and BSD distros, I don't see that adding up to 40GB.
-- Fratz, human
I used to work for an ISP where our contract stipulated that 'we' specified what 'unlimited active use' meant. Meaning we could be cop, judge, and jury. Typically it meant that you had to be sitting in front of your computer. However it also meant that our acceptable use policy said that we could whack your account if we thought your activites were questionable.
have been doing this; their bandwidth limit is 1GB/day up to a total of 5GB/week. They have been blaming their various recent problems on a few bandwidth hogs but I think it's more likely they just haven't invested in enough infrastructure.
I wouldn't normally get anywhere near this bandwidth limit but it does piss me off: what about the once every year or so when I might want to burn a set of ISOs for a distribution? It would suck to have to do so over ten days or thereabouts; frankly, I think I'll just take the chance on the occasional overuse and if virgin.net don't like it they can lose my custom.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
nah, not in metro areas. My place of employment gets 1GB of bandwith from QWest for what they used to pay for two T1 lines.
The days of limited bandwith are over.
It seems to be all cable companies that are pulling these kinds of tricks on their customers. I've used a number of DSL carriers over the years and frequently max out my bandwidth of hours at a time and never get a complaint. You might say that cable companies provide more bandwidth to their customers, but more and more frequently they are going the route of bandwidth equal to or less than a standard 1.5/256 DSL, and still imposing these rules. Either their technology has that much more overhead (doubtful, the network is already in place for TV, just like the PSTN network is in place for voice), or they are just that much more greedy.
I got one about 4-5 years ago when I was still on dial up. The ISP had really good connections and ping times so I signed up with them.
They had their servers automatically disconnect you after 8 hours (To prevent idling). This didn't really bother me though, I had my routing program just reconnect, mainly for 2 reasons:
1. My dad is a retard about computers and I got tired of explaining how to connect everyday
2. I was downloading a LOT, so if I wanted the files anytime soon, I had to have it download it overnight.
Now, the service was also advertised as unlimited, and I wasn't idling. So when I got the letter saying that my time online was considered "excessive" (over 600 hours/month) and there was no way I could be online the whole time, I was pissed. They were threatening to charge me extra every month for violating their acceptable user policy (Which was incredibly vague on the subject). So I went over there and tried to explain that yes, I was downloading the whole time. Basically they didn't care and still threatened me so I quit my service right on the spot. I went to another ISP that didn't care that was just as good.
I found out later that their own employees got the same letters and not even they could get out of it.
Now this is of course more difficult for people who are on broadband and don't really have much of a choice outside of maybe one other company, but you can vote with your money.
> guilty until proven innocent?
You're confusing criminal law with civil. Companies can find you guilty of violating the contract at their discretion. You have the recourse of suing them if you feel that they didn't live up to their end of the deal, but they can do pretty much whatever they please.
Josh Woodward
>However, it's not a great strategy for them.
Actually its a great one. If they get rid of, say, the top 10% of users that use up greater than 10% of the resources, then they will be ahead of the game. Reduce costs per customer and better performance/satisfaction for the other 90%.
>such businesses do not go around snooping on their customers.
Banks do, they report movements of large amounts of money.
Stores do, they video tape everything you do when you walk in, they store and track your purchase data.
Online stores do, they suggest books based on what I buy.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Here's the ever-lengthy Sympatico User Agreements:
http://service1.sympatico.ca/ServiceDesk/ServiceD
Acceptable Use Policy - www.aup.sympatico.ca
"Network / Security
In addition to these Policies, while using your Sympatico account, you are prohibited from conducting activities that include, but are not limited to:
Glad someone mentioned about the UK situation. One question though, with BT's 'unlimited' service... I can't remember if they still use the 'unlimited' word in their adverts (even though they do have the small print stating the restrictions). My point is, if any of the ISP's do advertise an 'unlimited' service (but do have active capping), couldn't they be easily bitch slapped down by the ASA (al la the Apple G5 - fastest PC in the world).
While I was on dialup, I always stuck with Freeswerve Anytime, and they never seemed to have any usage caps in place, whereas my friend was on the BT equivalent, left it connected overnight and immediately get a warning e-mail. At least I'm one of those fortunate to have had their 'unviable' exchanges LLU'd for broadband (damn BT to Heck and then Hell!). But for the meantime, I don't see any problems with Pipemedia DSL... plus I do throttle my usage, just incase :-)
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
How is my post a "troll"? Could a moderator with a spine grow enough of a pair to tell me this?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
What unlimited access means is you have unlimited network saccess. So you're conected to the network 24/7. 99% of the time it doest mean unlimited bandwidth usage. In this situation both the consumer and the ISP are at fault. You for not taking the time to investigate the service conditions and the ISP for not making them more clear.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
It's more like a communal water tank. One with a sign that say "take all the water you want!". And then they ban you from using it when you take a lot of water.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
How many knowledgable techies are going to want to deal with idiots complaining their internet is slow, when its there fucking fault for having a dozen worms blasting traffic non-stop. But of course, they won't secure their machine, because they "have nothing anyone would want to hack". You get a script reading dumbass because 99.9% of people who call are retarded.
Let's say that user X has made a fuss over a terminated account and notifies a local newspaper that they local ISP is unjustly terminating accounts. If an ISP has been asked by a reporter why they terminated user X's account, they have a right to state their reason.
But it's all pointless because the original posted didn't give anything other than a paraphrase of what an ISP might have said and not citing any other specifics. The whole argument was over "innocent until proven guilty" because an ISP compared a users usage to a certain number of movies. My post was an attempt at explaining why they may have chosen to state bandwidth usage in that way.
Totally correct. It is their legal right.
I have actually seen a TOS that said that the ISP's decision were final. They gave you two oportunities to appeal to them, but after that, whatever they said, went. Not sure if this would hold up in front of a real judge.
No sig
he could be collecting hundreds of huge, public-domain movies
Any of them "talkies?"
Not as scarce as it is made out to be. It was in the days of dial-up, but not now. Afterall, we have miles and miles of unused lines sitting around unsued now. The only other issue is that they built this big network and have this small, small gateway out the the big, bad interent. In short, they screwed up.
Thank you everyone for taking the first sentance I wrote and then basing arguments on solely that statement.
Talk about not reading the fucking article. Seems that most people couldn't even read my entire post.
As I.S.Ps go after people using p2p, they continue airing commericals that promote using the service to download movies and music.
With my ISP (Bell Canada) they advertized unlimited and then suddenly switched to a 5gb/month cap. I know a few of my friends hit it and they started charging them more money a month. Then just recently I hear that they removed it because their competitor Rogers psyched them out with the whole cap thing.
My friends who are able to get rogers actually got a speed *increase* the other month too.
When they advertise unlimited high speed access over here in Quebec, they advertise it as unlimited time and in the fine print tell how many gigs in upload and download can be done each month.
Take Videotron for example, leader in High-speed access Internet in Quebec. Advertised at 34.95CAN$+taxes each month (provided you bought the modem), you have unlimited time access and 15 gigs in download and 5 gigs in upload. (with speeds of 375k/sec in download and 50k/sec in upload)
At 49.99CAN$ (provided you bought the modem), you get unlimited time, unlimited download, unlimited upload, speeds of 450k/sec in download and 80 or 100k/sec in upload.
Other providers like Bell offer if I'm not mistaken unlimited time and bandwidth for 39.99CAN$, though the speeds are about 80k upload and 150k download.
Bottom line is, everything is advertised as what you get, though Sympatico capped the download one year ago and decided to uncap them after a few months because they were losing too many customers.
Videotron so far has been the only provider to offer more and more for the same price. It started as 6 gigs in download and upload combined, then 6 gigs in download and 1 gig in upload, then 10 gigs in download and 5 gigs in upload, then they upped the downloading speed from ~300k/sec to ~375k/sec and the upload from 15k/sec to 50k/sec and now we have 15 gigs in download and 5 gigs in upload. I think they're one of the rase case that with time the quality of the service became better, while the monthly price rose by 5$ over a 6 year period .
Shaw Cable is actually quite evil. They recently started harassing customers over using more than a certain *unknown* ammount of bandwidth. You see, shaw premium has no limit per se... Not that they're allowed to tell you anyways. The canned line they will feed you whenever you ask what your bandwidth limit is this, "Our business account users are limited to 50GB a month, and you need to be using significantly less bandwidth than that." When they ask you how much less they will repeatedly refuse to tell you. If you complain about buying the service under the notion that it was "unlimited", they will tell you that just applies to the times when you can connect to the internet. (Which is technically false, since they are sometimes down.)
For several months Shaw contacted me and fed me this line and said either I'd have to reduce my traffic or sign up for a buisness account. So for 4 months in a row I reduced my usage *every* month, eventually cutting my usage in half. Every month it was the same. Reduce your bandwidth by an unknown ammount or pay them more money. Then, with absolutely *no* warning, they shut off my cable. I called them and demanded to know why a paying customer had been cut off without warning. I got nothing but vapid droolers on the line of course. None of them could even give me a name to report to the better buisness bureau. The kicker is that by that point I was using much less bandwidth than I had been using for about 6 months prior to the start of this ordeal without complaint from Shaw. Astonishingly enough, those 6 months were a particularily high workload time for me, so I was using *much* less bandwidth than I had in the past!
Bottom Line:
-Shaw Unlimited Cable is limited. They just can't tell you what that limit is.
-That limit has been greatly reduced from what it was in the past.
-They *will* cut you off, and without warning. (This should be illegal)
-They are still advertising their service as being "unlimited".
-Prices are higher than ever.
-Telus is the local DSL provider, but they have ridiculously low published bandwidth limits. (10GB a month!) I have friends on their service who are definately using more than that without complaint, but I'm just not willing to sign up for a service that's likely to do exactly what Shaw has done to me.
I agree that if the contract says "unlimited," the meaning of that is pretty clear, but...
Who in hell has time to *use* all that downloaded material? How many movies can you watch in a month? How much music can you listen to? How much software do you need, or can you even use? How much porn?
With this kind of gluttony, one might wonder what this stuff is really being used for -- redistribution, perhaps?
Good for them. I wish more ISP's would scan for virus activity and shut down the perpetrators. The college I'm at shuts you down if you do.
And yes, you have to go to another computer and download removal tools. Have you noticed that Symantec generally keeps their removal tools under 1.44 MB? Convenient, eh? Or yes, you can burn them.
It's happened to me when I didn't lock down a windows box fast enough after an install. And I deserved it. That's the price of not correctly installing/administring your box.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Perhaps the ISP's are concerned about their own liability for their customers' (potentially illegal) activities. The question of whether an ISP is liable or not appears to still be up in the air in some countries. It makes sense that they would take actions to reduce their liability. Which do you think is likely to cost them more, a lawsuit from a record company or a few lost customers?
Business accounts exist for one reason only, to charge people with deeper pockets more money for the same thing. It is called discriminatory pricing.
Yep. I was even cursed out by the security admin because supposedly no person should need a 24/7 connection. It took 3 days to get a real person to talk to me and all 3 days I was shut off. They refused to reimburse me for the 3 days so I found another ISP. Apparently, according to him, you shouldn't need to check email every 20 mins when you're looking for a job & corresponding with employers. I also wasn't supposed to play games for more than an hour as well. Great service there...cuss out the customer & threaten to cut you off & ban you for explaining why you were on so much.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
If you want to rip on people for being pathetic, at least drop the livejournal.com thing.
But aren't porn movies copyrighted too?
If he ran rsync between his home PC and a work PC to maintain file state across two systems, the first time he could easily send 40GB to the home PC as quickly as the bandwidth would allow.
That qualifies as buisiness use, and would violate most home users TOS.
Just kidding.
What I've got from Comcast is not comparible to a T1 except that it transmits IP traffic.
What are the things that I can't do on a cable modem that I can with an ISP:
1) Run a server
2) Get a block of IP addresses
3) Run a VPN
4) Run a business
What else is different?
Well:
1) There is no SLA
2) #1 means that sometimes the DNS gets so slow that you can't use it
3) It means that if there is a problem, the most they'll do is "send somebody to look at it"
4) I can't get a status update
5) I can't get bandwidth utilization charts
6) If I use a firewall (as recommended) the help desk won't help me.
7) There is some vague bandwidth limit that they'll only tell me about if I go over it.
So why is the cost so high for a T1?
Well, the phone company's price in many cases is 1/2 the cost of the T1. That's right.
So you add that up together, and you know what you discover? That the Cable Modem is a great deal for downloading stuff from the internet, but not much else, because everything else is against the AUP.
But they *aren't* giving me a bargain with my cable modem, because its oh-so-very restricted.
I'm signed up for cable internet with telenet
Bandwidth limits are cable speeds down, and 16KB/sec up. Volume limits are 10 gig total, of which 15 percent (or 1.5 gig) up in the last 30 days. Go over the limit in a 30 day period and you get thrown on narrowband, which is about the same speed as a 33.6 modem, until the volume over the last 30 days sinks below the limits again. If for some reason you need more volume, you can rent it in 1 gig blocks for 1 euro / block / month, of which again 15 percent can be upload, up to a maximum of 20 blocks (30 gig total, 4.5 gig up).
It's a pretty fair deal, for the price. And there's no way you can be thrown off for using up more than your share. If you dl too much, it's narrowband for you, but that doesn't have any consequences for your account other than making it really slow for a while.
I don't get why all isp's don't adopt this kind of system, if they're going to impose volume limits anyway.
This is simply not true. Is this person working for Cox? This is blatant and very ignorant lie.
Cox has download limit of 3GB a month. Its all spelled out at their website at: http://www.cox.com/Phoenix/coxhighspeedinternet/
Road Runner spent lots of time and money developing software to monitor user usage. It was possible not only to measure bandwidth usage (bytes in/bytes out), but to log IP addresses and ports. There was one problem, though: Road Runner's affiliates (e. g., Time Warner Cable) were more or less autonomous, and set their own policies and had their own agendas. So as far as I know, RR has never used these tools. There was much talk at RR of "abusers", yet, when you asked people there who used this term the difference between an "abuser" and a "customer", invariable they didn't have a clue. I'd say about 1% of RR customers used 50% or more of his available bandwidth. Anyone care to share their experiences with RR? In general I found them very professional and competent, but each department was almost completely autonomous and there was very little interdepartmental cooperation (with the possible exception of 2001 when AOL was threatening to swallow RR whole).
Oh, so you don't mind if all your neighboors decide to sit down every night and use as much bandwidth as their connections can consume?
Of course, that might mean that your unlimited connection suddenly only gets dial-up speeds doesn't it, but that's ok because they're paying for "unlimited" service.
But one could also argue that "unlimited" means unlimited bandwidth and you should be able to get 100 terabits per second.
P.S. "unlimited" when used in ISP terms is in relation to old standards of hourly fees as used by AOL, Prodigy, CompuServe, etc. You have to use some common sense.
But, you have to have some way to encourage people to go for punitive damages. If not, then why would people go for them?
Fight Spammers!
My ISP (Wide Open West) limits my download speed to the rate that I have paid for. This is simply not an issue for them.
"What legitimate need does a single person have when downloading 40 gigs of data over a short period of time?" Some of us actually use computers for real work. I work with GPS data sampled at 5.714 MHz. During processing, I have files that are over 1 GB for each minute of data.
I used to get letters saying I was downloading too much. But that was before I figured out how to trick my ISP into never finding out how much bandwidth I use. :) :) :P
My cable modem is pre-DOCSIS.. which means that the UL/DL totals are stored in the modem itself. If I simply press the reset switch on the cable modem every few hours, it resets the UL/DL totals, and my ISP never finds out about it.
Using this method, I usually upload about 40gb/month and download approx 80gb/month, and I haven't received a "violation of AUP" letter in well over a year (since I started using this trick, actually.)
Oh, and my bandwidth is about 4800kbit down/960kbit up. Not bad for $40/month CDN.
i worked in tech support for a large brittish isp for a short while, about a year ago. there was a big problem with people keeping their internet connections open when they're not really using them. remember we're talking about diaup connections here, 56k and isdn modems.
the problem was not really the bandwidth, because if you're not surfing or doing somoething then you're not really using any bandwidth. the problem was that idle connections left open consume a modem in the isp's modem bank, so other people cannot connect at all when ther's no modems left.
at the time they were changing their contract from essentially: '24 hours a day any time you like for as long as you like' to something more like 'x number of hours a month, then it runs out'.
people were always furious because they hadn't read the conditions and had used their connection for more than 12 hours in a 24 hour period and been barred.
in ireland there was uproar two years ago when a major isp changed the terms of their 'unlimited' connection to restrict useage because they claimed they couldn't keep up. anyone who kicked up enough of a fuss was allowed to keep their connection because it was in their contract that it was unlimited. anyone who didn't complain lost their 'unlimited' contract. i believe some people still have these contracts, because it was not a condition of the contract that further restrictions could be added later.
funny story: in the job i mentioned, anyone who breached the 12 hour rule was 'upgraded' to use another telephone number. they would call up conplaining 'i can't connect' and we would check their file and see that they'd been flagged as abnormally high users. we would tell them that, because they were heavy users of the service they had been changed to our 'high useage' dialup number, and help them change their settings to dial the new number, and they were so happy that they had been recognised and helped.
of course, now they were neatly switched to another modem bank along with all their selfish idle connection loving kindred, and could barely connect anymore. we were instructed that, if anyone called complaining that their new high useage dialup number wasn't good, or they couldn't connect, we were to get rid of them quickly. this is a reputable firm, but they couldn't have people tying up a modem, when they were sleeping, or out of the house, or otherwise not using it.
(null)
Although I have not had the issue of being told that I am using too much bandwidth, my service provider did call my mother (yeah, college is expensive, so I live with the folks. Earn my rent through tech support:) at work and threaten to sue her. Why? Because I had logged into my company's VPN to check my e-mail. Once. For maybe an hour. They told me this violated my user agreement because this was considered "business use." Now, I do not run anything out of my home, I was just on call that weekend and decided to check my e-mail for once. Anyways, called around and around for a couple days, checked my user agreement, didnt say a word, and then finally called somebody in their legal dept, and was told that they have no such legal action pending. Don't know if it ever was true or if they got sick of me calling every day, but I'm never buying service from these guys again. Apparently, I'm not the only one, cause there are a couple pending customer action forms out on them. Take that sub-space!
ah, there are no limits to the amount of pr0n you can use. :-)
I've been with Speakeasy for about a year now and other than a few hours here and there (and today, a good part of Atlanta is offline at the moment) have had wonderful service with them.
The server permissions were a big selling point for me. I run a family webserver and some test applications from time to time from home.
As for the bandwidth, never have had a problem. Would like unlimited newsgroup access (1gb limit per month) but thats ok. I have a couple of VPNs that are always moving data from here to the office or to client locations.
You can provide paid WAP services to your neighbors if you so desire in their NetShare program. (
https://www.speakeasy.net/netshare/)
And did I mention the price break those in the over $100 a month range got 3 months ago? Out of the blue its announced that the 1.5/768 packages will cost less each month.
Standard referal program as well.
All in all, I agree with the parent poster. Good company, good customer service. Looking forward to another year with them.
----- LoboSoft specializes in Digital Language Lab
They're blocking my mail, depending on the content. This is mandatory and there's no way I can opt out. Pain in the ass.
And they used that same "average" excuse. This was in Ireland about 3 or so years ago, before any sort of braodband was available, and dial up connections were charged by the minute because that's how they charge local calls here. I had signed up for an Esat ISP that promised a flat rate on off-peak times and weekends with no by the minute fees during those times. So then I started playing some online games, spent quite a bit of time online, et cetera. A couple months later they sent me a letter saying I was disconnected because I was one of their top 3% or something, even though I wasn't on excessively. Then it was back to enormous monthly fees till DSL came a few months ago. So I'm just saying European ISPs have been doing this for a few years now, maybe that's where the US ISPs are getting it from...
Yup...
"Unlimited" services can't work. Someone's got to pay for the bandwidth somewhere.
I'm with Swiftel in Australia, and for AU$65/month, I get 512/128, with a 16GB/month download quota. This has built up to 16GB from the 8GB I was getting when I signed up in October. (They tend to increase user's download quotas every month or so as they receive more customers)
On top of that, p2p traffic between users in the same state doesn't count towards your quota, and a few users have set up eMule/DC++ servers (restricted to Swiftel IP ranges), which have been announced on Swiftel's user forums.
Plus, if you go over your download quota, it only costs AU$5/GB (charged per MB). Compare this to the horrendous amount Telstra charge their users.
I suppose it is truly unlimited. You just have to pay a very reasonable amount for what you use. :)
"Proudly Posting Without Reading The Article"
Unlimited is your connection. You have unlimited access to everything on the Internet. They don't censor (Unless you want them too). They won't cut you off right away if you exceed a set bandwidth limit. They will however, and do reserve the right to, charge you MORE for it. Working in an ISP, I saw this all the time. 99% of users used the system like a normal person would. We could tell who the Mp3 downloaders were and we had no problems with that. The problem came from those FTP leechers and other obvious abuses of the system. We're talking 5-6Gb a DAY. I'm not going to play innocent and say "I would never download that much etc etc." but I'd say the most I have ever downloaded in one day is about 3Gb. To be honest, if you get cut off for using excess bandwidth, you deserve it. The letter you receive from them talking about using excess bandwidth usually includes a "You should upgrade to X plan which will provide you more bandwidth" and really, if you're using it that much, then you should upgrade. Just because something is 'unlimited', doesn't mean that you're not going to pay for it.
"Anybody who tells me I can't use a program because it's not open source, go suck on rms. I'm not interested." (LT 2004)
Let the criminals and perverts sort it out amongst themselves..
hate titty pee colon slash slash
Uh, I think your confusing bandwidth speed/rate caps with transfer caps. The article/comments are about limited transfers (500MB/month or something, etc), not restriction on net traffic 'speed'.
Speed caps for home use, not a big deal. Transfer caps, that's another story.
I've gon with Metronet who charge per MB, up to a limit where they stop charging. I figured that they wouldn't try to stop me downloading if they were getting cash for it (they've lost the usage data a couple of times too:-) I used to have dial-up, which stopped working once, I rang tech support (cost me GBP3) and they said I'd used up all my unlimited access, I argued for ages and he said he'd let me off this once. I stayed with them because they were amazingly cheap.
Here's a link.
Hmm let's see...with dial up you get a max around 6k/s.
6k/s * 3600s/hr * 24hr * 30 days =
~15.5GB !
10GB/mo sounds a bit low considering. Of course broadband is still a better deal either way, not having to pay for a second phone line, being able to peak at higher than 56k, etc. But man, 10GB/mo? I think I'd be looking around at other options.
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
No, I'm most certainly not. Get a clue.
However, it's not a great strategy for them.
Yeah, angry customers are abandoning the broadband providers for good-ol' modem connections left and right. That'll show 'em.
Not as long as they can be held responsible for what you do!
If it won't boot, Fsck it!
not if you legally purchase them...
No, innocent until proven guilty means exactly that.
Where does "innocent until proven guilty" come into play? This isn't a court. Guilty until proven innocent does not always apply and it's also restricted to courts in only a handful of countries. For example, in Mexico (where I live), their law is based on Napoleonic code and the accused is required to prove their innocence.
Yeah, I use my broadband for illicit activities. I'm not sure what ISPs you people have, but I have absolutely no problems with mine.
There's nothing anyone can really do about what you download. They shouldn't be snooping to begin with. If I pay for 4.0 Mbps, then... I have every right to use that 4.0 Mbps connection.
On average, I download about 4-8 gigs a day (alt.binaries.dvdr is beautiful). I haven't received a call yet and I don't expect to.
Whether I download DVDs from usenet or PC games from IRC is absolutely none of their concern. I still pay my bills on time and that's all that matters to them.
I don't understand these freaks out there who expect everything for free. I know a freak who downloaded 200GB of stuff and then complained when his ISP cut him off.
Where do these imbeciles think ISPs get their bandwidth from?
"Totally correct. It is their legal right."
Where do you live???
At least in countries where customers have some rights left, ISPs CANNOT terminate your service for any reason.
Only if you do something serious (willingly spread worms/SPAM or don't pay your bills), your service can be terminated.
There's always a cap.. Most .nl DSL providers are up front about it; the basic, $25-30/month DSL contracts are not only limited speed, but there's a finite cap and a per-megabyte overage charge. On the higher revenue contracts (typically in the $50-80/month range) they'll tell you they you there's "no cap, but a Fair Use Policy". None of them will indicate what the FUP-cap is.
;-)
In the case of FUP what it boils down to is that they don't really care whether you go over a certain threshold, but rather, how much bandwidth there is available in your area. In DSL bandwidth is shared among all the subscribers to one telephone "switch" (CO). For residential use, they typically oversubscribe this to the tune of 1:25 - so a "T1" for every 25 people on a 1024Mbps DSL line.
If they find out that one CO is using vastly more bandwidth than planned, and there aren't that many new (and elderly) users lined up to get connected - so they can't afford to just lay down more fiber, they reserve the right to crack down on people who use more bandwidth than average. Of course they don't want to be dicks about this, so they usually target people using more than ten times the average, or the 10% "top talkers". Going after top talkers first makes a lot of sense, since the number 1 top talker probably uses half of the bandwidth of the entire neigborhood
The actual reason that most plans do NOT come with a cap is that cracking down on top talkers takes a lot of effort. Ever metering the bandwidth can take a lot money and equipment. In one of the earliest incarnations of ADSL service you could check the traffic you used online - they removed this, because all the overhead slowed down connections to the point it was costing them more in terms of bandwidth than just ignoring overages.
In fact, some of the budget plans that pretend to have a cap don't have one. It's a "special offer" for "6 months only", but in reality they don't have the infrastructure and the people to meter all bandwidth all the time and to go after people with nastygrams...
Of course, if your connection really is uncapped in the administrative sense, that doesn't mean they won't bandwidth-limit on your ass without you even knowing...
The most elegant scheme I've seen sofar is used by Bredbandbolaget (IIRC), who sell 10Mbps fiber internet access; if you go over your cap, which is specifically stated to be X GB per month, your speed simply drops to 128Kbps for the rest of the month.. Still usuable for the bare necessities (web, chat, e-mail and some windows updates), just no downloading movies until the next month/billing cycle starts. AND it's fully automated which makes it a lot cheaper than nastygrams. Winners all around.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
And I thought I led a boring life.
What legitimate need does a single person have when downloading 40 gigs of data over a short period of time?
Well, I have a perl script that polls certain newsgroups and downloads posts that may be of interest to me. It consumes about 40G/month of bandwidth (mostly while I sleep.)
I was surprised to get tagged by a Linux shop, iNebraska, when I was dialed-in constant on their "Unlimited" plan to build a new gentoo box. My only option, other than being dropped, was to upgrade from the $19.99/"Unlimited" to a $39.99/"Truly Unlimited" plan. I was frustrated to find my wife's Earthlink account had the same verbage . . . i.e. "you've signed up for an unlimited dial-up - but if you use it all the time, we'll discontinue your service." I think the problem is the false advertising when you sign up . . . the company I work for picks up the bill (usually), so let's be honest *up front* about what the $19.99 package gives you - and not hide it in the small print.
Um, sounds to me like they gave you several months of warning there. Pretty much any business offering "unlimited" anything will apply a "reasonable" limit. You can't go to an all you can eat buffet, take a nap in the booth and start eating again later, just never leaving the restaurant. You can't use your "unlimited minutues" cell phone continuously. These companies (like Shaw) don't fine you, or call the cops, or anything else, when you exceed their limit of reasonableness. They just decide to stop doing business with you. Their right, as a private company.
--
1984 was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual.
I up and download lots of lossless music. All of it legal, I might add, using a residential cable modem account.
I have a flow meter that logs my traffic:
(Month) Download Upload Combined
May 2003 51.04 GB 39.25 GB 90.29 GB
June 2003 109.75 GB 45.54 GB 155.29 GB
July 2003 96.43 GB 84.11 GB 180.54 GB
August 2003 102.83 GB 73.89 GB 176.72 GB
September 2003 122.58 GB 95.67 GB 218.25 GB
October 2003 103.40 GB 72.15 GB 175.55 GB
November 2003 88.99 GB 53.82 GB 142.81 GB
December 2003 47.01 GB 37.77 GB 84.79 GB
No cap, no menacing emails. I really can't decide if they are clueless or just alright about it. Of all the ISPs, you'd thing they'd be the ones at the forefront of interventions.
Anyone else have this kind of lax policy with Time Warner? (Please excuse the lame formatting)
If all my neighbooors saturate the node I'm on, then it's the ISP's responsibility to split the node in the interest of QOS. I know most cable companies don't guarantee a specific rate, but even they would agree that "dial-up speeds" are unacceptable.
I haven't gotten a warning from Comcast yet but I've recently (read in two days) downloaded more than 10 ISOs from major linux distros. Am I to be lumped into the "movie stealer" catagory for simply checking out my free OS choices?
All I know is that work pays for my ISP, and Comcast is on month to month...there are at least 2 other options in my area...who wants some free money?
Apple free since 1990!
" Traffic Consumption Allowances. Adelphia has the right to monitor, measure and report bandwidth consumption by You. Adelphia reserves the right to establish, modify and/or enforce consumption allowances at any time now or in the future, with or without notice, and apply a surcharge for excess usage. "
So for all of you like me that are using Adelphia cable internet services, they can terminate your account with no notice, for excessive usage based on download/upload caps they can make on the spot.
You can get the full agreement here.
It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well. - Rene Descartes (1637)
Without P2P apps, there'd be a heck of a lot less demand for broadband from teenagers and 20-somethings. Maybe the parents in the burbs just want "always-on" so they can check their email without dial up and send pictures to relatives, but let's be real, that's not driving the broadband industry.
Less than two months ago I worked for an ISP, it serviced about a 300 mile radius and had about 7000 customers. It's TOS (terms of service)was canned and podged together from other ISP's TOS. It had many restrictions and lot's of fine print. It seemed to me the owner was one part facist, one park pseudo geek, two parts ego, and three parts ass. Classic money grubbing scrooge.
On a whim he would scan the stats program for the dial-in boxes and find anyone connected over nine hours, and cut off the ones that were on the longest(usually 12 hours plus) He would then instruct us through the billing system not to reconnect them unless we tell them to go to our boradband service or find another provider. His rationalization? Dial-up was not a dedicated service, them tying up that phone line cost him money. I've had many a customer scream into the phone at me that they paid for access, and they shouldn't be penalized for using it. We also had wirless access, he had us (Sys-Admins) use HTB to throttle many PTP connections to uselessness.
People usually don't say what they will do, and rarely do what they say.
Your line of arguing might extend to the pleding the fifth. "If he has nothing to hide, why doesn't he say anything?"
Pleading the fifth implies guilt because of the way the amendment is written. It can only be invoked to prevent self-incrimination. "...nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself..."
So you're pretty much saying, "I can't say anything because if I did you would know I was guilty." However, though it implies guilt, it doesn't PROVE guilt of the specific charge. I.e. you could plead the fifth to avoid incriminating yourself in a totally unrelated matter.
AFAIK, you can't simply refuse to answer because you don't feel like it. Well you can try, but you might get held in contempt of court.
Disclaimer: IANALBIPOOTV
That's essentially what my university did. P2P was taking 99% of the bandwidth, so they simply changed all the port allocations (or something to that effect; I'm not on the inside), and now web pages fly like they should, and P2P has slowed to a virtually intolerable crawl. In addition, they keep tabs on your usage, so that if you do too much too often, they give you a phone call and shut you off. I haven't heard of anyone having a problem who wasn't doing something illegal yet.
Short answer: it works.
G
I have Telus ADSL, and they are completely upfront about what what you get. I don't do much streaming media and thus haven't come close (yet) to the 6 GB/month download cap, but since I live less than a kilometer from the CO, I routinely bounce off the 1.5 MBPS download speed cap on well-connected sites.
Just don't ask me what it's like to be a Linux user on Telus, OK? :-(
...laura
A few years back, I had an ISP which I thought offered unlimited access. One month, when my hotline server became a little extra populated, I accumulated a fair bit of bandwith on my cable modem. The limits I found out to be 5GB downloads, and 1024MB(1GB) uploads, at a aditional cost of $5 per GB over the download limit, and $5 per 128MB over the upload limit. Welllll, being a 24/7 server maxing out bandwith, I managed to run my uploads to 38GB in 18 days. And also getting files for my server, I downloaded in the range of 50GB in that time. They gave me a phone call asking me to cest and desit. I'm not sure on the fees, but I remember back then I calculated my interent bill would have been $900 some dollars for that month. (They waved the $900 bill, thankfully. :-> )
Looking at my usage with the ISP, I downloaded 5GB in a day, and uploaded 1GB to 3GB a day. With a 5GB dl and 1GB ul limit, my limit would be reached the first day. Needless to say, I used a random complaint generator, sent them the letter, and switched ISP's. 6 ISP's later, ranging from Cable Modem, to Satalight internet, I'm here happy with my slow DSL with unlimited access and reliable service.
Dollar Highway Financial News
Better business is to not be so buddy-buddy with your customers that are pushing their profit from you into the deep red line. Bandwidth does cost money, folks.
The reason ISP's use the word "unlimited" in their advertisements is because it sells more accounts than if they don't.
The fact that they are lying is really not a relevant point. Consumers will flock to the guy that says "unlimited" in his advertisements regardless if it's the truth or not. Consumers don't think that hard about the issue.
It should be obvious that you can't provide a dedicated "unlimited" 56K connection profitably at the $10-$15/mo market rate, but you will sell a lot more accounts if you say "unlimited".
This is also true in the web hosting business. I see advertisements for "Unlimited Bandwitdh" web hosting all the time. But we all know that this is neither physically possible nor economically possible. Still people sign up for these lies.
Guys like me that run businesses that want to be honest about things are punished for our truthfullness. Consumers demand to be lied to. So ISP's are forced to choose between significantly lower sales and being dishonest.
Now, I'm not saying that there aren't ISPs that try to be honest in their offerings. I could give you a list of honest ones that don't use the word unlimited unless they mean it. All I'm saying is that dialup consumers do not typicaly choose these honest guys when they see an "unlimited" offer for the same price.
Our Uni does this. It kinda sucks for bittorrent linux iso downloads, but the upshot is that http/ftp are basically untouched. So every l337 kid who is downloading mp3s on kazaa gets dicked, and the rest of us with legit purposes, like windows updates and linux downloads, can get it in a resonable amount of time. I just hope that bittorrent doesnt become the defacto standard for all distribution, coz then the internet will totally suck. For me, at least.
"Something's wrong with you...and I hope we never do meet again." - Deftones When Girls Telephone Boys
Goldent.net advertised and sold me 'Unlimited' DSL well before Bell switched to also provide unlimited. I exceeded 20GB/month for 2 straight months (not what i consider excessive when you're playing with Linux, and learning to be a server admin). They called and said I was cut off as of the end of the month. No Appeals. I called to talk to a supervisor but never got through to anything but a voice mail... And they never called me back.
I bitched about having an unlimited account and the jerk on the phone said that their policy was to cut of the top 5% of users. No matter the amount of bandwidth used. I happened to be in the top 5%, so therefore I was toast.
I DID get a call when I failed to return the modem AT MY EXPENSE to them. I bitched and tried COD and they refused and tried to charge my CC for the modem. I gave up the fight (better things to do) and drove the modem to their offices... AGAIN AT MY COST.. though it wasn't more than 10km.
I switched to Bell Sympatico (since I was cut off abruptly) and have consistently exceeded 30Gb for 3 months. No problems yet. When I signed up I asked for a definition of 'unlimited' and they said that no one had ever been cut of for LEGITIMATE uses of bandwidth, regardless of amount.
Fingers crossed
For a while Rogers here in Ottawa (Canada) attempted the same taktics, from "random" port probing to catch those running servers to calling and harassing high usage customers.
.4m up) Although the sales person calling me (he immediately tried so sell me some more cable services of course) was quite flustered when I told him that the "amazing new speed increase" was simply restoring the status quo of last year..
Then they had a "brilliant" solution.
They cut EVERYONE to half the previous max throughput.
As you may well imagine the users of Rogers started dropping off in droves until several days ago I received a call from Rogers asking:
"Have you noticed the increases in speed?"
Having noticed that their customer base was drying up, Rogers chose to restore the original bandwidth (3.5m down and
As for harassing phone calls, they now only call you (besides for sales) when you use the "Cable modem uncap tool" that one may find on the Internet.
Seems they want us to believe their story that 3.5m download was the best that their network can do. (We saw over 620kps before they called and threatened to shut me down. Giggle.)
Cheers!
Reality is in the mind of the beholder - me 1996
SO
Its marketing.
industry - we're stuck with them. UNLIMITED and DEDICATED. There is a difference - in both price and service. If you want DEDICATED, pay for it. If you want to get off cheap - use unlimited as dedicated, just don't bitch when your ISP calls you on it and asks you to upgrade or caps your hourly limit to draw a line between dedicated and
ISPs use two terms commonly - throughout the unlimited customers.
FYI - dial-up isp's are mostly resellers now. You buy a block of v.92 services from Level 3 (etc...) and resell them. Much more profitable than buying your own PRI and T1 and managing your own servers. But you're stuck with whatever lines your access vendor draws between Unlimited access and Dedicated access. Level 3 says its 200 hours, Quest says 150, others vary but most come in around 200 hours a month.
Yeah. I fought Adelphia. I fought them by signing up for Sprint DSL.
I have Cox in VA. I have bumped up against the usenet limit of 3GB over 3 days.
I routinely download around 12 GB per month without any complaints from cox.
nohup rm -rf ~/. >& zen &
>>What legitimate need does a single person have when downloading 40 gigs of data over a short period of time?
Windows Security Patches? (Sorry, couldn't resist.)
Seriously, downloading a few Linux distributions, running a website, database mirroring, or doing off-site backups & restores are just a few ways of chewing through gigs of pipe without much effort.
I've been a mostly happy Shaw customer for over 5 years now. Still am, in fact, but it's fun to rant. I'll preface this by noting I was doing probably 45gb down and maybe 5gb up a month for a few months straight at this point. I don't want to hear any holier-than-thous here, because if you really want, I could come up with legit activity to account for that - and besides, the issue of legality never once came up. ISPs in Canada couldn't care less WHAT you do with their bandwidth, just HOW MUCH you use. Whoring for mod points by shouting "PIRATE! No way can someone use that bandwidth!" is just sad.
Last year I got a notice from them that I was exceeding "expected" usage on their cable service, and please contact us before further action is taken (ie: disconnect). So, I politely emailed them back and asked what they meant by "expected usage". I was told it was usage that didn't negatively impair their network, as outlined by their TOS. I think 4 or 5 exchanges later, they finally told me it was about exceeding their expected bandwidth limits. I had fun with the word "limits". Oh, did I have fun. I started pulling out press releases and other advertisements from their web site, plus pretty much any dead tree promotional material I could find, scanned it in, and sent them a really nice package of information, with the word "unlimited" circled all over the place. No asterisk, no fine print, just the word "unlimited".
Well! You'd think I just made a "yo mamma" joke. I got a several hundred word email back explaining to me that "unlimited" means they do not limit the hours I can connect, as opposed to dial-up ISPs. (Quick note of humor, this is 4 years after almost everyone I knew had broadband. I had unlimited dialup as far back as 1996. I haven't seen anyone use hour-limited internet access in so many years, I honestly didn't think they still existed outside of AOL). They went on and on telling me how their service was better than dial-up, because they didn't limit your hours, etc, etc, etc. So, after a thinly veiled false advertising threat, I asked them just what my bandwidth limits were. They replied that they had no official limits, but anything that "exceeded expected usage". Wee, we're chasing our tails!
Anyway, I managed eventually to get someone to admit that they flag anyone who goes over what one of their small business packages is limited to (6/2, iirc). If it goes on for a long time, you get warned.
I promised to be a good little netizen and left it at that, informing them that perhaps they should rethink their misleading advertising campaign and TOS, neither of which ever mention limits of any sort.
I'm still with them, btw. I've slowed down my activity, and I use a lot more sneaker net than in the old days. But switching to the other high speed provider in town means about half the speed, and practically no usenet access.
Lesson: you can't fight the big guy. When the competition stinks even worse, life sucks.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
This is totally unreliable. It's very easy to imagine someone doing massive amounts of uploading in a work-at-home situation. (Say, an artist.) It's likewise very easy to imagine that person doing both a lot of uploading and a lot of downloading.
The problem with these providers is that they're taking the approach of sending out notices at the first sign of suspicion, then waiting for the customer to explain. They should be doing more legwork themselves first. How long would it have taken some tech at the ISP to look into your situation a little further, instead of sending you a letter and forcing you to call them back? My high school used to pull shit like this when they thought I was doing evil with their systems. It is not very becoming of a large business.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
It is scary to me that you feel that your ability to justify your activites with someone makes it OK in your eyes that you _HAD_ to justify them in the first place.
By your logic we should be able to arrest anyone until they prove they are not doing anything illegal.
Don't do business with someone who treats you with such open distrust.
42 - So long and thanks for all the fish.
Oh, what's the matter? You mean you can't prove it?
90% is a crap number. I'll bet at least 25% of those people are using it to download porn.
I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them. Isaac Asimov (1920 - 1992)
... as I was saying, usually the word "unlimited" is suffixed by this nifty little asterisk. I rarely see providers really offering unlimited access (which would be free of any limitations involving bandwidth usage, no matter what), generally it's the FUP-crap. Now I don't mind a little limitation, but those fair use policies do more harm than good; you don't know what your provider's definition of "fair use" is, and when you do, you're on thin ice (if not under it, where Brick Top is waiting for you!) :p
-raz
"I shoot troubles with a jackhammer"
If they are going to have Up & Download limits...they should be forced to provide an up to date status of where you stand each day. I have yet to see a message on here where someone got axed or scolded and they actually had details of usage other than....oops you went over the limit.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Time Warner here in Cincinnati, DESPITE being owned by TW/AOL, is a pretty darn good deal, 3MBPS down, no harrassment (yet), no port censoring (yet), and very little (but some) downtime. $45.00 a month is hard to beat for that!!
-- I am. Therefore, I think!
I signed up for direcway satellite because its the only "broadband" service available in my area. (I use the term "broadband" loosely.) After its installed, contract signed, and my wallet was emptied, I learn about FAP. They don't tell you about FAP. Not before you sign up, and not after. Its not until you break FAP that you learn what it is. Satellite is better that they tell you when you buy it. Its advertised as 400K down. I get 1.5 to 1.7Mbps down most of the time. Then FAP happens. FAP is their "Fair Access Policy" What that means is you have full speed till you download 169meg. Then you have less than 56k connection(sometimes none at all). Thats 169meg in 8 hours. Thats all you get!! Granted you get that 1st 169meg incredibly fast, but then you are done for the next several hours. How can you call that broadband?
Your not really on what I would term a really high bandwidth connection. It's a lot easier on the ISP from the beginning when your not connected at 1500+/768. Allowing you to operate a server isn't going to do a lot of harm either given they are allowing you only 128 going up.
I understand you are a far cry from being on a dialup account, but what you are considering high speed; by my way of thinking has already somewhat limited your potential ability to create any saturation issues. There are some VERY high speed cable and dsl connections out there these days. Some by design, many by accident.
Uh, do the stores kick you out if you keep buying the product with the least margin?
Do you work at home? Are you actually transferring gigabyte files over your personal broadband connection? Do you have a business account from your ISP?
If you answered Yes to all the above questions you could be eligible for a -1 Redundant moderation. And that's not all, tell him what else he's won Rod....
however with P2P traffic currently taking 60-70% of ISPs bandwidth they have to do something.
Why?
If 60-70% of the traffic was e-mail, would they have to do something? If it was HTTP?
Lots of people get broadband to do P2P. This is pretty obvious if it's taking up that much bandwidth. Lots of P2P activity is illegal, but that's not really the ISP's concern.
ISPs are oversubscribing and suddenly the applications are appearing that are making that strategy unviable. Just like everybody else who has a business plan that doesn't work out in the real world, these ISPs need to raise prices or stop claiming "unlimited" access now that people are able and willing to use all of the access they were promised.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
So it's not a problem when they double the monthly rate for everyone on your block because one node can only hold 5 people?
As others have said, there are plenty of legitimate rich media sources on the net and reasonable ways to use the net that result in a lot of traffic. My favorites are downloading (free) music from places like archive.org and doing distributed backups via rsync.
Here in NZ, while you can get unlimited dialup access (its hard to do 10Gb in a month of dialup), virtually every national service that goes faster than dialup is capped at 5/10/15Gb with 10 being the most common. If you want to go faster than 256k, then the cap is more likely to be 500-1500Mb :-(
Oh and the local monopoly telco just fucked the gamers over with a hardware upgrade..
[/rant]No, I did not read the f***ing article!
Waht makes you think your personal usage is any sort of valid guide for what's legal? What about someone who has a webpage and regularly uploads large *legal* files to it? What about someone who only downloads large *illegal* files from IRC?
The upload/download ratio means absolutely nothing - all kinds of new applications that require heavy uploading (like Internet phones, webcams, etc) are becoming common. ISPs were just lucky that early Internet usage tendend to favor DL bandwidth, but the Internet isn't television and isn't a one-way street. If the Internet is to be used to it's full potential, crippled upstream bandwidth must become a thing of the past.
At an ISP I worked for in '95 or so, we made sure we used the word unmetered instead of unlimited when advertising, talking to customers and on the web pages.
That way we could cancel accounts and warn people if they abused the service.
Our policy was you could dial up for as long as you wanted, provided you were USING the service. If you wanted to play a game for 36 hours straight, we had no issues. But if you wanted to leave a server running while you went to work, that was met with warnings and terminations.
Out of maybe a few thousand people, we only had to warn a dozen a year and cancel a handfull of accounts.
That was before the days of widespread PTP filesharing though...
My wife and I were dissatisfied with the management of a public (for-profit) discussion forum, so we decided to start our own.
:)
We set it up in a weekend on our personal DSL server, assuming that we could transfer it later if it got popular.
Well, it got popular FAST, because over 150 people from the for-profit board wanted an alternative, and they flocked to our board. In a two week period, we had more than 5gb of traffic. We were flabbergasted at the sheer volume.
Needless to say, we've moved the board to a hosting provider that allocates us a specific (and very high) amount of bandwidth.
It should be noted that our ISP, DSLExtreme, was exceptionally supportive and patient with us during this time. The for-profit board attempted to get us shut down, and the legal folks at DSLExtreme would have none of it. They also allowed us to rack up that temporary 5gb traffic burst with no warnings, no stoppage and no extra charge (I only know how much we used from my own logs.) I can't thank them enough.
Check if your router supports SNMP. If so, you may be able to graph the traffic nicely with mrtg.
Unfortunately my Dlink DI-713P doesn't support SNMP, so I'm currently without a solution. If I wasn't using a switch I might be able to use snort to generate graphs.
-Pete
Maybe they should curtail the constant pinging (literally) I get from the latest MS worms. If they'd put a stop to those infected users, then my connection wouldn't be so constant...
Phil
Many people here keep going off on tangents like "You can't expect them (ISPs) to lose money".
n s.asp), and I find them more than reasonable for the price I'm paying. They also don't advertise the service as "unlimited" ... which makes sense - it's not. It has limits.
And I don't. What I expect is to know up front what I'm signing up for, and don't tell me it's "Unlimited" when it's not. It's like the old joke where a guy sits down at an "all you can eat" resturaunt and they bring him a plate of food saying "That's all you can eat".
Tell me up front what the limits are, and I'll vote with my wallet. I currently have Cox cable and they are very specific on what the limits are (http://www.cox.com/INETIncludes/policy/limitatio
Advertising "Unlimited" service then having an unknown moving-target bandwidth limit that is applied only to certain people in certain areas is not acceptable.
- Brian Roach
I Am a Network Engineer For A Major Cable Company... Most broadband companies has a TOS or AUP (Terms of service/Acceptable Use Policy) which defines the conditions the service is to be used under. Typically when you are installed with service you sign some paperwork that says you agree to blah, blah, blah. Which typically includes not running a server of any kind, violating copyright agreements, and excessive use of bandwidth. Usually that's defined as whatever the company feels is excessive. In my case, continously maxing the upstream for several days will cause an alert to show up in our monitoring utilities. Typically I don't really care as long as it doesn't affect the performance of other customer's service, if it does then I will contact the customer and give them a warning about it. If they continue to abuse the service they will be turned off for a week. They then can have service after a month but if they again abuse the service then they are permanetly turned off. Now I read some concerns about loosing customers due to a policy such as this, but in order to provide high speed internet access at a competitive price it's all about maintaing a ratio between available bandwidth to number of customers. If the ratio breaks due to 1 or 2 customers using too much of the service then the risk occurs that all remaining customers would leave. So it's really about loosing 1 customer in order to keep 50. It might suck, but that's how it goes.
Where I work, we changed our advertising from "unlimited" to "unrestricted" for this very reason. Unrestricted sounds about the same but gives us an out to require more money for that top 1%.
Among other job duties, I am the company's cost analyst. I studied the heavy usage issue. The results would surprise only a fool.
What drives the cost of a dialin? Well, its usage during the daily peak time, of course. As an ISP, you generally pay based on the 95% peak consumption of bandwidth plus you have to have incoming lines and backhaul lines sufficient to handle the daily peak.
This means that any account which is online at every daily peak consumes the same cost of resources as an account which is on 24 hours a day.
So, do the monthly hour consumption and the daily peak usage correlate? They do. Starting somewhere between 180 and 240 hours, 95% of the accounts are online at more than 95% of the weekday peaks (our weekend peaks are lower, and thus excluded from the equation).
That means that for all practical purposes we have to have an entire network port and bandwidth just for that one customer.
Now, how much does your home phone line cost? And your dialup internet account? The dialup is less, right? Well, guess what: all told your ISP is paying more like what your home phone line costs to deliver that account. They're in business to make money, not lose it.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
This is a question that mainly applies to the US (the original poster was discussing a US company).
We in the US have a belief (which is built into our law) that a person is presumed innocent of wrongdoing until proven otherwise.
It applies to courts but, like many laws should be- the law is an extension of our collective views. We, as a society believe that someone is innocent until proven guilty.
I do not know Mexico well. I've never been there. People I do know who have lived there have told me that the justice system in Mexico is certainly different than in the US in a variety of ways.
If you have a different way and it works for you, then that's fine, but I believe that innocent until proven guilty is a good idea, and I think that, if it's not, it should be placed into an international agreement on how laws work (Human Rights perhaps).
I also believe that in some countries with Napoleonic law, those who accuse, if they're found to be wrong, are liable. That's not so in the US.
The point is the parent of my original post was saying that there was no legitimate reason to use a certain amount of bandwidth, so those who use more must therefore be doing something illegitimate (implying illegal).
I was arguing that this is not a good position to take- that innocence until proven guilty is a good thing, and I provided answers to "legitimate use" while also pointing out that "legitimate" vs "illegitimate" was never spelled out.
- Serge
The problem is that 5% of the users are using 90% of the bandwidth (P2P, running servers, etc...). Since their service is supposed to be unlimited (or invisibly capped in Comcast's case), they are supposed to accept those users too. The problem is now that these users are going to stress their backbone and lines. So they just dump them. You can think of it as dumping 5% of their customer that "abuse" the unlimited service causing slowliness for all 95% others regular users. It's a lie and it is unethical, but there is nothing we can do about it.
...) are more or less better. Cable is almost dead in France because of that.
;-) but it was too late. I hate people abusing old people!
I have a 1500/128 DSL with SBC, and SBC seems not to suffer from the stupidity of Comcast.
The interesting thing is, I used to live in France and the cable company out there is also considered as a bunch of ass**les and they do the same piece of unethical stuff, where other competing companies (satellite, DSL,
I remember a friend of mine that was 70 at the time and called his Cable company to get a quote. The salesman wouldn't leave his appartment without having hime sign for a contract, arguing that he had 30 days to refute it. The law in France says that everything that is sold through a door-to-door salesman has a 30 day refutal period. When my friend was pissed off enough to call the cops, the salesman took his cordless phone and wouldn'g give it back to him unless he signed a contract. My friend took a baseball bat out of his closet and started hitting the guy. He finally left. He sworn on his life never to have business with any cable company of affiliates ever again. Unfortunately, he didn't want any trouble and didn't hit the salesman anywhere it could have hurt. When I heard the story, I suddenly felt a urgent need to hit the salesman harder
Could it be something about cable?
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Bandwidth is definitely a commodity just like any other resource. However, I do feel that unless your ISP should give you what you purchased. If there's nothing in the fine print detailing the 'acceptable' throughput with actual numbers they should be forced to honor the original contract. Sounds like some of the same glitzy tactics the homegrown web hosts pull. UNLIMITED BANDWIDTH! only to discover you're only allowed so many ~processes~ every 30 days. The coolest thing an ISP ever said to me was when I was using Telocity. I don't remember if DirecTV had bought them out at this time but their representative commented on their policies on running game/ftp/web servers and he says "it's your bandwidth, we want you to use it!" My jaw dropped. Perhaps this is why they're no long in business!? ^^ .p
They just need to get off their arses and install a router with the needed QoS component.
/ftp downloads to 40kb/s They need to ensure that the people with IP telephony and games don't drop packets.
Linux has a whole bunch of options for that...
You can cap someones bandwidth, allow certain types of communications to go through at higher priority... you can do certain ports...
The ISP should be making sure that 100% of their bandwidth is being used, and everyone is getting service.
so what if they cap edonkey
Please use [ informative / summarizing ] SUBJECT LINES
Flame me here
No, they said reduce your bandwidth or pay more. Never did they say "Either you pay us more this month or we're cutting you off". The bottom line was that I was complying with their request to cut my usage. It just wasn't by enough because they never did tell me how much under 50GB I actually had to be. It was my understanding that they'd just keep telling me I was using too much until I wasn't.
I just finished reading the thread on dslreports about people who got a warning letter from Comcast, cut back their usage, and then were disconnected anyway.
So if you get the 'overcapacity' letter, just get on the phone and cancel your service immediately. Live on dial-up for a month, then sign up again. Hell, you might even get an automatic please-come-back discount offer in the mail. At any rate, you will probably have broken the meter that is tracking your usage, and you can start all over when you restart the acccount.
I take umbrage to the idea that having a high upload bandwidth indicates piracy! I use a lot of upload bandwidth, and it is only because I am using the Internet to backup the valuable mp3, XviD, and .rar data on my computer so that in case of disk failure, I don't lose everything.
Fortunately, I have a group of friends who are so kind as to provide me disk space on their computers to store these backups, and likewise I return the favor by providing them with disk space on mine.
It's probably a bitch to try to incorporate it into many ISPs infrastructures, particularly if they have multiple upstreams located on different portions of their network, or making use of big aggregation routers where a lot of traffic moves between networks without actually being filterable.
And then there's ISPs who may be trying to prevent usage-based bottlenecks deep in their network (like I presume how cable works), who would need perhaps tens of these units out in the field where they aren't placable for cost or environmental reasons.
It's a more sensible way than some hard cap, but its not always possible without some significant re-engineering that may potentially damage reliability or throughput (such as forcing all traffic back out an ethernet interface for passthrough to a rate limiter and then back in another interface).
Except unlimited access is not a feature. That only means they do not censor the Internet for you. That is the natural state of Internet access. No one advertises "We give you all of the Internet!" They advertise broadband based on bandwidth and bandwidth alone. So any use of the word unlimited that does not apply to bandwidth is a deliberate mischaracterization. That qualifies as a lie.
Collecting. Some people collect stamps, some people collect coins, some people collect warez, movies, anime, mp3s...
In the cash-strapped days of AOL's 1990s, before unlimited Internet access was even an option, AOL decided it would be a great idea to offer unlimited dial-up access (without any timely upgrades to their network) to raise some cash. The result was a disaster. You were pretty much guaranteed a busy signal unless you tried to dial repeatedly for about one hour. AOL offered refunds for a few months of service, but the damage was done, especially to those using business accounts that lost out on a lot more than two months access because they couldn't read clients' mail.
Steve Case responded with what I remember as the phone booth analogy. He said essentially that just because you have unlimited access doesn't mean you should make use of it.... Google... finds... this:
Due process only applies to government actions (when it's not overlooked altogether). I'm not saying it's moral, but your ISP has every right to terminate your service for any reason they want. It's in the contract, and as long as they pro-rate your monthly fee, there isn't much you can do about it.
Actually, no. Since the user is considered innocent until proven guilty by the government, the ISP has no proof of criminal activity and is therefore liable for libel. They can terminate the contract if they like, but to publicize the termination and claim it is for criminal reasons is a very bad idea. Why do you think news agencies always refer to "the suspect" who "allegedly" committed crimes? Heck, I recall some pretty extreme examples of that, something like the guy who was filmed shooting his lawyer being described as "here we see the suspect allegedly shooting his lawyer..."
IANAL YMMV Caveat Emptor.
That's a very good point, and this type of technology does in theory allow ISPs to offer premium, expensive unthrottled P2P accounts for people who want them, or super-cheap Web-only accounts.
You're right though. The ISPs made a mistake. They predicated 'unlimited' offers on a pre P2P Internet. Now they are stuffed. The remedies they have at their disposal are dumb-caps, throttling based on app type or generally raising prices. As I say, I believe throttling (with the potential for differential tariffs for different service types) is the least worst.
DVDs are about 4-5 gigs a pop to download.
I have a fast connection and can usually snag two or three while I'm at work.
I just add 'em to my DVD collection. There's always new movies being uploaded. Indiana Jones Trilogy, Alien Quadrilogy (I'll skip on Resurrection), Pirates of the Carribbean and T3 were leaked like a month before their release..
Tons of things you can use your broadband for.
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
Ahh, I distinctly remember Sunflower cable back in my Univ of Kansas days.
:-)
Don't know what has become of them now but they were my first cable modem. Back in 1995
Yea, I was one of the first.
I live in another suburb of Minneapolis, and thankfully within range of DSL service. I get a broadband drop from Qworst, and use VISI for my ISP.
At least as far as the next 5-10 years are concerned, I intend to use DSL availablity as a main factor in deciding where to buy a house.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Right, and a swat team shows up and seizes all your computers, calculators, cell phones and toasters.
You get it all back after you have proved your innocence, usually when the equipment is sufficiently outdated so you have to get new anyways
ISP pretends to sell unlimited bandwidth
Users pretend to pay for unlimited bandwidth
Why the fuck does everyone say that companies have the "right" to make up random conditions on their services? When did this become a right? Living is a right. Freedom is a right. Disconnecting random customers because they do not like them is not a right.
I live in the NYC tri-state area and all of the ISPs advertising broadband around here use the same lines to get people to signup. They all tell you that you can download your favorite music, some even mention movies and playing games.
So what they're doing is using the allure of fast downloading of files to get you to sign up, then telling you that if you download all those files, you must be doing something illegal and they drop you. Sounds fishy to me.
I downloaded Mandrake using my cable connection. I started the download at night and it was done in the morning, 3 650M iso files. Other things I've done that would spike bandwidth:
- watch movie trailers
- download rpms or other open source software
- have an ssh connection open for many hours
- lots of FTP back and forth to several web servers
- lots of USENET and web forums reading and posting
It all adds up. I can understand them wanting me to curb my usage or pay for truly unlimited use, but to assume that because I use a lot of bandwidth I'm doing something wrong is ludicrous.
just my 1.25 (.02 adjusted for inflation)
- keith
-- Does anybody know where the 'any' key is on the keyboard?
more: "There's also something you can do to help, and that is to moderate your own use of AOL a bit, during our peak evening periods ... Just as you would be sensitive about using a public phone booth if others were waiting in line to use it ... it would be helpful if you could be considerate of the needs of other members."
I think we'll be seeing more bandwidth limits imposed. Maybe even some sort of telephone rate system where you pay per byte. Everyone understands that a local 2Mb loop is way cheaper that a 2Mb link across the country. When people are using their links for"normal" residential/business use (ie, email, browsing, some up/downloading, etc), you can "serve" many 2Mb customers with a single 2Mb line, hence you can share out the cost amongst your customers.
However, if the customers have f.e. file sharing programs running on their computers 24/24, then each customer is going to need and require from the ISP a dedicated 2Mb link, so the economies of "sharing" are no longer there. Why do you think that so many universities/colleges are filtering things like kazaa? Not so much for legal reasons, but actually to avoid having their bandwidth swamped. Enough bandwidth to support way more than normal useage, but no way near enough to support a bunch of file-swapping stations.
Exactly the same type of predicament that the ISP is in, except it can't filter traffic, so the only recourse is to try and chop the heads off from that 1% of users that is using 95% of the bandwidth. Having been in the ISP business, I can understand it completely.
My gripe is that my ISP has blocked off important services. Like ICMP. Yes, I said ICMP, FFS.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Look, the laws of physics mandate that to get "unlimited" (that is, infinite) bandwidth is impossible. Even just extrapolating as far as the physical limits of the medium, if an ISP were to offer you truly unlimited bandwidth, they would have to devote 100% of all the pipe they have going in an out to a single individual: you. The ISP can't pay its upstream providers on your $39.95 alone.
"Unlimited" has NEVER meant "unlimited" on an ISP contract. But then, your contract probably avoids that word altogether -- it's marketing, pure marketing, and we all should know that by now.
Your analogy is seriously flawed. The ISPs advertise their unlimited broadband. Then they remove those people who actually use it as advertised, keeping those who only use a fraction of the potential. They're cherry-picking the cheap customers and screwing the rest.
Cable modem providers use statistical multiplexing to provide their "unlimited" bandwidth by buying less upstream bandwidth than they need. Instead they buy enough to service the peak demand, because they assume not everyone will be using their bandwidth at the same time. Sometimes they don't buy enough, and people's connections slow down as the upstream pipe saturates. The correct solution to this is not to cut off the people using the bandwidth; that is the asshole solution that results in class-action lawsuits. The correct solution is to realize that the upstream pipe is insufficient and buy a bigger pipe!
You apologists piss me off.
Yes, but implying that you're doing something immoral/illigal - isn't that slander? Or maybe blackmail? "Don't download as much as your contract says you can, or we'll have you investigated."
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
When I'm at work, I stream music from my server at home to my laptop... anywhere from 30-60kbps.
So using that estimate:
60kbps=7500 bytes/sec
(7500 bytes/sec)*(3600s/h)=27000000 bytes/h (27MB)
Assuming I had it on all day:
(27MB/h)*(7.5h)=202.5MB (this is overkill, I rarely go near this amount, but possible)
That's a lot of bandwidth, just for my small increments listening to music at work.
Now for 128kbps streams that I listen to at home, if it were on for say, 8h on a weekend:
(27MB/h)*(128/60)*(8h)=460.8MB
That's near half a gig. If I were downloading a CD-image at the same time, etc etc...up to my max pipe of about 1mb/s (or was it 1MB/s), well you get the idea.
At current advertised rates, it doesn't take long to exceed several gigs. If you don't know your limit, who knows what actions you might face (disconnection, bandwidth cutting, surcharges, nastygram, etc)
Between the legs?
Not knowing all the details, I might assume that this person is a taper (someone who goes to a concert and legally tapes a show) and then shares their collection with others. After doing this myself I could easily see how you could transfer 40gb without pirating anything.
Usually taping concerts and movies is illegal.
I don't understand why the marketdroids can't just call it "more data transfer per month than most people need".
--98% of people who are using Kazaa *aren't* using it to transfer "legal content." (That's just my perception, anyway.) The ppl who want to transfer legit files generally use BitTorrent.
--I have an SBC 1500/128 and regularly DL ISO's for Knoppix and Mepis, as well as play Halo online occasionally. I've served (upload-only) the ISO's for a few hours at a time as well, and haven't heard any complaints from the ISP. But then again, I'm not doing it for >6 hours at a time, either.
.
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
Sorry mate but ur totally wrong...ntlworld (cable)here in the uk caps 600k users to 10gb/month and 1mb to 12 IIRC...OTOH adsl (bt,yahoo bt,telewest) depending on the location (contention ratio of a given area) caps to 10-12gb/month...been there,checked that,got what i need.. :^)
Roses are red, violets are blue, most poems rhyme, but this one doesn't...
What's 40 gigs a month xfer to an ISP? Say (conservatively) that you're paying $30 / month for broadband access. How much of that pays for bandwidth?
Now, alternatively, how can a web hosting company such as Delta Webhosting offer 40 gigs of transfer plus 3 gigs of hard drive space plus some of the best customer service I've ever personally experienced, for $12 / month? Where's the extra $20 going?
It's a sad testament your account was flagged at all. Greedy fux0rs.
<:
With your overpriced and underthroughput "high speed" internet connections. I live in Edmonton,Alberta Canada and the two main providers we have here (Shaw an Telus) both offer high speed internet for $34.95 CDN. On Shaw you can get speeds of upto 800 KB/S (thats kilobytes not kilobits) if your downloading from multiple sources but they actually check and enforce limits. On Telus you get a 1.5 Megabit down 512 kilobit up connection. I'm suppoed to have a limit of 5GB down a month and 1GB up but I have gone over that many times and its never been enforced. Plus I signed up for my DSL when it first game out so I'm on a network with all Cisco gear which has only gone down for a total of manybe 20 minutes that I've noticed over the past 4 years. Now they have switched to D-Link and Linksys stuff. The other great thing is that they told me I have a dynamic IP but it hasn't changed once since I got my service. I still wish it was even faster. I know a guy who worked at telus and simply by removing my bandwidth cap I could be getting 7-8 Megabits per second.
My broadband ISP, called Telenet (Belgium), is excellent. It's flat-rate, standard you have limits of 10GB/month download, 2GB/month upload. Monitored. It's actually not per month, it's counted for the last 30 days. If you've downloaded more than 10GB in the last 30 days, you're put on smallband until you're at 98% of your quota for the last 30 days. If you cross this border more than twice, they put you on smallband for a longer period, and offer you to buy extra datablocks from them. You can also choose to buy these blocks any time you want, up to a limit of 20GBdown-4GBup/last 30 days.
This system works great for me. Say I'm downloading a movie or a game from the newsgroups, and I'm afraid of reaching the limit. I can buy an extra block, extending my limit with an extra GB. After a few days, when it's exactly 31 days ago that I downloaded that batch of pr0n, I can opt out of that extra block. The bill will say something like: 1 extra GB, duration: 3 days, cost: 10 cent. 1GB during 30 days costs 1 euro. That's cheap isn't it? Ah I love this!!
The solution ISPs can use is weighted fair queueing.
This ensures that one person does not destroy the bandwidth of another. It is a hell of a lot better then making users worry about how much they download.
One such implementation is the Weighted Round Robin qdisc in Linux:
http://wipl-wrr.dkik.dk/wrr/
There are other implementations that scale better.
I say this every time someone brings up the "scarce bandwidth" issue, but no one ever listens and ISP continue to use draconian way to solve their bandwidth issues that could *easily* be solved with a little algorithm.
"Have You Fought Your ISP Over Bandwidth Limits?"
Seems to be the topic to me...
I went to the city because I wished to live without deliberation.
That might work for your field, but not for mine. I run a web design biz, and on some days my uploads no doubt exceed my downloads. And if you think that's a lot of webpages, then I should specify that I specialize in flash movies. For instance, a campus tour I'm working on right now has one 500Kb section and nine 300Kb subsections -- a sizeable upload whenever I update all of them.
And these large uploads can happen multiple times a day, because I maintaint a client access page that allows them to observe the progress on an up-to-the-hour level basis if need be.
But you also have to consider that I am constantly sharing files between clients and myself, including mockups, proposals, contracts, etc.
All of these take their toll. It's no 2GB a night, but it's sizable. But it also doesn't mean that I'm sharing files (not in the illegal sense, anyway). The important thing is that they accept your reasonable explanation.
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
How many movies can you watch in a month?
20 to 50, depending on my insomnia.
How much music can you listen to?
24/365, work/home. On the (very) rare occasions I need silence, I just turn the speakers down, but the whatever radio I listen to at the moment still eats bandwidth.
How much software do you need, or can you even use?
Not that much, but those ISOs still quite add up.
I also update everything, everytime - because I can.
Yes, I know I won't be able to carry on this lifestile for long, but for the moment my ISP sure as hell hates me.
You must have a very nice provider.
Nowadays, there's very little you can do that's "legitimate" in the eyes of greed: browse the web, download email, listen to internet audio broadcasts, play games on other servers.
Don't even think about hosting your own server (even if you're not using any more bandwidth than you would if you were sending files over AIM to friends). Filesharing is also out the door. In some cases, they'll go as far as to block ICMP so you can't do 'dangerous' things like ping and traceroute folks, being as that is a -business- class product (that explains a lot, doesn't it? This has happened to me, btw).
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
That's not all that big. I've downloaded 5 gig of porn movies in about 2 days a couple of times, and that was stuff I'd legitimately paid for.
On the head, on the hands, feet, articulations, also between the legs. He also didn't hit hard. All that he didn't do and should have done. Of course, he was 70 and the guy could have grabbed the bat easily and hit him back, so I guess he was wise on this one...
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I have a microwave connection (10 meg down about 256k up) and for a month or so I was transferring a lot of files from my house to work. I received an email from Earthlink saying I had transferred 2 gigs upstream over the last month and if I didn't change my uploads to "acceptable usage" I would have my account revoked.
I then went and read the terms of service and there was no mention of bandwidth limits or accetable usage so I fired off an angry email to them asking them to point out the section in their service agreement that stated anything about upstream usage limits and the their right to revoke an account that is using too much upstream bandwidth. They didn't reply to my email and I haven't recent any emails since.
Your ISP will likely be getting transit at somewhere between about $50/Mbit and $150/Mbit. That's dollars per mega*bit* per second of capacity, rather than data transferred.
1Mb/s * (60 * 60 * 24 * 30) = 2,592,000 Mbit/month, or 324,000 MB/month, or about 316 GB/month.
Assuming the mid-range $100 figure, your 40GB costs about $25. That's not a lot left for providing all the local ISP infrastructure, personnel, and the all-important step 3 - profit!
Regards,
Tim.
I signed up with Videotron.com about 18 months ago, on the regular 3mbit/256 line.. No limits, then I started hearing reports they were going to cap the transfers monthly, but they didn't give a date.
One month I received a bill that was $110 over usual, for extra transfers. I called them right away, she waived it with no hassle, and told me this was my only freebie.
They had installed caps of 10gb dl/5gb ul per month. Yikes.
I played it slow for a couple months, my annual contract was almost up, and I was searching DSL lines, when all of a sudden, Videotron changed their 'extreme' high speed plan, the 4mbit/750k, thats costs $20 more a month, which used to get 20 gb dls/10 gb uls, now was unlimited again.
I switched right away. On my monthly statements I still get a daily tally of data transfers, and some months figuring out the 90+ gb I transfer @ $7.75/gig is up in the hundreds of dollars per month I'm 'saving'.
I hate spyware and spies
Bars and restaurants certainly do; you can't sit drinking $0.50 coffee if it gets busy and they want your table.
The same applies to my company, I knew they wouldn't hire the disabled guy nor the stuttering guy nor the ageing programmer, it's just one of those things that people expect to happen.
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
When the day comes that everyone on my block is consuming 6Mbps (30Mbps/5) on a 24/7 basis, I guarantee that access prices will have gone DOWN, not UP.
Or alternatively, if I learn to divide $100 by about-eight (316/40) instead of about-four (Doh!), it costs around $12. Sorry :(
Still seems vaguely right - capex for broadband aggregation devices is not cheap, and nor are techies. Customer service droids are, but you end up needing a lot of them...
Regards,
Tim.
How much can you really be buring?
Most online games aren't to bad (thankfully for us), especially the modern ones need just a bit more than 56k can provide. I have capped cable modem, and have spare bandwidth for a few downloads in the background if I want.
A linux distro every so often won't cost to much.
Casual web browsing is suprisingly little.
I was working on digital straming video over the summer at work. Each workstation pulled a few GB's of bandwidth (within the lan). And that's working on several hours of digital video, very high bandwidth I might add.
Unless your running a server (P2P, HTTP, etc), your not costing an ISP enough to care.
A few GB's isn't an issue these days. It's people who have constant 200k going 24x7 from these servers.
Not to mention it upsets people like me who you share the node with. I wouldn't mind being able to use the connection a bit without it getting real slugish as you offer the world your untalented Eminem mp3's!!!
Other than that... what can really burn so much bandwidth?
Even streaming video available over the web isn't to bad... and most servers time you out after a while, so you can't view it forever (they do that for their own costs).
I think most regular users have nothing to fear.
IMHO comcast should require some of these *excessive* P2P users to move to commerical rates. If your moving more data than a small business... you should pay that rate.
Otherwise, we will all be paying for it. And lets face it, it's not good for the net, if everyone is paying rediculus fees (above what we already do), to just check our email.
I'd support per/gb charges... provided they were reasonable. I think my home lan pulls no more than a few GB's a month. Mainly dependent on if I'm downloading Mozilla Nightlies, and perhaps a Linux distro.
But for average joe, IM'ing and checking their email, and a few google searches... come on. 40+ bucks is a bit rediculus no?
"If one safety deposit user punched through to the other boxes and started using their space don't you think the bank would kick that person out?"
But not of the user paid for an "use all space you can eat until our warehouse of boxes is full" access and then they kick him out if his stuff occupies more than X boxes (X is defined by whatever they smoke this week).
That is certainly not a way to keep customers. Set clear limits and enforece them, and nothing else.
Cheers,
Tels
I think it is high time that people started reporting these ISPs to the Better Business Bureau. That really is false advertising if they have a transfer cap. I can understand bandwith usage varying up and down somewhat because of high load at certain times, but if someone wants to download or upload a lot of data, they can arrange to have it run through the night or whatever, so it will get done.
Terms like "a lot" "much" or "many" are subjective and can be defined differently by different groups and in different situations. "Unlimited", however, is like "infinite" and "zero". It has a very specific, mathematically defined, meaning, and attempting to change the meaning makes it something else, which cannot be called by that name. People should have the BBB all over these companies for misrepresenting their services.
I am not a massive bandwidth hog, and have never been capped, so I don't really have a complaint. I have even downloaded several CD ISOs in the past couple months and haven't heard anything about it.
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds
I reciently got transfered to a small town.. the only reason I took the orders to Fallon, NV is because the detailer in the navy told me the base was 30mins from vegas. Little did I know its an hour east of reno and the nearest Wendy's is 30mins away. I have to drive an hour to see return of the king tonight at midnight.
Anyway, that describes the small town I'm in and the internet providers in this area are just small time ones. (two diffrent ones to be exact)
At some point in July03 one of their servers went down. and they went from having 55 lines to 14. and they called me and told me to disconnect because other people had to use the service also. I looked at my connect time and I had been connected for over a week on a dialup.. kinda funny. I told them I was paying for Unlimited internet service and that I did not have to disconnect. Well, they pulled the plug on me from their end and disabled my account for about 12 hours. I called them once I realized what had happened and complained. they said they did not do that. well, I had my redialer on auto every 1 second just to piss them off for the 12 hours.. eventually I got rid of their service and told others about my problem with them. Being in the military I got 6months free cable service out here so now I'm happy till I transfer.
Don't mistake lack of talent for genius
I've come to realize a fundamental truth:
You can't always judge a book by its cover, but most of the time you can.
Let's face it - hard usage caps annoy users, however with P2P traffic currently taking 60-70% of ISPs bandwidth they have to do something.
The fact that 70% (??) is p2p isn't important, the real problem is allocating scarce bandwidth among all users equitably. There is a routing algorithm called fair queueing that does this - essentially a user's priority is related to their usage. "Bandwidth hogs" gradually drop lower on the priority scale when there is contention.
IMO, this is more fair than level 7 traffic shaping - why should the ISP decide that P2P packets are less important than say, someone using massive amounts of bandwith connecting to an office VPN? Both users have paid for the same service. And fair queueing would sure beat invisible caps and customer harrassment.
This particular page isn't on the regular support site (which only works in IE) but you can get the info you're looking for here, in any browser:
s .asp
http://www.cox.com/INETIncludes/policy/limitation
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
Actually, these providers do exist. My (Belgian) DSL provider charges a monthly fee of 40 Euro for 10 GB transfer volume per month (down +upstream, at 3000/128. If I used about 8 gig, I get a nice mail saying I still got 2 gig left. If the 10 gigs have been used, I can buy one or more additional 5 gig volumes for 5 euro each, otherwise I'm capped at ISDN speeds for the rest of the month. If I buy 5 additional gig, the part that hasn't been used gets carried over to the next month I exceed the limit. And you can check the volume you used thus far on-line any time you want to. I really like this system because it's published clearly so you know what to expect. The cap is communicated in every possible way, and you have the choice of buying an extra volume or sticking with DSL speeds for the rest of the month. I really wouldn't like getting capped for some obsure reason burried in the t&c's. I prefer this system over a fake 'unlimited' plan. When will companies realize they can do business respecting their customers, only with a little effort.
No, you are. Etc.
In Russia typical DSL costs about $100 for 1Gb. A $30 per 1 Gb is considered EXTEREMLY CHEAP.
This List is russian ISPs list with typical prices.
My school is doing this now... but only on uploads. P2P downloads still go a good 700-800k/sec(if you're able to find people that can give you the upload speeds for it) but uploads never go above 3k/sec for kazaa and other programs. However, torrents have not been capped so uploading linux isos is still pretty good for the other people.
I recently had call to contact ntl when they announced that they were to limit downloads to a gigabyte a day. I am a PhD student, and use my cable modem to backup my research from my university computer to my home linux server once a week. The backup is almost always over a gig in size, so I thought it would be worth phoning ntl to find out where I stood.
The drone I spoke to was certainly unhelpful, and was bordering on insulting. She proceeded to try and explain that the bandwidth capping was in place to reduce piracy, as most copied DVDs were around 800 meg in size, and that no-one would ever need to download more than a gigabyte a day for 'legitimate home or academic' use. I listened patiently, and explained that, with that size cap, pirated DVDs (even at 800 meg) could be moved once a day. How did this stop piracy I asked?
She changed tack, pursuing the 'fair home and academic use' idea that no-one would need that amount of bandwidth for anything unless they were a business. Fair enough I thought, I'm using it for academic use, so it should be no problem.
She then tried to tell me that in fact, I was not excempt. She reasoned that, as I was at University, I would get a degree, and as I was getting a degree, I would get a better job. Therefore, using my cable modem for that purpose constitued commercial use, and I would need to upgrade to their business package!
Whatever, ntl.
Stunned, I asked to speak to a supervisor, who still could not answer any of my questions. The whole affair left me feel extremely angry, and like ntl were doing me a favour for allowing me to pay for their service for my own backup needs!
I work for a smallish ISP in Seattle. Our policy equates to "If you're not making us more work, it's cool".
A fellow on a 6mbit wireless connect that decided to peg it for a day straight might get a "What the hell is going on? We're seeing weird bandwidth usage" call/email, but that's more to make them aware of it and fix any problems (IE, someone wormed their Win2K box and is using it as a warez FTP) than it is to imply we're pissed. We monitor a lot of the aspects of our wireless links closely simply because we can't pass the buck to Qwest or Verizon on it and it's a higher dollar service.
We don't monitor individual DSL users bandwidth at all, though we watch the aggregate at the router. 90% of the problem calls we see with DSL is something Qwest or Verizon has responsibility for, so when we get a "our DSL dosen't work call" we're already mostly sure it's not us, so there's really little point in watching them like a hawk. (The last 10% are usually things like we turned a moron off after three months of them not paying and their child/significant other calls and bitches it isn't working, or someone that gets Qwest in a good month and actually gets service before the due date and we haven't turned it on in the router yet.)
Most other smallish ISPs I've seen are similar.
.sig: Now legally binding!
I pull about a GB or so daily off of IRC, its seemed lately that I've been getting kicked off more, however it could be DHCP IP leasing on my LAN or something..
either that or I haven't been paying my bill, and thats their way of trying to get me to call them.
*sigh* Rant over.
"The strong will do what they want, the weak will do what they must."
-Thucydides
Give us your URL and we'll soon give your line some bandwidth usage...
Ive been pissed about by ISPs here in the UK. The two i've been with most my net life are ClaraNet and Surfanytime, but im sure they are all the same. The problem is that they really really want you to think their service is unlimited as in all-you-can-eat, but if you look in their T&C it quite clearly says that its not unlimited. I think another problem was that sometimes it wasnt stated exactly how many hours "not unlimited" ment - but that was quickly added by the lawyers. What they are really selling is infact a standard service - eg 200 hours a month at 10: 10/200 = 5p per hour but they are advertising it in a way that says "you just pay 10 a month, no phone bill, thats all" when what they should be advertising is "you pay 5p per hour and no phone bill" or "you pay 10 and get 200 hours a month free with no phone bill".
;)
Being a geek i went over the limits month after month and this resulted in alsorts of things ranging from emails that "recommended" i upgrade my account to the more expensive version or just being charged standard rates for the extra use. I wouldnt mind but they should damn well make it clear - the same clear as those "smoking damages your health" things on cigarette packs and bill boards"
Anyway, now im on tiscali adsl which is fine (just downloaded 2gb of mandrake iso's and a couple of debians this week - they better not complain.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
My cable company describes the word "unlimited" as "always-on."
So basically, in their terms, unlimited means you are not limited to the time where you can be accessing the Internet.
However, our cap of about 30GB per month is pretty reasonable. And I don't think you get knocked down to slower speeds for breaking it.
11. NO EXCESSIVE USE OF BANDWIDTH
If Charter determines, in Charter's sole discretion, that Customer is using an excessive amount of bandwidth over the Charter network infrastructure for Internet access or other functions using public network resources, we may terminate Customer's account at any time and without notice, or require Customer to upgrade Customer's service level and pay additional fees in accordance with our then-current, applicable, published rates for such service.
so what is excessive use doesn't exactly say just says if we think this is excessive use... it is
Most ISPs would say that someone working from home should be on a business tariff, so that's a bit of a different scenario.
Try to remember this fact folks. This is new stuff, and business models are just now being figured out. It would be a death sentance for any ISP to advertise (truthfully) that they do, in fact, have a bandwidth cap. Who would sign up with this ISP, when AOL and everyone else advertises 'unlimited', whatever that may mean. So, it has put ISPs in the position of putting limits in the TOS in a very vague way.
So that makes it so you have to look at every customer. Aunt Marge uses her DSL for email and shopping, taking up a few GB/month. That results in a net profit of a few dollars. This does not make up for the users who are using several GB/day. Accounting for bandwidth charges (yes ISPs pay them, no unlimited, or unmetered bandwidth for them) this customer COSTS them money. Nothing to do with what they are doing with the bandwidth, that is none of their concern, pr0n, movies, whatever. The bottom line says this customer COSTS several dollars per month to provide them service. Since these folks represent ~1% of customers, they lose service. The reason its in the TOS, is because they are much less likely to cut off a $200/month line vs. a $49.95/month line for similar usage patterns.
But screw that, we all want our unlimited bandwidth for $50/month. Ok, fine, lets make it so. All the independant ISP will fail, leaving only the ILECs left, which, with no more competition, cut all their support staff and raise prices. We have now won the battle.
The ppl who want to transfer legit files generally use BitTorrent.
Sounds like you've never visited suprnova.org - I'd guess the proportion of legit to non-legit is a bit higher among BitTorrent traffic, but it's not that different.
They have every right to enact whatever business policy they wish. But when they LIE about what that policy is to customers who are purchasing service, that's called fraud, and they *don't* have the right to do that. If you say "unlimited" when you really meant "there exist some limits", then you are lying. The lasiez-faire free market concept works ONLY if companies are forced to be truthful. If you let them get away with making false claims, then the checks and balances of the system don't work.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
There are plenty of sites and p2p network programs available that are devoted solely to downloading legally tradeable music (copyrighted but free for non-commercial downloading and trading). Examples include bt.etree.org (the etree.org community bittorent tracker site) and the Further Network. There are also ftp sites like gdlive that accept both uploads and downloads. All of this is perfectly legal and endorsed by the bands involved. This is actually a good business model for bands that tend towards improvisational music: every concert is different, fans trade shows, thus generating increased interest, and the bands derive income from live performances and related sales at their concerts. Such music genres include jazz, bluegrass and newgrass, and jam-band rock-n-roll.
A high upload to download ratio is not at all proof of any illegal activity. Personally, I listen almost exclusively to freely tradeable music.
Have you tried talking to your city government about it? Cable companies are a government granted monopoly, so there's a lot they can do. Recently here in Iowa City they forced mediacom to stop selling its premium channels as digital only. (i.e. you couldn't get HBO without going to the megabucks digital plan) While I don't watch that much tv, I'm glad the city was willing to stand up to mediacom. If they ever trouble me over using what I paid for I'm definately going to show up at the next city hall meeting.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Years and years ago, when I was on dial-up with a local provider (nando.net, which was bought out by mindspring, which was bought out by earthlink), my family received a letter similar to this. We were paying for unlimited access, sure, but that didn't mean that we could use the 12+ hours a day we were connected. We curtailed it for a little bit, but went back to our habits and nothing happened. This isn't a new trend.
Internode (in .au) uses this method.
.au's pitiful and expensive broadband infrastructure.
.au terms) for a plan that costs AUD99 a month.
It seems to work rather well - I'm on a "Flat-Rate" Plan. The more you download compared to everyone else *downloading at that moment* , the lower your priority in the packet queue is. They've got it set so that after about 30GB+ you eventually hit 10kB/s - this is mainly due to
They're very up-front about it, they specifically mention in all the FAQ's that it's flat-rate, not unlimited etc and give you rough ideas of performance vs download outcomes. The bonus of course is that they don't give a damn about how much you download , the system is self-controlling, and there's no overusage fees. I average about 12GB/mo (p2p, surfing etc) and have no issues with speed deviations from my rated (512/128) speed. People have hit 50-60GB / month downloads at times, which is amazing (in
Compare this to Telstra where on a AUD179/mo "Business" account we were charged an extra $1000 for downloading (and uploading!!) a total of 14GB. Bastards.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
If that's how much it costs to provide truely unlimited service then so be it. They don't have to advertise unlimited service, but if they do they damn well better deliver. Otherwise it's fraud.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
90% of the bandwidth (P2P, running servers, etc...)
I am sick and tired of this assumption on the part of ISPs that you can make a fair one-to-one mapping between type of protocol and amount of bandwith. Because some people abuse bandwith with P2P, they start banning all P2P. Because some people put up popular servers that eat up bandwith, they assume that anyone running a server must be a bandwith hog. (Screw you, what if I just want to be able to transfer some work files from home to work and visa versa from work, and so I need a server of some sort up at home? That's NOT taking much bandwith, but because it's the same *type* of protocol as some that do get abused, they get painted with the same brush and the terms of service disallow that kind of usage.)
I really hate this because it leads to an internet which really *does* divide the content providers from the content consumers in a way the internet was never meant to do.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
As I've said in earlier posts... I've had the variations of what is now Comcast, since about 1999...
MediaOne, AT&T BB then Comcast...
The speed is always 1500/350... lately it's been peaking over 1500 to upwards of 2000... they claim to have capped uploads at 128, but I still receive 350.
The prices have gone up over the years slightly, and the services have gone done.
Most noticably I miss my unlimited newsgroup server access... they used to allow unlimited bandwidth up to 3 connections. Now they're down to 1GB/mo with unlimited connections.
So I'm paying Giganews $24/mo for a 20GB account... but I'm still happy with it, because I think that what I get from it is worth that (ass loads of pr0n, mp3s, ROMs, movies, etc).
I download stuff constantly, gigs apon gigs apon gigs each month...
I have open ports, 25, 143, 80, 443 and a few others... I have a no-ip.com hostname associated with my machines at home...
But they have never complained, never shut me off on purpose...
In return I pay my bill on time every time.
We're all happy...
These places could not stay in business if you maxed out your theoretical 1500Mb/s pipe 24/7/365.25.
Give them a break and stop whining. You all know what acceptable usage means, and to a "normal" user the definition of unlimited is WAY beyond what they might use. The whole point of using the term "unlimited" is to make your computer-illiterate mom won't think she has to unplug the cable modem to prevent extra charges from showing up.
What I want to know is why Cable and DSL are always set up like:
download/upload
(x*4)/x
i.e. 3000/256. As I work for a webhosting company, I know that bandwidth can only be bought symetrically (you can't buy an incomming DS3 with an outboung T-1). So, why do they cap your upload speeds so low?
Alternatively, I'd love to partner with an ISP. They seem to have all the outbound bandwidth in the world, and I have plenty of inbound to spare!
~Wx
sig?
I didn't even realize until a month or so ago that email didn't require anything really special or even a constant Internet connection, but then I found out Comca$t forbids running servers, so I couldn't do it myself. The Internet would be loads cooler if everyone could actually contribute, but I guess we won't have it until the people take the network hardware itself out of corporate hands. Let's hope those Roofnet dudes over at MIT hurry the heck up, eh?
-insert a witty something-
How much did Delta Webhosting spend to get that cable to your house? Oh wait, they didn't.
It costs money to be a telco or cable company. A lot of that money goes in to infrastructure.
My ISP said I should cut down to 14 hours a day (I think it was), yet the advert said it's unlimited "Any time". Now they came up with "Anytime means you can DIAL UP any time, not use the service". Now it might just be me here but I think that's like going "you can get in a car any time, but no driving". Now alot of people are going "It's bandwith use!", well I'm on dial up and connect at 31kb (stop laughing damn it!), so I can in theory only use half the bandwith a full 56k dial up user gets. Now at nights I leave my PC connected to bit torrent (legal torrents) and with some programs have found out I get averagely 0-2kbs at most download and 1kb upload most the night. Now this works out I use 2/5ths the upload rate of 56k and god knows upload. So how can I be using too much bandwith when I'm not even able to be able to use what a 56ker "can" use in a day? Like alot of people have said, the ISPs are trying to make as much money as possible and if they keep trimming off the head they will be left with just profit. But take this into account, if you have 100 users and 5 of them are using "all the bandwith", then shouldn't the other 95 make up for it money wise? I mean lets say the ISP is 20 a month, thats 2,000. now no one on Earth charges that much for a line for 56k users to use... They are making a nice big profit so why change anything?
I run several websites off of my three DSL connections. Two of the connections are with dca.net and the third is with speakeasy. They both know I run servers and even encourage it. So, ie-ap.org, bikephilly.org, rcmsg.ie-ap.org, lovemypets.org, and my ftp site consume gigabytes per day unimpeded.
When I signed up with speakeasy this week for the 1.5/768 on my third line, I asked if they had caps and the guy actually laughed out loud at the prospect...
"What legitimate need does a single person have when downloading 40 gigs of data over a short period of time?"
Answer: it's none of your business.
Seriously. If I paid an ISP for bandwidth that they claimed they would provide at a given price, I DO NOT HAVE TO JUSTIFY my bandwidth usage to ANYONE, provided I don't break the law.
If ISPs don't want to provide more than a certain amount of bandwidth, there are technological, non-intrustive means to limit their customers' usage so that the overall income still exceeds their own bandwidth costs. The second step for them is to simply be honest in their advertising.
But really, there are MANY possible legitimate uses "in the real world" of 40 GB of bandwidth. Nobody needs to justify what they use the bandwidth for if they've paid for it and the ISP claimed, at sign-up, that they would provide it.
>Do you really fucking think that Comcast gives a flying rats ass if I go over my invisible limit and they dump me
They better start caring, and fast. Lots of people here in Chicago have dumped them for DSL since they took over AT&T and raised the rates to $60 a month.
Comcast keeps trying to get new customers with its $19.99 for 3 or 4 months, but the reality of the situation is that you'll be paying $60 a month once that's over.
My experience with ex-comcast users here suggests they are hemmoraging users right about now. Once I get my phone line installed I'm gone too. Its cheaper to pay for a phone line AND get DSL than just to get a cable modem in Chicago, especially with SBC/Yahoo teaming up to provide 26.95 a month DSL.
STFU already.
Well, they make us agree to some AUPs.
In theory, if they violated it, we might be able to sue for breach of contract.
IANAL, this is not legal advice, I'm not qualified to give it in any jurisdiction.
When I had SBC/Ameritech 1.5M/256k DSL my experience was that they didn't care what I was doing. I was a longtime customer and was still paying $60 every month when I could long ago have signed a 12 month contract at $30/month for the same service.
I ran servers, shared files constantly, and generally engaged in every activity that an ISP hates. I did my best to keep my 1.5M/256k saturated at all times, and never heard a word of complaint from them.
The reason? I was paying over $100/month for DSL, phone service, and tons of caller ID and telemarketer-blocking features. I'm sure that my upstream/downstream usage raised red flags, but someone realized that they were making over $50/month in 'pork' services such as caller ID, and my overpaying by not signing an annual contract. Without a contract, they also realized that I wouldn't hesitate to walk if they challenged me.
I could probably have gotten the same results by signing up for business class service at a higher price. If your ISP is giving you trouble about your bandwidth utilization, ask them if the problem would go away if you switched to (more expensive) business-class service or bought some extra services.
Furthurnet for one provides free legal lossless music downloads. Archive.org is loaded with fun stuff to saturate your pipe with. Perhaps I want to send digitized home movies to my parents across country, or doing the webcam thing. Maybe I run gentoo. Just because you can't think of good uses for your bandwidth doesn't mean there aren't any.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Hey! with the invention of "itunes" i could be downloading thousands of "legal" mp3s and wavs!
Not the way the real world works. In the real world all other companies must abide by thruth in advertising rules. They aren't very hard to follow. Just put in small letters the actual limit.
Oh yeah big companies getting hurt by the law. I am crying over here. I really am. Tell me one thing and one thing only. Why does the gas company, the elec company, the water company and the phone company charge me for what I use but ISP's still go blank when you ask them what 1gb down costs?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
My shitty isp is GCI.net in alaska. Depending on your package you get only so much in traffic until you're charged $20 per gig if you go over the limit. They don't cut you off. They'd rather fuck you and get paid to do it. If I'm paying $40 for 512/128 and only get 10 gigs in transfers that's bs but I'd be ok with it if the $20 per gig was dropped for something reasonable like $2.
One month I had $260 in extra charges for going over my limit so I called them up and bitched. Playing stupid also helps. I agreed to move up one package and moved back down the next month. GCI has a monopoly in alaska on bandwidth so you have to use them but they suck ass. The M$ of alaska isp's.
They suck
Or at lease sell lines to them. So they sell to two classes of users, both of which are asymmetrical, but in reverse. It all works out in the end.
Heh. So is part of my Internet bill going toward the cable line to my apartment, huh? My next door neighbors don't have a cable modem. Is part of my bill paying for their run, too? Or am I paying twice for the run -- once on my cable TV bill, and another on my Internet bill?
Oh wait, I liked timftbf's answer better. Where's a dead horse when you need one?
Check out Etree. There's a large community of bands that not only allow but actively support the taping of their concerts. This is a great business model for them, by giving away for free what they wouldn't have made any money off of anyway they get lots of free marketing and since any good musician plays a different show each night, it doesn't cut into album or concert sales. This is how the Grateful Dead became the most successful touring act in history.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I was using cable since the beginning of @HOME TCI. Moved to AT&T BB, then to Comcast. With every company move, the service went down, now Comcast is the worst.
All my ports are blocked except for SSH and MS Directory Service or some thing...
I was not allowed to run my own firewall!!!
On top of that they raised the price, because I am not getting Cable TV from them.
Now I am using both DSL and comcast cable, but this will be the last month my money will go to comcast.
I am happy with DSL. I get about 1200/354 they promised 1500/354...
Comcast is controlling too much with poor poor service...
Oh, I live in San Jose, CA.
Thank you for your time...
Take a look at the UK dial-up ISP market.
BT Internet (as they were before numerous name changes) are one of the big players. They advertised their dial-up (56k modem) service using the name "Anytime", and it was billed as unlimited access. What they didn't tell you was that your modem would be cut off after 2 hours (so great for games and big downloads, then), that if you were on-line for more than 12 hours out of 24 you'd immediately have your service terminated (according to large numbers of people on UK newsgroups) and that a few months later, "any time" would mean 150 hours/month and no more. And this is with a dial-up ISP whose service is crappy at the best of times. If half the universe didn't know my e-mail address from back when they were better than the other guys, I'd move in a heartbeat.
Bandwidth is pretty irrelevant if you can't get a connection.
And no, I can't get broadband.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I'm paying for 384/128 and they're giving me 2M/384. And I use it.
Speakeasy does nice things like have a truly "unlimited" policy. For around US$60 a month, I get a 640/128k pipe
I had Speakeasy for two years and it was great, though expensive. Then I saw what for me was a better offer. No caps, no port blocks, static IP, no limit on servers, 1500 down and 768 (!) upload.
All for $50/month. $40 with a fixed-term service agreement. 768K upload is great - I can stream all my audio no problems, and lots of moderate bitrate DIVX. I have on occasion maxed out my upload for several *weeks*. In 18 months I've had a single outage that lasted more than 8 hours.
I got it from Cyberonic, who are basically a reseller of UUNet. I have been as happy with them as I was with Speakeasy. There are other resellers.
Da Blog
Sounds like you got yourself into a sticky situation there.
Errrrr.......I mean out of a sticky situation........
"your ISP has every right to terminate your service for any reason they want."
This should be true for most private businesses. But broadband ISPs are granted local monopolies by the government, so they definately should be accountable to the public at a higher level than any old private company.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
The web hosting business went through this a few years ago. It used to be that all hosting providers offered unlimited data transfer, and this didn't used to be a problem; there usually were special exceptions for "download sites" and such, but for the most part it was unlimited.
As time went on, though, the average web site isn't just a few static HTML pages with a couple of optimized GIFs any more. As broadband access becomes more popular, web sites become more huge, more dynamic, and less optimized.
Most hosting providers did one of three things:
1) Offer a specific amount of monthly or daily data transfer. Usually this amount varies by the plan you have.
2) Redefine "Unlimited" deep in the TOS or AUP.
3) One big provider actually states that transfer is unlimited as long as you keep within the 17 GB/month limit. So, "unlimited as long as you stay within the limits".
Obviously #1 is preferred, but to many hosts, changing "unlimited" to any kind of limit puts them at a marketing disadvantage, since most customers don't really understand the limits or the fact that there's no such thing as "unlimited".
I'm sure ISPs will deal with the issue in similar ways, though one advantage is that most users understand the concept of "hours per month" more easily than they do "GB/month transfer", so a high-ish limit will appeal just as easily as "unlimited".
NGWave - Fast Sound Editor for Windows
How's it fraud? Define "unlimited service". As I stated in a previous post, "unlimited" in ISP terms is in relation to the previous per-hour charges of the big names like AOL, Prodigy, and so-on. They don't say "unlimited bandwidth", they say "unlimited service" which actually refers to your ability to use the service whenever you want to without additional cost. However, it does not give you the ability to use up all the available resources nonstop 24/7.
I've had SpeakEasy for 3 years now
I had Speakeasy for two years and it was great, though expensive. Then I saw what for me was a better offer. No caps, no port blocks, static IP, no limit on servers, 1500 down and 768 (!) upload.
All for $50/month. $40 with a fixed-term service agreement. 768K upload is great - I can stream all my audio no problems, and lots of moderate bitrate DIVX. I have on occasion maxed out my upload for several *weeks*. In 18 months I've had a single outage that lasted more than 8 hours.
I got it from Cyberonic, who are basically a reseller of UUNet. I have been as happy with them as I was with Speakeasy. There are other resellers.
Da Blog
Mod parent up! This is the kind of info that should be shared...
The problem is they are building an infrastructure for limited access and bandwidth, selling 'unlimited' access', then complaining when the users are 'overusing' the system by using it as represented. It is not the customers fault the ISP oversold the network in an effort to wring more income out of the setup costs. The fault lies squarely on the ISP for overselling their services.
Also, if the ISP access plans were spelled out better then there would not be the problems there are.
There should be standard verbage for standard conditions - i.e., "unlimited access" should mean you can access the system at any time and with any number of machines. Just like it says, ACCESS to the system is not limited in number or time. Note that ACCESS does not have anything to do with how fast you can pull or post data, or the amount of data you can get or put over the network.
"1.5down/500 up" specific terms and numbers on max network speed at any time you ACCESS the network. Note that it does not say anything about the quantity of data you are allowed to send or receive at that speed, nor when you are allowed to connect to the network.
"8gigs down/2gigs up" The QUANTITY of usage you are allowed in a month. Says nothing about speed of transmission, or when it is available.
Therefore, "unlimited access times, 1.5m/256k per sec., 20gig/5gig per month." specifies all three - when and how many machines I can CONNECT, the SPEED I am allowed to use, and the QUANTITY of data I am allowed across the network.
All three should be specified in any contract for service from an ISP, and they should not be allowed to change the terms of the contract during the life of the contract. That means the contract should have a term and must be honored by both parties for the lenght of the term. If changes need to be made, they should be made on the next contract, not unilaterally to the existing contract. (unilateral changes to a contract is an oxymoron - a contract is a meeting of the minds between two people while unilateral is the opposite - like 'jumbo shrimp')
Acts of massive stupidity are almost never covered by warranty. --me.
You ever hear of buyer beware? You didn't read the AUP did you?
http://www.comcast.net/terms/use.jsp
Prohibited Uses and Activities
(viii) restrict, inhibit, interfere with, or otherwise disrupt or cause a performance degradation, regardless of intent, purpose or knowledge, to the Service or any Comcast (or Comcast supplier) host, server, backbone network, node or service, or otherwise cause a performance degradation to any Comcast (or Comcast supplier) facilities used to deliver the Service;
me karma am bad
Their policy is simple -- You can use up to the bandwith your account type allows. The basic $19/month package has 3 GB/week, add 1 GB/week (4 GB/month) for $10. They give static IP address and no arbitrary server restrictions.
In their newsgroup discussions, they explain that because there are so many people who pay for big chunks of bandwidth and don't use it, they can provide the whole enchalada without problems. If more people started using all their bandwidth, then they'd have to lower the limits, but with all the homes and businesses and colo connections that consume only a tiny bit of the bandwidth they pay for, they don't anticipate it as a problem. Their stats show an aggregate of about 3 empty 45Mb/DS3 lines even at the peak use.
xmission is great.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
What legitimate need does a single person have when downloading 40 gigs of data over a short period of time?
I like to do offsite backup, and an easy way to do it is to have a hard drive sitting on a machine somewhere else, and just RSync it periodically. I start it up, it runs for many hours, but what do I care?
This can easily saturate a cable connection for > a day at a time, though usage goes down if I haven't changed much recently.
Most of my traffic takes place on port 22, and good luck figuring out what it is, unless you know a good exploit against SSH. I paid for bandwidth and it's not their f'in business what I do with it.
In fact, they don't WANT to make it their business to know what it is. As soon as they demonstrate the ability or willingness to police based on perceived legality of the material, the cease becoming common carriers, and they become RESPONSIBLE for the materials they carry. If they do so, then RIAA/MPAA/whoever is fully able to expect them to do their policing for them, or to be taken to court for trafficing in stolen goods.
I just like to collect stuff basically.
I suppose the logic I use to myself is that one day if my cable ever got cut off, I'd have plenty of media to consume in its absence.
On the other hand, since I get the majority of my content from usenet and not from P2P, I often have wondered if that is why my extreme downloading habits are overlooked. I typically download 4 gigs every day from usenet, but because it is coming from my ISP's local server (RR Orlando), I wonder if it makes less of an impact on the overall network than a P2P app would produce?
0verride y0ur subc0nsci0us r0bot: Crunch-0-Matic
I work for a small ISP that truly has NO cap. But we do have rules about not running servers and such. Certain customers can recieve different priorities and different rate limits. My pr0n recieves the highest priority there is. Yes, downloading at 3mb/s may limit others ability to watch Strongbad on a busy night but they can wait. All kidding aside, this has been a very interesting thread because it makes the company I work for look damn good. I shut people off almost every day, but never for excessive use. It is usually for spam, viruses, or lack of payment. And I personally wish we would block all P2P traffic because it does use the majority of our bandwidth, but we don't because it would lose us customers!
I did not make the assumption that everyone running a server or a P2P is a bw hog. I actually meant it in the exact opposite way: A bandwidth hog is using either P2P, running servers or something else. I don't think that this assumption is any wrong, especially since I specified "etc..." ;-)
Write boring code, not shiny code!
and we have an "unmetered" 56k dial-up access package, which in fact includes 150 hours of "free" access, with all subsequent hours charged to the customer. While this seems unfair, the restrictions are imposed upon us by the monopoly which controls access to the phone lines - British Telecom (yeah, the same guys who tried to enforce the patent on the hyperlink. Really.)
It's basically impossible for us to make money at the market rate (around USD20.00 / month) without imposing the surcharge, because of BT's pricing strategy. We could offer alternative packages - 300 hours for USD 40 for instance - but the market isn't there - forty bucks a month buys you DSL in the UK.
Our advertising materials include mention of the cap (though we don't like to dwell on it...) and we notify our customers that they are about to exceed their "free" quota.
For our broadband offering, we've implemented some limited traffic shaping - the P2P application ports don't get as much bandwidth as the games or web ports.
Sucks if you're leeching the latest britney album, but if you're playing medal of honour, you get decent ping times.
Cnet, yahoo news, and others- have had stories spelling out the increase and the reasoning behind it.. dsl competetion.. where verizon is trying to entice folks with lower rates for DSL, comcast is competeing by raising the d/l limit.. not reducing prices..
if I could get dsl I would, it's the 256k upload cap that is my biggest problem.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Depends . . :-)
One ISP I had a contract with required either party to give 30 days notice for cancellation
They no longer exist , wonder why
Not that this matters, but limiting myself to a constant rate transfer of 9600 baud could be construed to violate this agreement according to the wording, if Comcast desired.
I'm sure they don't filter out the broadcast and probing packets coming down my connection unsolicited of me, either
...we've just begun doing this as well. While there are corperately defined guidelines for what constitutes unacceptable amounts of bandwidth use, there is no automatic system for flagging subscribers. The only time a subscriber is contacted regarding bandwidth use is when other subscribers on the same area hub begin to complain about reduced speeds. After that, they get one automated warning phone call advising them to curtail their use, or call us to discuss what may have caused this (a lot of these people are killing bandwidth through virii, etc).
If the usage doesnt change, and complaints continue from other subs, they get cut off for a day, then a week, then permanently.
I believe the level where complaints can flag a person as an abuser is above 1.5/2GB a day.
I haven't seen anyone permenantly disconnected from this yet, I haven't even seen anyone go past the one day disconnection under this system.
Really, at least at MY ISP, Unlimited still holds, as long as it doesn't affect other subscribers.
This guy with cable/broad band is limited by his ISP to "not to download more than 3 gigs a week"
I have a very good dial up with Earthlink and if I download 24/7 I could download almost 2 gigs a week. My actual download varies between 1 gig a week and 1 gig a month.
If ISPs gag the total volume to 3 gigs a week, it stops making sense to upgrade from dialup, if your dialup is good and your downloads can be mostly automated.
I have always heard it phrased as "I refuse to reply on the grounds that it might tend to incriminate me."
:)
Might.
Tend.
So what you are saying is that "I can't say anything because if I did, people who either did not know the entire situation or choose to interpret what I said in certain ways might jump to the conclusion that I had done something wrong, and fifth amendment states I am not required to answer if that is the case."
You are right on on the part about not proving guilt.
One of my favorites is the one about the high school student who ran into the old woman, knocking her to the ground. He then held her down and proceded to strike her about the head and body while pulling at her clothes, pulling some of them right off her body!
What a bully! What a cad! Someone call the cops! Put him away for life!
Oh, I forgot to tell you her clothes were on fire, and his actions saved her life.
Knowing the whole story makes a difference, doesn't it?
Acts of massive stupidity are almost never covered by warranty. --me.
your ISP has every right to terminate your service for any reason they want. It's in the contract ...
No,
they don't have every right. You have a contract with them, it may contain conditions which you must follow. If it has a clause which says that they can terminate your service for any reason at all, that would not hold in a court of law.
Let me explain: If I walk into a store and try to purchase a banana, the clerk cannot deny me of my banana unless there is a legit reason for it, i.e. if I was drunk and was making a scene, and/or was trying to use fake money. Not even if there was a sign on the wall which said "we preserve a right to deny anybody to buy anything, for whatever reason".
If a reason for not making a contract or terminating a contract is not legit like that, that would be kind of like making a group of people sit at the back of the bus because of the colour of their skin!
However, if there are only so and so many bananas in the country, and I was trying to buy a whole bunch of them, that might hold as a reason for not selling me more than X bananas. However, it would not be OK if the store clerk would allow me to purchase all the bananas, then run after me and take them all away from me. He would have to tell me about the "maximum X bananas per customer" rule before I make the purchase.
The same goes for bandwith, an ISP cannot terminate a contract unless there is a legit reason (like if you were downloading kiddie-porn or violating a clause in the contract, a clause which has to clearly state the condiotions of your usage).
My other UID is 1337
I got banned from using BT's 'Anytime' dial up service for using it too much.
For God's sake - why are supposed Internet Nerds using the word "bandwidth" when the term required is "Data Traffic"???
It's pretty simple: You can't, under ANY circumstances use more bandwidth than your ISP permits you. C'est l'impossible!
It's Data Traffic that NZ ISPs are stingey as all fuck over. My account is 256/256 DSL and it rocks - except for two things:
1) First hop ping time of 55ms - INCLUDING 48ms of DSL Interleaving. AAARGH.
2) 2GB of monthly DATA TRAFFIC.
This from a company which owns a 120Gb/s pipe to the USA and it's running at 20% capacity.
Insanity.
Rationing a resource that is NOT scarce. *sigh*
They use layer 7 packet inspection
Heh, that's great until somebody makes a P2P client whose traffic looks like HTTP transactions to get around the filtering. (or DNS lookups, or email, or whatever feels properly abusive)
I would just tell them that I wouldnt have so much excessive usage if I didn't get 100 meg of spam a month on each email address. Not to mention my router is lit up like a christmas tree even when all my computers are turned off, from port scanners and script kiddies.
How do you plan to apply your little algorithm efficiently and economically to hundreds of thousands simultaneous connections? How do you efficiently and economically determine the average bandwidth instead of peak bandwidth of each connection? Do you want to allow a heavy user to utilize all available bandwidth when no one else is on the network at the moment? It's not as simple as you first thought, and Linux is not the answer to every question.
What happens when people ICMP someone? A user could be asleep or not home and their ports could be pegged to the max with packets. Is the average user responsible for packets sent to their computer when they (the average user) cannot accept/decline said packets?
Also, what about trojans which send packets to other machines? And, as bandwidth becomes limited, how is it legal for you to pop up an ad and steal the limited amount of bandwidth I have without asking?
ISPs say unlimited access ...
;)
they never say anything about unlimited bandwidth..
and luckily 99% of the population just see the word unlimited and block out the access bit..
-judging another only defines yourself
Having seen a lot of feedback here, I'm not sure that I understand what it is that people want. Here are the things that people have said: "Don't offer speed if you can't deliver" and "don't offer unlimited if you can't deliver". Let's take a look at the way that most ISPs work, and then address those.
Your standard ISP pays not for bandwidth, but for pipe density. T1, T3, DS3, OC3, etc. They pay for 1.5Mbps up/down 24-7 if they need it. NOw, obviously, this costs them much more a month than your 1.5Mbps download connection, by an order of magnitude of 20 or so. If you're on a dial-up service, most ISPs don't pay much to maintain infrastructure, unless they are also the phone company. It's some servers, a few banks of digi-cards, and a local dial-in number. In the case of high speed access, they generally also have to pay to maintain lines and equipment along the lines, such as repeaters and routers. A few web servers, a couple of mail servers, and you're an ISP.
Now, here's where the issue comes in. Normally, an ISP expects that some people will use high-speed very sparingly, probably depending on it for a few small critical tasks and the rest is email. And then they know there will be a few gamers and downloader making up some slack. This is expected by your broadband ISPs.
The problem comes in when you have someone who demands to use their connection for 1.5Mbps, all day, every day. The same connection, bursting, might serve six or 7 heavy usage customers, or 40 light usage customers, but now you have one single customer, attempting to consume $500 worth of download bandwidth for $50.
Obviously, there should be some sort of common sense applied here. Capping the top speed lower would be a poor idea, because those who download the occasional large file or movie trailer or whatnot enjoy access to the full speed. Changing the access hours seems silly, since some people play games for hours a day but never come close to consuming full bandwidth. Does it seem right to penalize this MAJORITY of the customers because a very small percentage of customers who seem to be of the opinion that if you have a 1.5Mbps connection, you MUST use all of it. If you gave them more bandwidth, they would simply find something else to do with it, not content unless they are pushing their connection as hard as possible, obviously lacking any idea of the economics behind it all.
Some have said that hard limits should be imposed in the contratct. This makes me sad, because it means that you are telling the company that they cannot trust their users, that they cannot use reasonable judgement, or expect that from you. Sometimes, you might have customers who never go over the limit, but might have a school project one month that pushes their usage up high once. As an ISP, I'd prefer to be able to use my discretion in this situation rather than hear the "told you so" of users crying about "lax enforcement of rule".
DISCLAIMER: I work for a mid-sized ISP.
--- I'm going sane in a crazy world.
Ss the world moves towards (pure) capitalism... subsidization will become less common. So people who use a service a lot (and hence are subsidized by others) will have to pay more. A lot of geeks (like me) use the internet far more than an average person. I think I'm going to be paying $150/month in internet (instead of $30/month) in 10 years (adjusting for inflation) :(
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
Yes, as a matter of fact, I am *QUITE* familiar with 'caveat emptor' ...
But, then again, I'm also aware of "false advertising," "deceptive trade practices," "fraud" and a few other terms that broadband ISPs don't want to talk about.
As an earlier poster said, "If they say 'unlimited' they damn well better MEAN "infinite, limitless bandwidth" unless they want to run afoul of some VERY nasty consumer protection laws.
Just my $0.02 ( & BTW, IAAL)
utter rubbish
It is their legal right
I already corrected your parent post, but I am also going to reply to yours, because you make a very common legal error.
A company does not have a legal right to discriminate people on any grounds they want to, no more than the government.
It's not like inviding people to your birthday party, you can invite all the coloured people, and not invite the white's, but the same does not go for those who offer goods or services in the open market.
As I stated above, one has to be able to point out something that legitimately gives them the right not to do business with them, an example would be if the person was a spammer or a dDoSer. Terminating a contract because they don't want to do business with people who use the Internet a lot is not a legit reason in this case, unless the ISP contract you agreed upon clearly states this condition.
PS.: this is the way things work in Scandinavia (no, that's not a country ^_^), where I live. I'll eat my hat if the great US allows this kind of discrimination.
My other UID is 1337
Just the usage. they probably hint at illegal activity as another kind of threat. They really coldn't give two shits. The reason they want you to quite is bandwidth costs money. They more you use, the more they need. What ISPs want is a bunch of casual users that just check e-mail and maybe play on the web once and awhile. That way it costs them little in bandwidth per user. They do not want people that download and/or upload lots of shit, regardless of if it is illegal copies of movies or just tons of Linux ISOs.
Like I said, the illegal thing is just another kind of threat they can use. They know that:
1) A good portion of the pople with large numbers ARE doing something illegal.
2) Even those that aren't may get scared by teh threat.
What people need to do is (when possible, I know it's not always) tell them to fuck themselves and go to an ISP that does bitch. Qwest, for all their faults (and they have a lot of faults with their DSL service) never once whined about my usage and it was real high. I ran a web server and in addition was always transfering audio mixes back and forth (like 4-16 tracks of 24-bit uncompressed audio). Speakeasy likewise does note whine now, despite the fact that it's now three webservers, as well as audio, online games, web, etc, and two roomates doing the same. Also much smarter and better organised than Qwest (high ping times though).
If people hop shitty ISPs, they will either fix their shitty policies or die. It really is the easiest and most effective solution. Not always feasable, but the best if you can do it.
As a Cisco CCIE and working for a ISP, I will as politely as I can ask you: what have you been smoking? Weighted Fair Queuing does not solve any bandwidth issues. What it DOES do is to give priority to "streams" with few/small packets, making interactive traffic/voip perform better on congested low speed links (typically 10mbit or less).
However, it does not make a saturated Gigabit Ethernet(or similar) backbone link filled with kazaa traffic less saturated, and the only way to overcome saturated links is to upgrade the links, at a price.
SOME ISP's rate-limit P2P traffic to give their backbone links a breather, but that again rises the question of unlimited. Do you prefer to have your link limited so that you can download X gigabytes over a month, or do you prefer to download X gigabytes as quickly as possible and then be capped?
The fact of matter is that consumer internet access is priced according to statistical usage (read: normal). If you want to peak your link 24/7/365 you should buy a service that allows you to do so, but be aware such a product cannot be "consumer" priced. You get what you pay for, always have, always will..
Note that I said there are other implementations that scale better in the original post, and that WRR was just an example to illustrate the point.
There are many papers on this subject and many routers implement the protocol -- even to "hundreds of thousands of hosts".
Google for "Weighted Fair Queueing". I don't have the time right now to right a tutorial on the subject. There are papers that answer your other questions.
You ever hear of buyer beware? You didn't read the AUP did you?
IRRELEVANT.
Comcast is, in this current, valid offering which I am currently holding in my left hand saying - quite explicitly, mind you - that I can get "Unlimited Internet Access" by signing up for their cable service. The TOS/AUP/POS/whatever is NOT printed OR referenced ANYWHERE on this advertisement. NO alternative definition for "unlimited" is provided that says they mean anything other than the dictionary term.
The advertisement is, quite obviously, advertising a service THEY DO NOT SELL.
If it's that easy, can I start selling shale through the mail as gold and claim in my convoluted, small print TOS that "gold" really means a "a brittle, grayish-brown stone"? Does my TOS vindicate my false advertising? I think not. That's exactly what Comcast is trying to do here.
They want to cap people? Fine. Then stop advertising something completely different that you're not selling and never have. That's all I ask. Advertise your product or service, don't try to hide your deceptive ads (which are actually flat-out lies) behind convoluted terms and pretend that that justifies your fairy tale advertising.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
The ISPs specifically mentioned on the mailing list I was talking about were Comcast, NTL (England, Ireland, Wales) and CFaith.
One guy thinks maybe buried in the Comcast legalese it says "unlimited access" means access at any time, but not for an unlimited length of time.
I've never received any complaints myself, but as an avid DC++ user I am waiting for it to happen and wondering what the highest odds outcome is if I ignore the warning.
You ever hear of buyer beware? You didn't read the AUP did you?
http://www.comcast.net/terms/use.jsp Prohibited Uses and Activities
(viii) restrict, inhibit, interfere with, or otherwise disrupt or cause a performance degradation, regardless of intent, purpose or knowledge, to the Service or any Comcast (or Comcast supplier) host, server, backbone network, node or service, or otherwise cause a performance degradation to any Comcast (or Comcast supplier) facilities used to deliver the Service;
Since this rule is to prevent a degradation of service, and the service I'm paying for includes unlimited access, I don't see how they can claim that unlimited access is disrupting the service.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
My father recently wanted to terminate services with Verizon DSL because he didnt use it. It was only the fact that my little brother would be unable to leech mp3s off kazaa that made him end up keeping it. He said reading the news online ad email could be done just fine over a nice slow dialup connection because the price was cutting into him each month. He called verizon and told them what he was going to do and they slashed his rate and upped his bandwidth.
Piracy is one of the major sources driving the high speed access. I know lots of people who won't move to cable or dsl precisely because they can do everything on the web or email that they want to do with dialup.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
Not if you made them yourself and share with your friends and they share with you.
I've dealt with people from Scandinavian countries, mostly sweden, with service like that on many occasions. Let me guess, it's the service with the name that abbreviates BBB right?
Here's the problem with your service:
So I am at work, chatting with a guy in Sweden. He wants me to send him some files. I don't want to be here all that long, so I ask him how fast his conenction is. 10mb he says. Great, that'll finish in a couple minutes. I start the transfer. It levels off at about 15 kilobyytes/second, that's 120k in linespeed terms. I'm like WTF? He claims the problem is on my end. Wrong. I work for network operations at a university. We have two OC-3c lines to seperate providers. Those hook through dual gigi ethernet to our core, into which the switch I sit on hooks via gig. I check the router stats to make sure we aren't doing excess traffic. Nope, we are at like 40% usage on each line.
So I start investigating and testing, have him transmit to me, test with other people. My connectio is working fine, I can get 2 megabytes/second to and from other fast Internet locations. More research yeilds BBB to be the problem.
See, they give you a fast DSL LINE. That gets you a fast connection to them. So anyone on their network (other DSL users mainly, but also peers) you get blazing speeds to. However bandwidth to the Internet are expensive, and they don't have a whole lot of that. So they cap their users. I believe 20 kbytes/second is thw current cap. That means any time you're doing traffic with a part of the Internet that ISN'T one of BBB's peers (and that would be most of it), you get speeds little better than ISDN.
Well US DSL connections, espically from providers like Speakeasy, aren't like that. You pay for soemthing, you get it. I have a 1.5mb/768k Speakeasy line and I get every bit of that. Doesn't matter if it's to next door or to Japan. They allow me to use my full bandwidth to anywhere, and have the connections themselves to support it.
Static IPs also factor into price. IPs are a scarce resource, so they cost money. Static IPs cost more since you use them all the time, even if your comptuer is off (because they are assigned to your line only).
Sorry, but it's not the broadband paraside you think over there. Not saying it's a bad way of doing thigns, just that there are tradeoffs. It's very much like a university campus, on a larger scale. For example most of our users here can claim to have a 100mbit connection. Their desktop is conencted to the switch at 100mbit. That means that they'll get that bandwidth to anyone else on that switch. If they are on the campus proper, then their switch usually has 2gbits of uplink to the distribution switches, which have the same to the core. So they can get 100mbit to more or less anywhere on campus at any time. However they can't off campus. Why? Well we only about 300mbits of total off compus bandwidth. That is shared between all 25,000 computers. That means that the 100mbit link they have hits a bottleneck. It's still fast, but not 100mbit.
BBB's situation is a little more sever since they ENFORCE limits. Our limits are a product of necessity. If the network has enough free resources, you can get your full 100mbit speed, but that basically enver happens since there are always a number of people using the network (we almost never go below 30%). The BBB limits are there all the time (near as I can tell), even if their netowrk links would support more speed. this is probably because they have one or more metered linsk where they pay per the amount of bandwidth used.
This will become higher profile and more common as the average person uses residential high speed access to work from their home office.
I suck back a bit working from home, but 8 hours of shoving documents around and moving files can add up fast.
Streaming audio, streaming video, OS patches, umpteen programming applications, remote backups, distributed computing, perfectly legal P2P applications...this is the short list.
Oh, yeah, and another thing: who the hell are you to define what's legitimate? Whether I'm downloading pornography, telecommuting, or watching reruns of 'What's Happening Now?' from a server in New Guinea, it doesn't matter. If I'm not violating my TOS, and I'm simply using my 'unlimited' connection, then I'm not doing anything wrong.
I'll call a spade a spade: certain broadband providers are screwing a subset of their customers, because they can, and relying on 'common sense' from non-techies to justify their actions. I understand their business justifications (hey, I'm a businessman), but their tactics suck, and it will bite them square in the ass someday.
What makes this especially fun is that if you exercise your unlimited access and that limits someone elses access it is Comcast that is in breach of contract. They are failing to provide unlimited access to that person.
Someone needs to mod the parent post up!
"Why is bandwidth offered so asymmetrically?"
:)
Because they can?
The typical Internet user uses very little outbound bandwidth, so 80% of your customers have little need for high upload bandwidth, so the ISPs are limiting their network infrastructure costs by setting upload limits lower than download limits.
If you're one of the 20%, who would really benefit from broadband uploads as well (online gaming, personal web servers for friends and family, etc.), you either pay extra or you're just plain screwed.
Since this 20% of your customer base represents such a small percentage of your overall revenue, the savings outweigh the churn from that part of your customer base.
That's why you don't see shoes that fit Shaquille O'Neal in regular shoe stores
I agree, this is extremely shortsighted and doesn't enable us to take full advantage of the capabilities and promise of broadband services. I think this is one of the reasons why broadband adoption has been slow in the US.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
That may be true for the bandwidth on the backbones, however IIRC the way that a cable modem works, the down channel is way bigger than the up channel. Remember that cable was originally ONLY one direction.
Someone who is more familiar with the actual technical details please elucidate, or explain how I'm wrong.
Mike
If you are willing to claim unlimited, be prepared to put your money where your mouth is. If not, don't make the claim. Unlimited means just that, no limits, no qualifications. You can't afford to offer that at your price range? Then don't offer it. You can make other claims such as no preset limit or so on. However if you want to say there is no limit, be prepared for people to use that.
I do with my ISP. I expect that my connection be on 24x7 barring problems. I expect to be able to use all the bandwidth they choose to give me as often as I like adn not hear about it. I put a heavy load on that line too, what with three servers, two roomates and lots of personal use. They don't complain, their pricing is such that they can sustain that.
It is the ISPs that need to get over it, with it being the concept taht you have the right to advertise something and not give it. ISPs want the allure of being "unlimited" but not the associated costs. Too bad. Either be unlimited, and don't whine about it (my dialup ISP never bothered me if I left the modem on for a week straight, which I did) or don't advertise as such. Isntead of unlimited say no time restrictions and no preset limits.
Notice that American Express does NOT claim they give you an unlimited spending amount. They say they have "no pre-set spending limit". That means that, unlike other cards where you have a hard cap as to what you can charge, they have no default cap in place. Doesn't mean they'll let you charge anything you want. They couldn't do that or someone would get one, charge $50 million in shit and skip the country. However, it would be dishonest to claim otherwise.
Finally, I would not that DirectPC got sued over this and lost.
That's still wrong. A bandwith hog is anyone using bandwith. If you download 50GB in a month off of web HTTP downloads, that's still just as much of a hog as someone transferring that much over P2P.
And if your specification of 'etc' was meant to cover everything as you are implying, then that renders your statement utterly pointless because it equates to "bandwith hogs are using something or other."
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Had an ISP cut me off beacuse my line stayed conneted for 12 hours with no 'appreciable' traffic. ( was a glitch in my pppd )
Said i violated the 'unlmited use' policy by 'not using it'..
Bastards. they just wanted my static IP back...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Is that you be truthful with your claims then. that is not unlimited. Unlimited means just that, no limits, no restrictions, no exceptions. So if you claim unlimited use of a line, it ought to mean just that. My current ISP (DSL) DOES mean just that. I put a really heavy load on their line, probaby puts me in the top 10% of users or higher. However their speed limits and monthly fees are such that they can sustain that.
If you want to offer a service that DOES have limtis, just not hard set ones, say that. "No pre-set limit". That's what AmEx claimes on their cards. However it is dishonest to claim something has no limits (which is what unlimited means) and then put a limit on it, even if that limit is not a hard set one.
This is flawed. I'm not using other people's safety deposit boxes just because I use mine all the time. The bank is selling access to 100 boxes when they only really have 75. Some people don't use their's the whole month, but when everyone uses their box, the bank runs out.
You forget, the 'bank' sold me use of a box, like Comcast sold me 1.5Mb down and 256k up. I can't get more than I'm capped. This isn't the user's problem, just because they want to use what they've been sold. The whole business model for ISPs is to oversell capacity. They buy 1.5Mb and then sell 10 people 1.5Mb and hope they don't use it all at once (which usually they don't).
When the Airlines do this, they customer who is bumped is reimbursed. Maybe we need a law to make ISPs do that?
An old friend was once a manager at a Pizza Hut. At that time, PH also had a salad bar. It was sold as an all-you-can-eat salad bar. His regional manager was riding his ass about controling the salad bar costs. My friend said, "It is an all you can eat deal, how can I control what people eat?" He was told to keep track of how much had been consumed each day and stop restocking the salad bar when their cost limit was reached.
Guess what happened next... Salad bar sales dropped by about 2/3rds and then he got his ass chewed about the drop in sales. The main thing companies seem to want is for people to pay for 'unlimited' services/food/etc... and then not use them. Unlimited makes for good marketing strategy because the marketers don't have to deal with the realities of a greedy consumer.
I ran into this with my first ISP in 1995. Each account had a shell account and ftp space with that shell account. I would download large files from non-resumable ftp servers *cough*microsoft*cough* of the day into the ftp space and then download them locally. One day I found the file I had transferring was no longer in my ftp space and an email about my 'suspicious' activity. I called and finally got hold of the person that sent the email, their security/compliance officer.
I'm stunned by this and he starts grilling me about what I was downloading that was 50megs. I inform him that it was the linux trial version of Wordperfect and could he please restore the file so downloading could resume. He declines and says that I'm using too much space. I asked just how much space is allowed. I was told that they had no set limit, but that I was using too much. The closest thing he would give to an answer was that the number would float according to overall usage. When he still refused to give any number, I asked why they even had the ftp space and he said it was one of the services they provided.
Their policy was that I could use ftp space, but not too much or too often, with no amount or time given. I asked him how much sense that made to him and he wouldn't answer except to say that was their policy.
I was so pissed that the next week I signed up for AOL just to dump the bastards.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
>Just my $0.02 ( & BTW, IAAL)
Nice, If I had but one life to give for my country, it would be a lawyer's.
Did they say "Unlimited Bandwidth" or did you add the word 'Bandwidth' for them? It is reasonable for them to assume that there words will be taken in a reasonable manner. Would you assume 'unlimited internet access' means I have unlimited access to whitehouse.gov and could change it to fit my needs? No, because that would be unreasonable. "But gee they said unlimited access!" boo hoo. That's nice. But let's not take "Unlimited" to mean something unreasonable.
me karma am bad
which really *does* divide the content providers from the content consumers in a way the internet was never meant to do.
Ummm, if we're going to dig into what 'the internet was meant to do' you're probably right. However, the 'internet' in those terms was never meant to be used by the general public.
So it's an error to stretch and distort the meaning of 'what was originally intended.'
A Good Intro to NetBS
"However bandwidth is a scarce commodity"
That is the biggest myth being propogated by the bandwidth barons. Bandwidth is stinking cheap and getting cheaper with each passing day.
What the powers that be want to do is keep increasing their profit percentage even though their volume of sales keeps going up. Corporate greed at its finest.
That T1 you may pay several hundreds a month for costs the phone companies a couple bucks a month for just the bandwidth. Don't believe the NSPs bullshit and all the ISPs' shills out posting here!
My ISP defines "acceptable" as something like 4Gb/month on my subscription. They also define what happens when I pass that limit: They limit my bandwidth to about what I'd get from a normal modem. Still 24/24, but just less bandwidth.
:-)
However, according to their mesurements I've never reached that limit. According to mine, I have...
Roger.
I'm about to launch a 2-3 month long application that would max my bandwidth (unlimited usage plan) 24/7 during the duration of the trial. Looks like I may need to speek with my ISP about their feelings on this. None of my activity would be in any way illegal or inapropriate but that may not matter. Is anyone else in this situation or have they been before? What's happened?
-Tim Louden
Sorry for my rudeness. I'm not in the field. That's a great pointer, interesting stuff to read at bed time.
-always available, no dialing
-no hourly usage limits
-no tying up the phone line
-no content restrictions
looks like only one of these really applies to "unlimited"
1) unlimited availability - you can access our service any time, any day. It's kinda lame though - would you buy an Internet access you can only use during business hours? I know newsgroup servers have sold off-peak accounts though - they have limited availability. So it's a valid "unlimited"
2) unlimited hours of usage - you can use the service as long as you want whenever it is open (which is always, see above). Btw, I used to have a limited ISDN account this way - max 8 hrs/day. So yes, another valid "unlimited"
3) unlimited access to content - we do not censor what you can get. Well DOH, unless you live in China, but it's still a valid "unlimited"
I'm sorry, but I think they can create enough reasons to justify calling it unlimited, even if it's not the kind of unlimited you'd want it to be. Unless they directly say in marketing material that unlimited = unlimited bandwidth (unlimited downloads may actually refer to the last "unlimited" above) I don't think you'll get anywhere.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I live in NZ and have had serious problems with my ISP after signing up for an unlimited 128Kbps connection. All was great for some weeks until one day I wake up and there's no connection. I spend 3 days trying to get through to my ISP through various voice mail boxes and automated responses, and when I finally do, the admin tells me in a pretty gruff way: We booted you because you used too much bandwidth.
Now, that's quite possible - my flatmate did have a penchant for downloading movies, but still, when we signed up, it was all you could eat, er, download in 128k.
I told him this, and he replied it was a new policy and that they weren't interested in our custom any more. Fine, I said, and hung up.
As an addendum to this story, I got a call a few weeks ago from this ISP telling me I owed them nearly $300 in fees.
Shall we say I suspect they're not likely to ever call me again.
Have you downloaded the latest fixes to XP? It's over 35 MB! Imagine having to do that over a dial up connection to one of these ISPs. Might qualify me as a pirate?
As for CATV. Comcast raised the prices also for me and so I opted out of CATV. Lo and behold after about 4 months Comcast came a callin' and offered me a permanent discount to reconnect my CATV.
I guess this is so that they can boost their viewership numbers to advertisers. As it turns out they might need us more than we think.
It supposed to be until March 2004, at least that's what my postcard said.
Who knows what they will do after that period...they may offer better tiered services (higher download speeds at the same prices they were charging prior to the 2mb upgrade), maybe offer a 256kb upload option, etc.
I followed the deforestation chain, and all I can say is, what a PITA. For years, I've been looking for a way to eliminate paper, and it just ain't that easy. And when I think about old-forest trees being ground up for paper (or so I've read), it just royally pisses me off.
I find myself wondering whether we're too far screwed up to ever salvage.
All that over a little paper. But then, it's just another example of how earth-shaking issues integrate themselves into our day-to-day decision.
Sometimes, it is just that people don't know. MY roomate have twice now (once each) managed to get some kind of infection. Thing is I don't know about it right away. It's not like I have a sniffer running and logging all my traffic or something. I don't notice until I happen to go in my server/network closet to do something and see their computer doing a lot of traffic when they aren't at it. As soon as I notice, I shut down their port and then fix their computer when they get home.
Now there'd be hell to pay if my ISP shut my line off without warning me first (it's a bussiness class line and that's against the SLA). However a notice would be very nice, I wish they would look for this kind of thing and send me e-mail, but a straight disconnect is not good policy.
That's what we did on campus when the MS worms hit. We put information in teh dorms (with cleaner CDs). Then we scanned campus every day and announced infected IPs to the net managers list. We gave them a few days to clean off the computers. Then we started shutting down ports, but only after they had been warned.
TOC cannot violate LAW.
You cant terminate because you don't like their daughters.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Where i live (Portugal) the vast majority of ISPs refuse to guive you unlimited access, the "consumer" versions of broadband packages include things like 2gb international, 20 national. Only 2 ISPs supply real unlimited access, and they charge 60eur/month (the cheapest) for ADSL 512/128.
they don't mean "Unlimited Bandwidth Usage" when they say unlimited access.
They probably mean "unlimited access" as in, there are no limitations or restrictions on when you use the service, nor what parts of the internet (or their network) you access.
While they *still* aren't being 100% correct, they will pass the legal standard, which is something to the effect that a reasonable individual would understand the intent of the advertising.
For instance: Unlimited Access (24/7/365)
but, obviously not during outages. If outages got much beyond 1% of the time, you could probably sue, but... just because for first 30 minutes of each month the system is down for maintenance doesn't mean it isn't "unlimited" and "always on"
Incidentally, Cox Communications recently put an official limit on bandwidth usage. No more than 2GB/day or 30GB/Month
Now, at peak, I've hit 3.1GB in a day -- never heard a word. That said, I'm probably only in the 15-20GB/Month range most months.
And here is the point that I go ballistic over. It is NOBODIES business whether or not I can use all of the downloaded material. Nor is it their business what I do with it afterwards (unless of course I am violating the law). This is not an issue of what is being done with the content, but rather, whether or not the service given lives up to the advertised claims.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
And if your specification of 'etc' was meant to cover everything as you are implying,
Yes it did.
then that renders your statement utterly pointless
No it doesn't. I was talking about BW hogs, and chose to give a few example of bandwidth hog. P2P users and popular servers are good example of bandwidth hogs, but there is pretty much no limitation. I was still talking about BW hogs. My statement didn't rely in any way in the fact that a BW log would be a P2P user or a server host. Maybe you should read my original post once again.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
OK, so what do they really mean by unlimited?
If I can use the service whenever I want, doesn't that mean I can download 24/7?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I'm sick and tired of hearing about people complaining that their bandwidth is in jeopardy becuase of some cap that the ISP is going to put in. Lets look at this, honestly.
Chances are no matter what extent of web surfing you are doing, you're not bringing down more than 15gig per month.
If you are using an excessive amount of bandwidth, stop bitching about it, contact the ISP and ask them (act like a man and actually confront your accuser) what are the acceptable limits, and how is it that I am breaking them.
For all of those people that have complained about downloading Linux ISOs for 'install fests', come on and be honest. Assuming that you even downloaded two recent distro's you're only talking about 7gigs, not counting SRC cds or extras. My suggestion, contact your ISP and encourage them to host local mirrors of the popular distros, including Xfree, kernel.org, and redhat/suse/debian/. Suggest that they can limit the external hog of the bulk of Linux CD downloads, not only that, but because its kept locally, you are going to get better speads from your ISP directly. I typically get 340-360KB/s which is quite sufficent, but get less than 60KB/s from Suse directly.
This is just a few thoughts from someone rambling at work...
g'night
think before you write, it'll save me moderator points.
There is no such thing as umlimited anything in telecommunications - this is an invention of the marketing department. Every piece of traffic that moves - every phone call, every email, every single thing - is paid for on a per basis.
Not knowing that little bit of wisdom kind of skews this conversation - don't ya think? Companies that sell 'unlimited' sure as hell aren't buying it that way - they are gambling the same way all you can eat restaurants do.
As much as I complain about their cable service, Optimum has been VERY good with the broadband. Anyone living in their service area should check them out (NJ/NY).
I've had the same IP for almost a year now (although it is not guaranteed to remain the same as it's not static).
I get 6Mb/1Mb. My buddy in the next town gets 10Mb/1Mb. (Imagine being jealous when you're getting 6Mb yourself)
I download TONS of stuff, at least 5GB/month consistently, and I've never gotten any notices from them.
are you serious? Cox? I have Cox cable, and I seriously download, like hundreds of gigs a month sometimes, and I haven't heard anything either
There are many people who share media, and thus both upload and download it for legitimate reasons. Amateur graphic artists, musicians and porn stars all have legitimate reasons to use lots of bandwidth.
If a company cannot accept people using their service legitimately, there should be some type of legitimate recourse. After all, the ISPs have become utility providers of sorts. i belive they should be regulated in a similar way. One doesn't get their local phone service cut off for calling their entire scout troop or calling all their fellow church members.
Yep. The Ihug ISP in NZ offered unlimited broadband. However I had a battle with them over the definition of 'unlimited' It ended with me ripping a page out of the Oxford Dictionary with 'unlimited' underlined and sending it to their CEO. The result was an apology (nice) but I was also informed that my usage was excessive, but when I wanted to know what 'fair' usage was they couldn't tell me. So I told them to shove it.
My fav units are dead Mavs
This is a marketing and technical issue and financial issue for both dialup and DSL customers. I own a small ISP so I can see the problems from both sides.
Many potential customers ask for umlimited service. If the service doesn't say that it is unlimited the customer goes elsewhere.
Since many companies advertise unlimited service (even when it isn't) this forces other companies to advertise unlimited service or be destroyed by competition.
Some companies say they are unlimited, others say "virtually unlimited" but the truth is that the customer doesn't want a limit even though most customers never hit any acceptable limits.
The other side is technical and financial. Each dialup customer uses a dialup line when connected. Do ISPs have a dialup line for each customer? No, the currnt ratio is about 5 to 6 customers per line. Do the math. If everyone has unlimited access and used it, then 80% of the customers dialing would get busy signals and the ISP would die.
For DSL it isn't quite the same. All the DSL customers have 1.5/256, but how much bandwidth to the internet does the ISP have? DSL costs between $40 and $60 for most people. All that bandwidth travels across an ATM circuit. A 1.5 ATM circuit costs an ISP like mine about $800 per month. A 1.5 to the internet costs an ISP like mine $1200 to $2000 per month.
Once again, do the math. In order to make money selling DSL an ISP needs to put at least 40 DSL customers with 1.5/256 on the same T1 (the same 1.5 of bandwidth). And 80 is a more common number.
If every one of those customers expects to get 1.5/256 24 hours a day, 7 days a week they are dreaming. They have to share.
But since ISPs have to make customers want their service, they have to advertise unlimited service. The truth is that even if the ISP advertises unlimited service, it simply can't be unless the ISP has only 1 DSL customer per ATM and per T1 to the internet and loses money every month.
And that ISP won't be around for very long.
Howard Shere Altair to OS X so far
it *is* unlimited. They won't charge you a single red cent more for using too much bandwidth. They will simply exercise their option to terminate the service.
Theoretically (and probably in actuality) they have to refund you the pro-rated amount of any prepaid access you bought. If you paid $50 for April, and they cut you off on the 15th, they owe you about $25.
I imagine that if you screamed loudly enough, you could get that $25.
But they are under no obligation to continue to offer the service after the end of the month you prepaid for. And you probably agreed that they can cancel at any time if they give you a refund for unused amount.
and it is most certainly their right to refuse to sell their service to whoever they want -- within reasonable limits -- they can't have a policy of not selling service to, say, women (although, they probably could get away with not selling to white guys, the way current trends run in America)
And dammit, I'm not an "apologist" I'm not apologizing for them, I'm telling you why you have <1 clue.
Optus in Oz simply slows the cable connections of those who use more than 30GB a month (or something) down to modem speeds till the beginning of the next month..
It's still unlimited in that they can download as much as they wanted without getting charged more.
When someone sells you "768/128kbit DSL unlimited" you as an intelligent customer would have three clues:
a) its 768kbit download and 128kbit upload. The smaller number is always the upload, always has been on all end user internet connections since the 56k modem. This is called regular/usual/normal terms of trade. And common sense of course.
b) it is a DSL-connection. That means, you have exclusive bandwidth that you don't need to share with your neighbourhood. You have 768kbit down and 128kbit up as long as the DSL head end is not maxxed out, which happens rather seldom compared to alternative methods like a cable access. Technical specifications combined with usual terms of trade and common sense again.
c) everything else is unlimited. Max. bandwidth is limited as noted before, so the rest of the parameters are not limited. Remaining parameters are: connection time, transfer volume up/down, access to ports, access to ip adresses. Common sense again, you know.
So all in all combined, you have an internet access, that lets you up and download all data from/to all servers via all TCP/UDP ports 24h a day, 7 days a week as long as the contract goes, the only constraint being 768kbit down and 128kbit up. Congestion is supposed to happen seldom, if it happens often they may need to provide more backbone bandwidth.
If I market my grocery store with "apples for 20$, unlimited", I should pretty much hope no one shows up with UN cargo plane.
I got disconnected for a week by Shaw, not once but twice! I also got the "we don't limit how many hours a month you can connect" argument. I was told that we were only allowed to download 5gigs a month and only 1.5gigs a month of uploading. I went on to explain to them that simply playing counter-strike for 2 hours a night would put me over that limit. I also went on to explain how I could more than quadruple a 1.5gig limit on a freakin' 28.8 modem. I also went on to explain how they never advertised unlimited hours. They went on to explain how they don't give a rat's ass and my service would be turned back on in a week. As soon as I could actually switch to Telus, I did. It was a long waiting period before they actually fired up service in my town though, was a horrible wait. Shaw sucks. The Terayon-based network they use sucks. Pings in games with Telus are dramatically lower, averaging 20ms compared to way over 50ms with Shaw. (Yes, I notice the difference in some games.) Shaw had dropped their upstream bandwidth from 100KB/s to 50KB/s during my stay with them. Telus is at 64KB/s upstream right now, so that's higher than Shaw was when I left them. Downstream's capped at a slower rate than I could get with Shaw, but it's still plenty fast. Glad I switched from day one.
Telus's service blows large, stinky goats..
I am forced to deal with them on a weekly basis, and their "support" is
We had a school on a Shaw cable account for two years, with no interruptions.. the Powers That Be decided to move everybody to Telus.. so we get a Telus "business class" account, and take cat5 cable from the cablemodem, plug it into the DSL modem, then instruct the router to get a new DHCP address.
Two days later, the school has no internet connection. I go down there, and sure enough, can't ping the gateway. I call Telus, and am told "try releasing and renewing your IP address" - I do, and the link comes back with a different IP address. "So, the problem was with your equipment" the Telus guy says. "No, I haven't changed anything - the problem must be with *your* equipment."
Two days later, guess what? The school has no internet connection. I go back, and it's the *same thing*. Knowing the script, I release and renew the DHCP lease - and it comes back, again with a different IP address.
I call Telus, and I get "no, it must be your equipment."
Two days later, it happens again. I reconnect the router to cablemodem (which is still there), and it works. I leave it for two weeks (until the service is about to expire) without a single glitch, then move it back to the Telus DSL line.
Two days later, the school has no internet connection. Telus tells me "there is no problem with our equipment. It has to be your computer. LALALA WE CAN'T HEAR YOU LALALALA"
The next month, the DHCP servers *for the entire northern half of the province* go down for almost two weeks(?!?!?!) Telus DHCP leases last for 2 hours.
Telus advertises "static" IP addresses, but they won't give you one. You have to use DHCP. When I ask a Telus rep what the 'D' in DHCP stands for, they say "well, it's a static IP address, because we say it won't change, unless it does."
A Telus rep once told my customer "you shouldn't have a firewall." When he asked why, he was told "well, because it can interfere with traffic to your computer."
My home has Shaw. They've always been courteous, and willing to give me the benefit of the doubt. Even when they did not believe the issue resided with them, they still checked on it.
Check out Etree. There's a large community of bands that not only allow but actively support the taping of their concerts. This is a great business model for them, by giving away for free what they wouldn't have made any money off of anyway they get lots of free marketing and since any good musician plays a different show each night, it doesn't cut into album or concert sales. This is how the Grateful Dead became the most successful touring act in history.
Oh, I know about the Dead, and also Metallica's ironic flirtation with bootlegging. There are, as you say, lots of bands who don't mind. But unless they give permission, you are technically (supposedly) breaking some kind of copyright. I am not sure exactly how that works, but I know lots of concerts actually check for cameras before you go in. Thank you for the link, because I think it is going to be my goal to support more bands who are more free with their work, which fits in with my own philosophy.
For any "unlimited" pricing scheme to work, there has to be a large enough low-usage subscriber population to subsidize the high usage subscribers. Currently, there are a lot more high-usage subscribers than the company can support. This figures, since those who want high speed internet are the tech savvy, so of course those who sign up first are going to use a lot of bandwidth.
But here is the thing. If you get a *lot* of low-usage customers(the general public at large), by lowering the price (let's say to $25/month), it might be possible to subsidize those bandwidth hogs without limiting them. I think the first company to figure this out might be SBC, with their $30/month plan. Of the phone company knows all about cheap unlimited rates--how many people do you know doesn't have unlimited local calls?
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
Its basic economics and people still think Bandwidth is free... Its not.. Its very costly.. and You have unlimited access but not unlimited usage.
Its plain and simple how Highspeed works.. They get a Highspeed line and share it among its customers.. Say your highspeed ISP has a 1Gig/sec line and they doll out 1Meg/sec connections. That means that it only takes about 1024 people using the full 1meg that they are portioned out on a consistant 24/7 basis to congest the incomming trunk. say Your paying 40$/month for your connection which is pretty much the going rate for the most part... Do you actually think Any ISP could find 1Gig/s of bandwidth for Less than 40K$ a month.. Thats just Bandwidth charges.. They still need to Feed thier greedy pocket and pay for infastructure upkeep and Support yet too not to mention Advertising Ect..
There are a few reasons why they do not Publish What they currently consider Acceptable use.. As time goes on What the Typical user uses on the ineternet is going to change.. and Thats what the economics of high speed are about... Typical users.. Another reason why they don't want to publish any numbers be because alot of people have a odd mentality of "They told me I can use up to 20 gig's in a month So I am gonna use it all Dammit!".. In which case They will loose some of thier profitability when alot of people are doing thier best to use thier alotted bandwidth.
If you think you are getting ripped off by your ISP ask them if they will provide you with a metered connection.. Then Download and Upload as much as you want then take a peek at your bill at the end of the month. I am sure you will be greatful for the unmetered conection you had with its unwritten limit.
Who needs WiFi when we can have Packet Over Sheep! http://datacomm.org/PoS-InternetDraft.txt
indeed... way back in the dizzy you could buy one-sided cable, like some satellite services of today still are.. had to use dialup for your upload packets lol..
makes the down speed pretty worthless what with ACK packets and all
combining all previous posts into one, the final conclusion is:
"unlimited" != "some large but defined number"
Just ask your local mathematician. They will tell you that "infinity" or "unlimited" is not "300", not "300000" and not "3^10000".
x is smaller than +oo for all x
Prove me wrong, tell me one number that is equal to or bigger as "infinity" or "unlimited".
The rest is simple risk management. If you are an ISP, if you offer unlimited access, you are actively and willingly taking a risk. Factor this risk in your calculations, use a safety margin and compare this with your competition. If it then isn't profitable for you to join that market stay out or take a higher risk. But don't expect others to take YOUR risk. BTW that's the reason why you can collect the margin, the premium or whatever you call your earnings. You as an entrepreneur can collect a premium because you have an idea, money and the willingness to take risks. Higher risk, higher premium. No risk, no premium.
Hello Mr. or Mrs. Decameron81 #628548. I have to inform you that I sent a copy of your post to John Ashcroft and George W. Bush. You oppose the concept of "suspected == guilty", what makes you a suspected PATRIOT-opponent and a guilty terrorist. You just committed a thought crime and a team from the Homeland Gestapo is already on its way to pick you up to Guantanamo.
/me will collect a huge bounty from the $25M "Saddam memorial fund" from TIPS. Sorry for ya, but I'm broke right now. I hope the rumors of gas chambers and crematoriums on Guantanamo were false...
Your $15 a month (or whatever) you're paying for dial-up does not even come close to covering the cost of the commercial rate phone line that you're tying up. Additionaly the ISP also has to cover the bandwidth, wages and infrastructure needed to make the rest of your Internet connection work. When you're tying up that line 24/hours a day, the ISP is only recovering a small portion of what it is actually costing them.
I used to get something like 1Mbps on my SBC DSL line. A few months ago, that suddenly dropped to a max of 320Kbps. They say they guarantee 384 at least, but even their own bandwidth meter measures me below that! I emailed them asking what's going on, and have gotten absolutely no response. This isn't exactly my ISP asking me to reduce my bandwidth usage, they're actually restricting me below even what they guarantee.
There is a fundamental difference between "unlimited access" and "unlimited bandwidth". A good parallel I think would be the highway system (cars make a great parallel to computers). I can legally hop on the highway and drive for as long as I want(access). I cannot legally hop on the highway and take up every lane on it(bandwidth). What they mean by "unlimited access" means you can surf or play games etc all month long without running out of hours because there are no limits on time used in a month.
ISP's (as several people have already posted) base their bandwidth needs on an average user. This is common sense - you don't send 6 delivery people to drop off 1 letter. Paying for too much bandwidth would be a waste and likely result in inflated rates as well. The money is better spent maintaining or upgrading the network.
I work for a fairly large high speed provider and when we go after a "severe" case it's not someone who's downloaded 40gb of data in a month even if our limit is 15gb. Believe it or not but there are users out there who somehow manage to hit well over 120GB's(and more) in a calendar month. These are the people that are using well above and beyond what would be their "fair" share of the available bandwidth. These people are pushing their connections 24/7 which is fine - but they are using every bit of their available pipe - which is not so fine, and it impacts other users as a result - just like if you were to block up every lane on the highway.
If you want a QOS (Quality of Service) that allows you to use a full 1.5mb for 24/7 of every month with no limits then I would suggest you lease a T1 line and pay what the ISP's are paying for your "unlimited" connection. I think your tune will change quickly enough.
---------------
The phone, the bane of my existance, rings. "Hello, Computer Room" I say, being helpful - BOFH
60*60*24=86400 seconds in a day.
Amounts to something like 2.7Gigabytes.
Assume you're listening to that no more than 8 hours/day.
2.7*8/24=0.9 ; so call it "a gigabyte".
Any/Every day.
So an individual could (in theory), without significant effort, suck down 1GB of legitimate/legal traffic a day. ie 30GB/month.
- That does mean 8 hours on the internet (even after school/college/work) every day - but these are SLASHDOT readers, after all
- And, of course, that doesn't include anything else consuming bits (reading slashdot, trolling for pr0n, email and attachments, playing games, movie trailer downloads, machinima, mirroring OpenSource, downloading ISOs, WindowsUpdates, AntiVirus Updates).
So, in summary 30GB/month is actually not such a ridiculously unreasonable/unbelievable amount of data that "anyone using that much MUST be breaking some law, somewhere - so lets shut him/her/it down".Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
some years ago before broadband became popular in Denmark, CyberCity had flatfate isdn for those who had to wait for broadband.
:\
:)
Quick note, in Denmark with modem you pay per minut charges
After a few months they limited the unlimited to 13 hours / day and their system disconnects you if you attempt to be on more than 13 hours / day afaik.
Just my 2 cents
"Linux is more than an operating system, its a lifestyle"
What I want to know is why Cable and DSL are always set up [so asymmetrically] ... Alternatively, I'd love to partner with an ISP.
You answered your own question.
The terms of service certainly doesn't prevent false advertising charges. Companies have been slammed for false advertising when the fine print was too fine but present in the ad.
It doesn't just have to be there, it has to be readable. In a commercial if spoken it has to be hearable, etc.
Normally, when ISPs are quoting speeds, they specifically state that it is a 'up to' whatever speed. There's also what's known as a CIR -- Committed Information Rate, which is the speed they promise that you will always get. However, most companies don't promise a CIR anymore. Most residential connections don't come with any form of SLA [a service level agreement, basically a guaranteed level of service].
Trust me on this -- the companies have lawyers who have looked over what's required to make sure they stay profitable, and there are very good odds that their actions are legal [although, it may be required for a judge to make the final determination], but it's very doubtful they're just doing this out of the blue.
I have fought an ISP and won -- when they raised my rates over 100% without notification, but it took me many hours of work to get it all cleared up. [And I switched carriers as soon as I could get a new circuit up, as they refused to file a Covad switch form]
Right now, I'm using SpeakEasy, and I'm very happy with them, and have refered others to them, but they have covered themselves, so they could shut me off if they felt I was a problem user:
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
i live in canada, using shaw cable as the isp. i talked to a couple of the tech support guys just to clarify their perspective and what i found was that DOWNLOADING could be considered mostly unlimited. but because most times it's p2p, that UPLOADS cause the most headache for them. so, for the past 4 months i've been downloading anywhere from 20-80 gigs per month, but limited uploads to about 3-5 gigs per month. this seems to keep them happy. one trick i have seen though is for them to not actually cut you off, but lower your priority to a pittance reducing a cable connection to a 28.8
a contract implies a responsibility on both parts.
i agree to pay my bill use the system according to AUP and TOS.
i expect the isp to provide CLEAR LANGUAGE as to what this policy may be, in terms of usage caps etc.
i have found most companies are far too happy to advertise one thing and sell another. this is, of course, not limited to isps
just because I don't care doesn't mean I don't understand!
I don't know. I just felt like being argumentative. =D
me karma am bad
It is reasonable for them to assume that there words will be taken in a reasonable manner.
Yea, that's why when I see "unlimited" I think it means "unlimited" not "unlimited unless it becomes inconvenient for us". If they don't mean unlimited, they need to say something like "150 hours a month for $49.95" or whatever the actual service is. 150 hours or some mysterious, unknown limit is NOT unlimited, plain and simple.
But let's not take "Unlimited" to mean something unreasonable.
I REALLY don't understand where you're coming from or why you think anyone is going to buy this argument. You're arguing this point on quicksand and you're already in up to your neck. Look, whether you're going to admit it or not, unlimited has a clearly defined meaning. It's not ambiguous. They're not saying "lots of access" or "a whole bunch of access", they're saying "unlimited access". Unlimited is a very clearly defined, well understood term. How could I apply an unreasonable meaning to it? Unlimited is unlimited. No limit. None. Zip, nada, zilch. NO LIMIT TO ACCESS.
Would you assume 'unlimited internet access' means I have unlimited access to whitehouse.gov and could change it to fit my needs?
Completely pointless and offtopic. You're arguing the meaning of access, not unlimited. Access to the Internet does not automatically grant write privilege to a small portion of the WWW which is only part of the Internet. When they say "access", it's generally understood that they're talking about the ability to connect to their server in order to use the Internet in some capacity. How you use the Internet is not guaranteed by them in any way.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
Ok, this is what I thought the OP was referring to. Etree has a mailinglist with a bunch of ftp servers with "taper friendly" only music. There's also the Live Music Archive serving legal downloads through http, and Furthurnet which is P2P whitelisted for taper friendly bands. As a side note the hendrix estate has been gracious enough to permit "liberation" of old bootlegs. There are 8 or so shows on furthurnet, that alone makes it well worth the effort imho.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
And YET, you choose to redefine the word "Access" to mean "bandwidth", even though they are two different words. If your webhost says that your website is 'universally accessible', would that mean they shouldn't implement bandwidth limitations? Explain to me why you believe that webhosts and ISPS would pay different prices for their internet access? Except in rare cases, they don't.
--- I'm going sane in a crazy world.
Actually, if your ISP is also a local telecommunications company (a CLEC or ILEC), it's not their legal right to deny service to anyone. A CLEC can (and will) quite quickly lose their license to provide services if they fail to provide equal access. This has often been the case with small FTTH (fiber to the home) initiatives - instead of the expected 15% market share, they had demands for service from 85-90% of the customer base, and went bankrupt attempting to provide the service!
Bottom-line: If you've been disconnected, and your ISP is a CLEC, file a complaint.
Would not happen in Japan... Of course it wouldn't be a baseball bat but steel katana!
I didn't moderate your post, but I think the excessive sarcasm and over generalization of the Slashdot crowd is what did it for you.
Incidentally, have you ever been to an all you can eat restaurant. Look at the clientele? Trust me, these legal battles have been fought before. That's why there's some restaurants have signs on their "buffets".
Although I can understand the complaints of the ISP, I also know this goes both ways. Ever had an ISP (dial up) that won't let you maintain a connection for more than an hour?
What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean....
And YET, you choose to redefine the word "Access" to mean "bandwidth", even though they are two different words.
It's an incidental side effect of what they advertised, not a redefinition of the term. If I hit a bandwidth limit and get kicked off till the end of the month, that interferes with my "unlimited access", does it not?
Maybe that's not the intent, but when they say unlimited access, that says to me "you can access it as much as you want 24/7". Now, if, for example, they could chop the transfer rate way down on my abusive account, that would be mean, but as long as they didn't bump me, I certainly couldn't argue that they were interfering with "unlimited access". I could whine about my new 28.8k modem connection, but I don't think I'd get a whole lot of sympathy when people realized I was downloading the first two LOTR movies, a Windows XP .iso, and 500 mp3s at the time.
(BTW: I'm on dial-up... wheeee.)
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
Not everybody with high upload usage is doing anything wrong either. Sharing files isn't illegal, sharing COPYRIGHTED FILES in which the COPYRIGHTS BELONG TO SOMEONE ELSE and you DO NOT HAVE PERMISSION TO SHARE THE MATERIAL with another party is illegal. I can send divx encoded home movies to my mother 24/7 and still be engaging in legitimate activity. Or I could be a business with an offsite backup running that requires me upload immense amounts of data. Or an active kernel contributor who downloads and uploads kernel source numerous times a day.
upload really doesn't tell you anything about whether or not the activity it's being used for is legitimate.
It's real simple. A D3 costs the same whether you use have the upload bandwidth or all of it. The issue is that they want to preserve the upload bandwidth for dedicated hosting etc.
When you talk about backbone links that are x speed, they are x up and x down simultaneously so are essentially two pools of bandwidth, the up bandwidth and down bandwidth. They have to give some up to make down useful, but not nearly so much, so they give very little and keep the difference for servers and other services that need it. Which is part of why running a server is typically against the TOS for home users. (Kazaa is not morally wrong, but it would in any reasonable sense qualify as a server and therefore IS valid reason to bump a user)
Please read the fine print. In the communications world "Access" means to connect to. Internet Access is a connection to the Internet. Unlimited Internet Access means that your Internet Access (your connection) is not "time" limited. You cannot interpret it to mean "Unlimited Bandwidth" since clearly all bandwidth is limited.
To an ISP, bandwidth is volume - not speed. That is because ISP's are charged by the Internet backbone providers for the maximum volume that their connection to the Internet is capable of handling. That rate varies between $150-300 per month per Megabit/sec. If that sounds like speed to you, just multiply it times the number of seconds in a month. $20 = approximately 21 GigaBytes download.
If you use more bandwidth than you are paying the ISP for at the ISP's cost, expect them to take action because they would save money (increase profits) by kicking your butt out the door.
Tell you what: You give me some reason to cap out my bandwidth for a few months straight and I'll get back to you with the results. How about that?
"Unlimited" in this context should mean (i.e. a reasonable customer would interpret it to mean) that the user is not limited by the contract to a given monthly time or bandwidth cap.
If someone sells you an "unlimited account," and the contract doesn't say anything about 150 hours/month or even about "excessive usage," then they are not within their rights, under that contract, to cut you off or charge you more after 150 hours. If the contract does specify a limit, then the account should not be called "unlimited," because that is deceptive.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
But I've emailed them about my shitty 128Kb upload and never gotten any replies back.. ..three times..
sigh.
(Charter.Net - Charter Communications - BLOW A GAPING ASSHOLE)
You can't compare the two on asymetrical residential connections. His traffic was outbound, yours was inbound. That being said, when I ran an Fserv on IRC I was maxing out my 384 upload 24 hours a day at times and never heard a peep from my ISP. That was over 3GB per day.
About 1 year ago, I signed up for a Charter Business account : 1.5/ 768 with static ip for 179.00 per month. I actually use this for my business ! 768 is decent enough to host a small site. With out warning, they changed me to 2.0/512. Sucks ! But what am I gonna do ? I hope to get some SPRINT SDSL 1.5/1.5 , but not available yet. You can give all the excuses you want about power this and that.. BS ! This is designed for customers to be consumers and not pushers of content. period. I say cut the home users and all the 13/14 year old kids using kaaza out... if you don't pay for a business account you get ports blocked, bandwidth caps .. all that good stuff. I'm just a small business who actually needs the upload but I have to suffer because of the kiddies. The cost of bandwidth should come down in time.. not go up. When they cut service but you are still paying the same price .. that's an increase in price. But I gues one day everything will be great when we get ONE wire running to our house that gives us "everything on demand" .... cable, movies, internet, radio, power, water, spoons, toliet paper...
Charter,FSCK YOU !
I know because I have a letter sitting here in which they say - direct quote follows:
--quote>
Excessive bandwidth usage may be the result of many different activities. Activities that could contribute to exceeding bandwidth limitations may include, but are not limited to:
* Commercial or business applications,
* Peer to peer networking,
* Newsgroup downloading
* file sharing,
* Streaming music, video
* Voice and/or video services
quote--
Now.. After reading the above I can help Comcast save a more valuable and truly limited resource -- trees. They can cut down of the amount of paper needed to send their obnoxious letters by summing up the above as "broadband" for it pretty much defines what most people consider to be the reasons to actually shell out extra for internet service. So they can reword the whole thing and simply say that using broadband internet contributes to "excessive" usage and to be certain you are not being excessive you should use dialup.
I live in Nashville where we are fortunate to have competition (I'm having Bellsouth install DSL as a result of this letter and implore anyone else who gets one to do likewise[Speakeasy is also available as are others]).
The really galling thing is that I already pay double the usual rate not to have to worry about such things. That's correct I was duped into getting a "special" extra high-speed from Comcast a few months ago and they thanked me by sending this letter threatening to cut me off.
Their letter goes on to say that my level of use exceeded the national median amount by 100%. The national median must by defintiton include dialup or its some made up useless corp speak -- i.e. Comcast has a definition of national median and the rest of the world has another.
So my crime was to use broadband. Why didn't they just say so??
There are many different implementations of QoS and some solve different problems:
* Some give priority to specific protocols or
ports
* Some give priority to smaller packets over
larger
* Some give priority based on the ToS bit
* Some just drop packets for "high bandwidth"
connections and hope IP drops its window size
There are also about a dozen different ways to do each of the above and each vendor has a different name for it. Thus there is much confusion on this subject and I did not make it clear in my post which I was speaking of.
The idea is to schedule packets based upon origin / destination IP address rather then by a protocol, port or connection. The simplest schemes such as WRR mentioned above, require little CPU because they are simply round-robin. The down-side to this is that they make the TCP window size thrash. More advanced algorithms use a modified token-bucket scheme and grant a specific number of tokens per second to each IP address it sees.
In both cases, because it is done by IP and not by protocol or connection, Joe P Hacker can have 1,000 P2P connections going and if Grandma loads a web page, Joe's connections will not slow her down while still giving Joe all the availible bandwidth he wants. If Grandma and Sue down the street load a web page, again they will load fast (slowing down Joe for a second) and then Joe resumes. If Joe loads a web page while he has 1,000 P2P connections, his own connections will drown him out. If Joe P Hacker is running 1,000 P2P connections while Julie is downloading the latest Linux distro and they are the only two on the wire, they'll get equal bandwidth.
Who cares if the pipe is saturated by P2P people if we can guarantee that everyone else's traffic gets through when they need it?
So this type of a scheme is not a backbone solution, it is a near-leaf solution. ISPs implement this scheme (or at least should) within regions and then balance their regional routers with another scheme more suited to massive bandwidth.
Granted, I have never done this in a NAP scenario, however in a company with ~500 employees after proper tuning I never had to worry about any one person downloading too much crap ever again. But as mentioned before, this would not be done at the NAP anyway -- it should be done more towards the leaves.
Cox advertized "unlimited" bandwidth usage, but as a dug deeper and found the well hidden fine print, it states that when they say "unlimited" they mean always connected, and that there are infact, bandwidth limitations. Although they don't seem to really enforce it. I go over the limitation every month and have yet to recive anything from Cox telling me to knock it off.
Buckethead
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Needless to say I dropped them like a hot potato. I mean if you say unlimited, thats unlimited. YOu can't redefine "unlimited" (tho your definition is completely reasonable...
Unfortunately you did them a favor. The were able to get rid of a high usage user with no hastles. Dial up ISP's love dial up users that call once a day to check their stock quote and e-mail. They hate users that tie up a modem in their modem pool all day. They were easly able to weed out a high usage low profit user.
The truth shall set you free!
Hehe... ;)
I don't care what you do with the bandwidth as long as it's not between 1am and 7am... That's my free time! and I don't like it when my streaming video stops working at night only.
Please use [ informative / summarizing ] SUBJECT LINES
Flame me here
Check the financials of your cable company. They all basically have huge debt loads from building out all that infrastructure. The whole point of cable internet is to get more revenue and cut down that debt load. Cable almost put AT&fuckingT out of business, BTW.
If P2P is taking up 60% of the bandwidth, and SPAM is taking up 60% of the bandwidth (as some ISPs claim), then that's 120% and I should not, at this moment, be able to read Slashdot because there'd be no bandwidth left.
> A D3 costs the same whether you use have the upload bandwidth or all of it.
Maybe for you it does, but most cablecos are either buying asymmetric bandwidth themselves, or selling their unused upload on a commodity market, or doing hosting (as you mentioned).
Dude...
I have been smoking, and even I can see your flawed reasoning.
It's not that complex, but let's see if I can make it look that way.
The root problem is that isp has X bandwidth capacity that they have purchased from their upstream provider for $BIG cost
ISP then sells broadband accounts to C customers.
This should allow a mamximum worst-case of X/C bandwidth available per user, so ISP can advirtise, say, X/nC to each customer, n>1 to give them a little leeway.
ISP realizes that $BIG/C is way too large, and that the average customer only uses the equivelent of a maxed out connection for 1/Dth of the day.
Now ISP can reduce cost to each customer by a factor of D ($BIG/C ==> $BIG/CD), and still kind-of claim that they offer "X/C" (short-to-mid-term burst) bandwidth to each user, by getting D times as many customers (C ==> CD).
This includes the built-in assumption that each customer only uses X/C for 1/Dth of the day. So although the promised (mid-length-term burst) speeds are X/C, the real (long-term) bandwidth available MAX per customer is X/DC.
So far, so good:
users * bandwidth * daily user usage l.t.e. BW available
(CP) * (X/nC) * (1/D) l.t.e. X
Now, remove P power users from group of C customers, and let them exceed the "expected" daily usage tremendously. Specifically, assume that they complement the "expected" daily usage exactly (1/D ==> (D-1)/D), for the sake of argument.
What does the equaltion look like now?
[ Newbies * BW * usage ] + [ PowerUsers * BW * usage ] l.t.e. total ISP BW
[ (CD-P) * (X/nC) * (1/D) ] + [ P * (X/nC) * (D-1)/D ] l.t.e. X
solving for P yields the following:
P l.t.e. [CD(n - 1)] / [D - 2]
Unless I screwed up my maths (always possible) this should provide a reasonable estimate for the sustainabily of that model.
-dave-
(Note: l.t.e. == Less than or equal to, if it weren't for slashcode)
The pig browse. With Google. Sigh is to the chicken. Chicken is fool. Giggle. The DailyWTF giggle.
Probably, the remainder is used to serve up your homepages. I generate most upstream traffic from my homepage, not from my 56k modem...
(Mine generates about 2GB/month in traffic. So far, my dialup provider hetnet.nl hasn't complained, even though they have a 1GB limit on that)
Musicians don't die. They just decompose.
need to say something like "150 hours a month
:-)
How about at most 745 hours per month
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
This is a good idea - most leeches aren't going to complain too loudly if their p2p traffic doesn't always move as fast as their Web access, or the p2p speed drops during peak hours. Just as long as they are not throttling to something absolutely ridiculous, like 56 BYTES/sec (no joke! My university actually set this...)
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
720 hours/30 days would be acceptable here. That's a perfectly reasonable compromise, imho.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
I'm sure there is a more technical answer than this but one reason would be to make running a server rather slow which would force you to look at a better (and more expensive) package.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
What legitimate need does a single person have when downloading 40 gigs of data over a short period of time?
mirror Debian Linux for all eleven architectures, both unstable and testing + dozen of unofficial repositories.
Why would person need all eleven architectures?
You don't know which hardware he have. May be he have old UltraSparc or M68K Mac in the attic.
I got ADSL working at my parents' small office - an architecture firm in a former farm in the nothern Italian plains, near Milan, some 3 miles from the CO.
Tiscali sells 256kbps for 37 Euro/month flat, including VAT (31 Euro ex-vat).
The cool part is, they never notice _any_ bandwidth contention, and at off times a megabyte takes ~17s to download: they unofficially get throttled up to 512kbps.
It may not be particularly cheap or really "broadband", and could be taken away at any moment, but after years of fighting with modems and line noise, this is one of life's simpler pleasures.
Optus Net in Australia had an interesting idea in one of its previous plans. They stated that 'acceptable use' for their users should be 10 times the average download. So, for a given month, any user could download 10 times the average users download on their cable connection before Optus would step in and say "nah ah. Your doin too much downloading". This was basically their premium plan, and it afforded about 8 gb per month. You could check your download percentage (against the average) using a netstat program provided on the Optus Net server. My friends used this service, downloaded too much and were sent to an interview where they basically had to promise not to do it again and to promise they weren't doing anything illegal. They were later reconnected. At AU$70 per month this doesn't seem to be a very good deal, but it is an interesting approach at stemming piracy... essentially restricting pirates to around the bandwidth legitmate users.... however if a lot of pirates / high bandwidth legitimate cable users are using your system your profit margin is going to drop dramatically.
The difference in upstream vs. downstream .
.
is that data going upstream from their
network to others is billed higher
Also Caching servers download common websites,
and files and store them on the equivalent
of a advanced Squid box and requests are
filled from it vs. going to the true
source on a remote network
Pushing data out to other networks is much
more costly for them, and thus the upstream CAP.
Peace,
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
I think the best but hardest solution would be a ISP Coop .
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
, .
.
.
.
It would take some CCIE level grey matter to make it happen,
and to make it affordable you have to buy a huge pipe to
get the bandwidth cheaper by the dozen
Putting in the wired Infrastructure just costs too much, thus
a solution like Wi-MAX is prolly the best bet for good speed,
and truly unlimited usage
The Cable & DSL providers can dump the 1% that use 75% of the
pipe, and not even blink due to the HUGE $$$ they will save
I am suprised it took them this long to start doing it
Does it suck ? Yeah . Is their wording false advertising ? Yeah
They will change their Terms of Service, and can do so at any time
Internet Coops will become feasible soon, especially in crowded
areas where ppl are packed in like rats
Directional Antenna spraying 72 Mbps like spokes on a wheel
12 antennas , 30 degrees each, cover 360 degree Arc
12 x 72 = 864 Mega-bits per sec
1,000 customers paying for 1 meg links, $50 a month
If you can get 2 OC-12's for $50,000 a month ur ok,
but last time I checked they were more than that
Hell a OC-3 is nearly $10,000 a month
Peace,
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Just a simple question... If anyone would follow *THAT* as is, I would pay for the service and wouldn't be able to take advantage of it. Performance degradation ?? I had a loser on my street that encapped his cable modem and was sucking all my bandwidth.. so that's illegal right ?? OUUU, and another thing, the only way that someone is able to make downloads on cable or dsl without affecting other users performance, is buying CDs and go directly to someone who already has what we want :)
Somebody else argued this same point just before you did (probably became part of the page right after you posted, actually).
See my response to that poster.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
first let me make clear: i'm not trying to set up a flamewar between US and Europe.
When i look to the reactions i read all kind of disconnections from the USA. Now i'm wondering, wasn't this for illegal material? Isnt there an organisation like "customers united" in the USA who have the ability to sue together when they believe they're right? EFF? Why don't you people start uniting and start together against this madness?!
My DSL ISP is Xs4all with 2048/640 in the Netherlands. Besides cool features like SSH access and a huge Usenet server i have a FUP. I can see what i use since statistics are provided by them. Because they are so transparant, i try to keep my FUP ok. The average usage is 6 GB a month. My total usage is between 30 and 50 GB both up and down. Granted that's a lot more and if i were asked i'd use less but i never get over the 50 GB because that's what i think is my honest limit. Never had a single complaint. With a slightly more expensive DSL account one can get 150 GB a month at 8192/1024 at the same ISP but there's a 175 EUR setup fee and a month disconnection tradeoff plus some other factors which keeps me from doing the change.
In other works, bandwidth has widely varying costs depending on when you use it, how you use it, and who you share it with. The ISP cannot create identical networking environments for all its customers at all times. In this kind of variable environment with a finite resource, excessive means that you are screwing it up for everyone else. There really is no easier definition.
It would be better if the ISPs would simply throttle the excessive customers when the network becomes busy. Or maybe just cut you off midday, saying, sorry, you've caused enough problems today. See you back tomorrow.
I agree that ISPs advertising "unlimited" are lying. But it is also the case the customers expecting "unlimited" are foolish.
Well now that i have seen the book review on the web spiders book...
maybe I am just mining the net for information that is of personal interest.
(like all of its free porn!)
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Unlimited means "without limit". It means "If you use this all you want, we arn't going to shut you off because you hit some limit".
Now its not unlimited bandwidth... the bandwidth is limited by thge equipment. It is unlimited usage of the available bandwidth. That means if I jump on and slam thm at full bandwidth 24 hours a day 7 day s aweek, and it affects other customers... well guess what. Thats not my fault, its their fault for allocating so much bandwith to me and telling me it was unlimited.
If there is a limit, then they are misrepresenting their service to trick me into becomming a customer. They are falsly representing themselves. They are dishonest. What more do I need to say?
If they advertise unlimited access for $X then thats what they have to give me. Just like if the grocery store offeres me Y brand canned tomatoes for $.15 in their circular, they HAVE to sell me Y brand canned tomatoes for $.15 - its the law.
See its one thing if you walk in with one great deal in mind and they convince you to get some other deal. Thats high pressure sales, and as much as I may dislike it and the tricks they often employ to do it, its fine and legal. However when they offer you something that they don't really have (like an "unlimited plan") and sell you something else (ie a "limited plan" under the guise of being unlimited), thats just not legal.
Call it what you want. False Advertising, "bait and switch". Its a quite simple scam. But in the end thats exactly what it is - a scam. And its not a question of whether it should be legal - we already have laws against this shit because dishonest companies have done this shit for years.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
The implication here is that no one can claim legitimate use of that kind of bandwidth on an individual basis.
The reality is that it is very easy to show legitimate use of lots of bandwidth. I'll share my individual case as an example. My company is an IBM Business Partner. We provide professional services for over 10 different IBM software products, across five different operating systems, and three different databases. We pull all of our software media and documentation from electronic repositories which we pay an annual subscription to gain access to. Add in patches, version upgrades, and marketing collateral on top of that. For each consultant, pulling over 10 GB of material in a month is not unusual, and it's even more when someone wants to skill up in a new product, which happens all the time if they want to stay alive in this industry.
For strictly personal usage, I don't use a whole lot myself. Mostly email, though there are a lot of email lists I archive. But I hardly know anyone in the IT industry at least who uses the Net for just personal enjoyment; most people I know consume more bandwidth in their role as a business user than a private individual.
What I would really like to know is why bandwidth is so expensive in the U.S., even in the urban cores. Even if you are willing to tap directly into a MAP, and take other measures to drop out the middlemen. The wholesale price of bandwidth is much higher than all that dark fiber sitting out there would lead one to believe.
I live in the boonies, and havn't been able to find decent broadband, or even not-so-decent ISDN (or wireless! Come on, someone get a tower to hit northern Leesburg VA).
I selected an ISP that resold UUNET's dialup network (and others) at like $14/month for unlimited use. It was MonsterISP (remember, not chosen for it's name, but price and the fact that it was reselling someone else's decent dialup net). I had a FreeBSD box on a dedicated phone line bring up the connection adn NAT the rest of the boxes. After most of a month had gone by the connection dropped for the first time (I may have "borrowed" the line to send a FAX, or it could have been Telco joy). It called back and got "access denied". I tryed some other numbers (including non-UUNET ones) and got the same thing.
When MonsterISP's customer service people pulled up my records they saw something like 400 hours of usage (two plus weeks on one call) and were puzzled. Apparently "UUNET cuts them off at 200 hours". It was "all UUNET's fault, we can't fix it, but we can deactivate this account and give you another free of charge, you can ring back if it goes over 200 hours".
Ok, so they made good on trouble another caused me, and did it fast, and promised to do it agian any time it was needed, they get to be the good guys...right? Er. Bull. The problem happened on all the non-UUNET numbers as well. They were keeping track of the hours and denying access, and blaming it on someone else.
It is very clever sleeze, I mean they get to fix it anytime someone complains, but it discurages folks who want a lot of connect hours because it is a pain to call and get a new acocunt and configure it. More over it is impossalbe to do it when MonsterISP's offices are closed for the night. At the same time it seems unlikely that you would convince a judge or jury that they aren't "making a real effort to give unlimited dial up hours" (well, at least not if they started blaming their own software "it's a bug, but the author quit/can't find it/has better stuff to do" rather then UUNET).
I ended up with Eskimo North for $22/month. It's actually unlimited. With a gentlman's agreement not to dial back up if disconnected until you need to use the net again. (there is nothing in the agreement that says one can't run NTP which more or less will keep the line pegged all the time...which I actually do because my box has a crappy clock, so the "never wait for dial" is a bonus)
Still, I wish I could get something with real bandwidth (and latency that doesn't totally suck, which puts DirecTV's stuff out of the running, at least as far as I know).
I hope that quite soon someone will start a movie download service based in a country were copyrights do actually expire. E.g. in Russia where all pre-1970 movies are in public domain (both local and foreign). With current traffic costs these can be uploaded to users for less than 0.2$/movie, which means prices of 1$/film or 10$/month subscriptions might be profitable.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Well DUH.
That's equivilent to just "a bandwith hog is running something". Since nobody would ever really say such a pointless thing, I doubt your claim that this is what you meant. Hence my comment.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
A bandwidth hog is using either P2P, running servers or something else. I don't think that this assumption is any wrong, especially since I specified "etc..."
Wrong. That was my answer to your flame about BW hogs not being P2P/server users. Here is my original comment:
As you can see, the "P2P, running servers, etc..." is just here to illustrate the users using 90% of the bandwidth. Illustrate. As an example. How is that pointless?
It's like saying: I like people that eat a lot of rice (Chinese, Indians, etc...).
How is that pointless? Pointing out that Indians and Chinese people eat a lt of rice is just here to support and illustrate the people that eat a lot of rice.
Anyways, enough time wasted trying to explain to you the concept of using an example.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Wrong. That was my answer to your flame about BW hogs not being P2P/server users.
1. Here in the real world, I never said that. I said they werent EXCLUSIVLY so.
2. Here in the real world, people are held accountable to *all* things they say, not just the first post with the rest being ignorable.
It's like saying: I like people that eat a lot of rice (Chinese, Indians, etc...).
How is that pointless?
It would be pointless if you believed that every country in the world contains people eating lots of rice. If, on the other hand, you thought that only a limited subset of countries contain people eating a lot of rice, then listing examples would make sense.
It's a perfect analogy - you don't start listing things unless you think the list is a subset of the whole. If *everything* qualifies, you don't bother giving examples. Nobody would say, "I like food (bratwurst, rice, tomatoes, etc..)" or "I like nations (China, India, etc...)"
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
The model that says there must be a divide between consumer and provider is counter to the way the internet protocols actually work. It's not just historical. It's technical. There is no technical reason that a computer sitting in my house can't be a webserver. So the industry invents fake reasons to make an artificial divide that's not really there except for in buerocracy and paperwork. It makes as much sense as saying, "From now on, let's just make it our company policy that Pi is equal to 3.1 instead of 3.14159....etc. It's simpler that way. Yeah, that's nice, but that's not how the underlying system actually works.
And, just like that, the way the internet actually works, every node is a peer.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
1. Here in the real world, I never said that. I said they werent EXCLUSIVLY so.
;-)
My bad. I'm loosing patience explaining to you that 2+2=4.
2. Here in the real world, people are held accountable to *all* things they say, not just the first post with the rest being ignorable.
Right. I didn't say anything else. What you did was taking a sentence I wrote out of its context. I was pointing out that it was not my original post and that I was explaining to you - in this 'silly' sentence - my example. Let's take my rice example again:
I said: I like people that eat a lot of rice (Chinese, Indians, etc...)
You replied: I am sick and tired of this assumption on the part of people that you can make a fair one-to-one mapping between type of food and the nationality.
I then replied: I did not make this assumption. I meant that a person eating rice is either Indian, Chinese or something else. I don't think that this assumption is any wrong, especially since I specified "etc..."
There, the smiley should have indicated you something: That I did fully understand the stupidity of that sentence, and the fact that it was obvious. I understand that the sentence basically meant: Someone eating rice can be any nationality, which is so obvious, it is stupid to mention. But that was to make sure you did understand that my previous example didn't have the implication you meant.
Please don't reply.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
My bad. I'm loosing patience explaining to you that 2+2=4.
And I'm losing patience having it explained to me with a condescending tone that 2+2=5 and how I'm an idiot for not seeing it.
[The lying mischaracterization of what transpired has been snipped]
Please don't reply.
Translation: please allow me to slander you and please roll over and take it.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Actually, asyncronous bandwidth is technically feasible and cost-effective, which demonstrates that the Internet as rolled out in the practical world can and often is 'divided.'
Add to that the fact that many people don't have a permanent IP address and again, in the practical world clients and servers are 'divided.'
And many of the security problems experienced on the internet have to do with unmaintained 'services' as opposed to client application faults. If every machine on the net was listening on Port 80 there would be more, not less security problems and cracks going on.
'The original intent' of the net didn't include protocols like hypertext, so if we're going to fall back on 'original intent' and not the real practical implementation that exists, we'll have to roll things back to pre-gopher times. Then, yes, every system on the net can run a mail server. That's about it. Maybe some FTP as long as it's not very organized. Usenet is out because it started out on UUCP, not TCP/IP.
A Good Intro to NetBS
Correction in above: Asymmetrical bandwidth, not asyncronous bandwidth.
A Good Intro to NetBS
This is a new thing since the early days. I used to d/l gigs and gigs a day through their system but realize....that was the old days. Most of the ppl in Lawrence had never even heard of this thing called "the Internet".
:-)
Sounds like things have changed - for the worse.
I know SWBell is the telco up there. Have you considered using them? I have used them where I live now and have zero complaints. Bandwidth has never been an issue and trust me, I've used my fair share (and run servers). To this day, all I've heard from them is "thank you for your payment". Seems like a good deal to me
'The original intent' of the net didn't include protocols like hypertext,
The original intent was to make a system that was extensible in the future. Adding new kinds of data to send is *exactly* the sort of thing that fits the model they were going for. The reason the model only describes how to send streams or packets of bytes is because then ANYTHING can be put on top and not require a rewrite to the whole model. Was it written with hypertext in mind? No. Was it written to be extensible to handle whatever future ideas come along? (of which hypertext was one), abosolutely yes.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.