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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"
"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
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.
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. )
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*
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.
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)
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.
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...
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.
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 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.
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 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 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.
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.
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"
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.
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
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
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!
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.
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?"
>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.
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'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.
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
I don't personally care how they measure my bandwidth, because "unlimited" doesn't depend on units.
(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.
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 $500 setup fee and slow speeds (640/640 IIRC)).
Comcast comes in and takes over an area, raises prices because there are no other options for HSD, and then sets these invisible caps...
Do you really fucking think that Comcast gives a flying rats ass if I go over my invisible limit and they dump me (mind you, they refuse to tell you what the cap is, how they determine it, how you should determine it, how you should protect yourself from it, etc)? They don't for one simple reason... MORE MONEY. If I go over that limit I am hogging bandwith money from others that only check email and a few webpages a day...
With 25 million subscribers, moving to a 3mbit speed cap, and needing more money, they are doing exactly the best thing to save their bandwith costs, dumping those users that use the service the way it should be.
Sadly we have no recourse. 90% of their users aren't going to start pegging their bandwith usage and they are going to keep dropping off the high-end users until they are satisfied they are raking in enough dough.
Sad but true... Just my worthless
Here's the ever-lengthy Sympatico User Agreements:
http://service1.sympatico.ca/ServiceDesk/ServiceD
Acceptable Use Policy - www.aup.sympatico.ca
"Network / Security
In addition to these Policies, while using your Sympatico account, you are prohibited from conducting activities that include, but are not limited to:
When they advertise unlimited high speed access over here in Quebec, they advertise it as unlimited time and in the fine print tell how many gigs in upload and download can be done each month.
Take Videotron for example, leader in High-speed access Internet in Quebec. Advertised at 34.95CAN$+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 .
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?
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?
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).
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)
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.
You can't really annotate, underline or highlight text easily on the screen. Paper is much easier to handle and distribute to others when I need to.
Eh, yes you can. I do it all the time. And then give it to others.
funny munging
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
Moderators be flogged for feeding this troll!
Anyone who doesn't think they can chew up at least 20gb a month legitimately is an idiot or a luddite.
Now maybe you're the only one who uses your connection and all you do is surf Slashdot all day, but there are those of us who listen to streaming music (legit), mp3 downloads from sites like mp3.com, magnatunes.com, and others (legit), download Linux ISOs and updates (legit), Windows updates (legit), game demos (legit), PLAY games online (legit), and send high-res digital images to family members (legit).
I've done all three of those this month. Now factor in my two geek roommates and we go through upwards of 5gbytes in a 4-day period. I've seen my usage spike as high as 72gbytes in a 30-day period.
All that without servers, work files, porn, or copyright infringement. Good thing you don't work at my ISP.
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!
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.
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
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
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.
Hmmm... I can think of another obvious way. The various MMORPG like Camelot, Evercrack, and even various LAN shooters, can devour bandwidth. Nothing illegal or contrary to TOS there.
I think the problem is that ISP's oversell their networks, and then try to blame / charge the end-user when resources are spread too thin.
Raoul Mitgong: Unhelpful.
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.
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?
Uh, do the stores kick you out if you keep buying the product with the least margin?
that's like 6 hours a day for 25 days
or about 20.5% of the "unlimited" access you are paying for.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Old school GTE dialup had 150hr/month. I do not recall it being marketed as unlimited though. They had a web control panel that showed your monthly stats and would send warning emails when you got close. I always joked about having no life and being online via dialup that much but I came very close to 150hrs several months in a row when I was unemployed during a winter.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
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.
The dialup ISP I used to used let me maintain my connection indefinitely. I managed 1037 hours for a single connection, once (that's like 6 weeks and one day). They let me multilink free of charge, too. For $13 a month.
My mental image was of some admin on their end looking at my pair of 14.4 connections saying "let the poor bastard stay connected, he deserves it."
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
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.
Actually, nowadays it's quite simple to rack up massive bandwidth charges doing very benign things.
My digital camera has two 1 gb cards for photos. Each photo can exceed 12 mb. To upload 100 thumbs, 800x600s and originals of a roll of wedding shots takes 1.2 gig.
Listening to a 128 kbit radio station for 8 hours is 450 meg.
I often make connections to my work VPN, or to customers via PCAnywhere, for encrypted desktop sessions. The transfer rate to update the 1024x768 screen is usually 10 KB/s+...over 8 hours, that's 288 meg per session.
The latest OSX patches usually weighs in over 20 gig. Windows service packs are pushing 150 meg. Game demos can be 200 meg+. A Homestar Runner short cartoon is > 3 meg and I'll do 10 or 20 in a sitting. Downloading all the skins and maps and mods for your favorite game at 1 meg, 2 meg, 100 meg a pop adds up pretty fast, in addition to the gamedata (a steady 8 kB/s).
And spam email averages 60 KB. 300 messages is 18 meg. Hope my ISP isn't still selling my email address the way RR did in '97...
Hey freaks: now you're ju
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!
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?
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!
In college I managed to stay connected to dialup for 3 months.
:)
That was a nice nice time period.
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.
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
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
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
...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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
"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.
"Servers, which are generally prohibited"
The interesting thing about servers is that if you're not running one, you're probably not a real part of the internet. People without server status are just consuming information, and not really contributing to it.
There are ways to participate in the internet without a server (by email, sourceforge accounts, slashdot accounts, yahoo accounts, wikipedia accounts, etc) but the internet always grew up a peer-to-peer thing. I visit your website and you visit mine. When you read something interesting, chances are it was written by an individual, rather than by a company.
We're starting to see more push for the idea that the internet is just one big television show, where you upload your credit card number, download "content", and go shopping. And the ISP accounts with crappy upload figures, bans on servers, dynamic IP addresses, and bandwith limits, port blocking, and all the rest only encourage this.
What does a vagrant contribute to a city? What does a port-blocked upload-limited dynamic IP address contribute to the internet?
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
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.
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.
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 $2000 per month.
Once again, do the math. In order to make money selling DSL an ISP needs to put at least 40 DSL customers with 1.5/256 on the same T1 (the same 1.5 of bandwidth). And 80 is a more common number.
If every one of those customers expects to get 1.5/256 24 hours a day, 7 days a week they are dreaming. They have to share.
But since ISPs have to make customers want their service, they have to advertise unlimited service. The truth is that even if the ISP advertises unlimited service, it simply can't be unless the ISP has only 1 DSL customer per ATM and per T1 to the internet and loses money every month.
And that ISP won't be around for very long.
Howard Shere Altair to OS X so far
Its basic economics and people still think Bandwidth is free... Its not.. Its very costly.. and You have unlimited access but not unlimited usage.
Its plain and simple how Highspeed works.. They get a Highspeed line and share it among its customers.. Say your highspeed ISP has a 1Gig/sec line and they doll out 1Meg/sec connections. That means that it only takes about 1024 people using the full 1meg that they are portioned out on a consistant 24/7 basis to congest the incomming trunk. say Your paying 40$/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
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
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.
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!
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!
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.
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.
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 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).