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?

Comments

The most common tact

[shoemakc]

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

Re:The most common tact

[shoemakc]

Yeah, I figured such a response. The funny thing is that most of the applications you mention are all downstream applications and not upstream. Most of the occurences i've heard of people being contacted by their ISP's are for upstream traffic, not down. Why do you think many ISP's put upload caps on their clients but not download?

As for your contributing to the internet assertion, I admit the idea is interesting...but what's the larger contribution: a 500k piece of code uploaded to the net once, or a rip of the latest LOTR dvd? More bits doesn't make it a larger contribution. Heck, how many of the largest contributions to the net were done over modems?

-Chris

Re:Can you blame them?

[Random832]

i would prefer to be cut off after X MB download in 30 days rather than after f(X) MB where f() is unknown