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How Much Broadband Usage is Too Much?
Semprini2k asks: "I just came home from work to find a letter waiting in the old snail mail box from my Broadband ISP. It has very nice titling on it: 'Notice of Acceptable Use Policy Violations' and also has an 'Abuse Ticket Number' associated with it. Has anyone else received these from their Broadband ISPs lately? Are they being overly cautious or are they working towards throwing off any users who might possible tax their network? I am trying not to be paranoid about this, but what are other people seeing and/or doing in this situation?" The "proper" bandwidth is liable to vary by region, but it would be interesting to note usage patters of people who are getting these letters versus those who aren't.
I called their toll-free number to inquire whether I could get access to their data. No, I cannot. All I can do is try to use less bandwidth and hope I do not see any more of these letters. 2 more and my service will be terminated."
"'Oh, no!' I think to myself, 'They think I'm a spammer!!!' But further reading sheds more light on the subject:
According to our aggregate bandwidth usage records, during December 2003 your [...ISP...] account exceeded [ISP's] bandwidth usage limitations. The activity associated with your account was more than 100 times the national median. This level of activity violates [ISP's] AUP."I freely admit to using a lot of bandwidth. From the day Fedora Core was released via BitTorrent I have kept an active BitTorrent session going to help others get it too. So I find this a bit of a concern.
I called their toll-free number to inquire whether I could get access to their data. No, I cannot. All I can do is try to use less bandwidth and hope I do not see any more of these letters. 2 more and my service will be terminated."
It has very nice titling on it: 'Notice of Acceptable Use Policy Violations'
Look through their AUP and see if what you are doing is indeed a violation. I had a warning via email several months back from my (cable) ISP which claimed I was using "above average" amounts of bandwidth even though they advertised "unlimited" when I signed up years back. I replied to the supplied human-read address saying basically "An average is made of of highs and lows, right?" to which I never had a reply or a warning since. That may just be coincidence but I do generate a fair amount of traffic...
Trolling is a art,
and the hacker is using a lot of bandwidth to relay spam or something
interesting to note usage patters
I'd be interested in finding out more about those too!
"Traffic Consumption Allowances: Adelphia has the right to
This means they can say at anytime you are downloading too much, without even telling you how much is too much. They don't need to give you any download cap.monitor, measure and report bandwidth consumption by You. Adelphia
reserves the right to establish, modify and/or enforce consumption
allowances at any time now or in the future, with or without notice, and
apply a surcharge for excess usage."
I haven't received a letter yet but I have friends who did... people might want to start thinking about limiting their download, especially with the very popular dvdr newsgroups. It does take 5 GIGs of download per movie. You can easily let newsbin download at 300k/s 24/7.
Download wisely...
It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well. - Rene Descartes (1637)
if you have unlimited bandwidth in your contract, you should fax them a copy and stick it to them.
With him hogging up the pipe, I'd hate to live near him!
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
I play a lot of netrek, and do some bittorrent stuff too.
:)
What region of the world do you live?
I sure hope it's not the midwest U.S.
"Sometimes the truth is stupid." - Lawrence, creator of Prime Intellect
Why are you censoring your post?
you got a contract when you signed up for service.. if it fails to specify a bandwidth limitation, this is a scare tactic and nothing more..
Get a torrent client that lets you limit the speed and users, then you can still help but regulate it.
It's a great idea (for the ISP's) they cull the worst 1% of their users (which usually take up way more than 1% of the bandwidth) and are left with users that pay for a super fast connection to check their E-mail once a week. I'd be interested to know what the going rate is for a 1 GB transfer. At what point are you costing the cable/dsl company money?
Everyone that disagrees with me is a paid shill
Enuf to suffice all the downloads from IRCs'
The activity associated with your account was more than 100 times the national median. This level of activity violates [ISP's] AUP.
This language implies you better know what the median is and you'd better stay less than 100x of it. What's up with that??? I assume somewhere else in the letter is an exact amount rather than this measure against the median? Does the fine, fine print of their terms of use actually say 100x the median???
Here in N. California, our provider (Village Media) doesn't send us letters. They simply just cap the bandwidth. I get about 150 KB/sec down and 100 KB/sec up. And as far as broadband goes, that isn't that great. However, since we are in an apt. complex, we don't even get a choice or say in what service we use.
-Valiss
Guess it doesn't pay to have my unemployed brother downloading movies on my line.
It is not our abilities that show what we truly are... it is our choices.
I just got an email from comcast saying "we've upgraded your broadband connection at no extra charge! Just unplug your cablemodem, wait 60 seconds, and then reconnect!"
Has anyone else gotten one of these? Maybe its just my area got an upgrade, but it seems you and I have far different ISPs.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
When you signed up there should have been a terms of service agreement. If there's nothing stated about the bandwidth limit then you have nothing to worry about. I live in BC and had the same thing from my ISP. I asked them to show me the document that stated what the limits were. They said they didn't have anything in print so I told them they didn't have a leg to stand on. Cut me off and I'll take you to court.
The GEEK shall inherit the earth...
I use Comcast in the Sacramento area. They are supposedly bumping us to 3Mbps/384kbps. I can't wait :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Just out of curiosity, I have noticed that whenever I see these stories they are always associated with cable broadband.
Anyone with a nice fast DSL connection ever gotten one of these things?
How about
btdownloadcurses --max_upload_rate ($something more reasonable)?
They think you're a spammer? That's ridiculous of them. I would think it wouldn't be too hard to see if you're sending mail or actual packets. As far as usage, I personally am all for setting throttles. If they can't afford to have you downloading constantly at the maximum speed you're paying for, then they need to scale back. Some people (like myself) are using their broadband as their media connection; as in I watch a lot of streaming broadcasts. Don't set a limit on how many GB of data transfer you can have per month (like I noticed Comcast doing recently). Just do the math and set the throttle. It's that simple.
Damon,
http://actionPlant.com
Challenge them. Pull out your copy of your service agreement, and verify that there is no statement of limits on that.
Then verify the on-line copy, since they will claim that is the controlling version.
Assuming you cannot find a statement that says "You agree to use not more than X bandwidth per Y period of time", then challenge them. Inform them that unless they can show a contract, with your signature, that binds you to that agreement, you will consider any termination a breach of contract and will pursue it as such.
Make them tell you exactly what the limits are, and what you usage is.
This is classic modern business - "Try to screw them, since they don't know their rights. If they bitch, back off."
BUT MAKE SURE THEY DON'T HAVE A LIMIT IN THE AUP FIRST!
www.eFax.com are spammers
I've got 3 Mb/s cable (768k upstream) and I've never received a letter like that. I download ISO's and new kernel's and other large things all the time. I do not run Kazaa or any P2P software though. Make sure your machine has not been hacked - someone could be using it as their personal warez server or to relay spam.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
so, which broadband ISP is this? I'll make a note to not do business with them.
You could ask them how much it would cost to get
service with no cap. If you can't afford the service with no cap, then comply with the agreement that you have made with your provider.
I know it's unpopular with the SlashdotGroupThink, but read the agreements you make and DON'T make them if they're bad. If you do make agreements that are leagally binding, then prepare to have your service cut.
Want to reduce your broadband usage? /. , and subscribe to the newsletter, otherwise there is no way to reduce broadband usage.
Easy, stop reading
The IT section color scheme sucks.
ISP's that do this are just plain lame, and your nbest defense is to threaten to switch to another provider. You'd be surprised how quickly they consider upgrading your service at no charge to you, and if they don't then switch for real.
That only works, of course, if you have another provider. I'm stuck with mine and I can only hope I don't have this problem.
* Please do not read my signature.
According to speakeasy.net the most bandwidth I'm allowed to use on my 1.5 megabit connection is 12,960,000,000 bits per day. Seems fair to me.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Out of nowhere they called me and asked me if I have a problem and would like some help. I hang up. 15 seconds later they are calling again because my bandwith limit exceeded. I made up some spoofing excuse and they bought it and left me alone. :)
It's nice you are sharing legal software with others. Kudos to you. But don't expect them to beleive this is nothing illegal, and don't expect them to allow you to pay $49.95 or whatever for 100 times the average. I'm sure if you were 2 or 3 probably even 10 times the average, you'd be ok, because, after all it's an average. But when one or two people are sending that much traffic over their network, it's raising their cost, and eating into everyone's pocket, because the only way to recover would be to raise all subscribers prices.
If you have another choice for a provider, check their AUP. If not, either accept the terms of the AUP and not leave Bittorrent open for the whole month, or go back to dailup.
Remember, you don't have a right to broadband, so use it wisely.
"This amp is special, see all the knobs go up to 11, that means it is one louder than other amps"
If they're laying this on you without any prior warning or detail in the AUP, then it's time to tell them to kindly fuck themselves with the nearest sharpened object. A lot of ISPs are basically saying one thing in their promotional material, and then offering something different once you're on board.
If they're saying "1.5/384" and not mentioning caps, then they owe you "1.5/384" and if they don't deliver that, then they owe you a refund. If they hold out with the demand and claim to be holding you to a service contract, you can probably drag them over the coals for breach of said contract.
So I can understand the ISP's point of view - you're using a lot of it, and you're costing them quite a bit of money.
I would ask them, "What is an acceptable amount of bandwidth to use?" for my service?
If they can't tell you what is an acceptable amount, start looking through the fine print of your contract.
Also, if they advertise "unlimited" service (as many broadband ISPs do) you have an easy false advertising claim in court.
Well, I wonder who the ISP was.
Our cable broadband is provided by Comcast (notoriously identified as evil), and I have never heard so much as a peep from. I basically have torrentstorm running on one of our machines 24-7 downloading every kind of media imaginable, and I would not be surprised if I cleared 4-5 gigs most weeks... and that is only *me*, we have 2 other users on the network too.
I suspect this will end up being some small ISP who really can't afford to buy more bandwidth and has little choice but to throttle back heavy users.
Please, it would help those of us shopping for broadband to know ahead of time what ISPs to avoid.
My ISP allows 2gb of transfer per day. For the avarage user, that's plenty. But I could easily blow this quota by dl'ing two Linux distributions in the same day. I'm sure I've gone over once or twice, but probabally not frequently enough to get their attention. I'm certainly in more flagrant violation of their AUP by running an HTTP/FTP/telnet server under my desk :) Also, I believe they want you to pay for each PC you have connected to their network. Heheh, like that'll ever happen.
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
I was 'red flagged' by my ISP Shaw Cable in Canada. They let me know exactly what my usage was, 80GB downstream and 50GB upstream that month. All I got was a phone call, and I told them that I was sending and recieving home movies. I was actually running a public FTP portal, but that is something else. Long and short of it, they never called back, but there are no real 'limits' on the personal accounts up here when I signed up. There are now though, 10GB both ways. So that kinda sucks.
As a general rule of thumb, most ISPs don't want a "consumer" user to operate a server. Right to operate a server is usually part of a "commercial" level service plan. That BitTorrent you have running is probably the culprit.
I have a broadband account with CableOne.net - they have a similar policy written into their fair use aggreement.
"You must comply with the then current bandwidth, data throughput, file storage and other limitations on the Services. Users must ensure their activity does not improperly restrict, inhibit, or degrade any other user's use of the Services, nor represent (in the sole judgment of Cable One, Inc.) an unusually large burden on the network itself. The Cable One network is designed for typical usage by a computer user seated at his or her keyboard. Computer activity resulting in excessive or sustained bandwidth consumption such as from unattended computer activity may burden the network and such usage may be restricted. Cable One may, without notice, modify the speed, interrupt, or prohibit such data traffic. In addition, users must ensure that their activity does not improperly restrict, inhibit, disrupt, degrade or impede Cable One, Inc.'s ability to deliver the Services and monitor the Services, backbone, network nodes, and/or other network services."
As I am an extremely active user - I too host things on bittorrent alot. When I got my account with them I spoke with one of the people in charge and explained out in advance - they aggreed to amend my account. I think it is a matter of communication - you have to let them know that you are an above average user in advance. Most broadband ISP's - that suddenly experience huge changes in bandwith from one user would get interested given the amount of machines that are highjacked to send spam.
Anyhow - I would consider switching providers if they will not tell you what the limit is (something I hate about my provider - they are very vague - does anyone know of a company which is specific?).
There is always a frontier where there is an open and willing mind
Perhaps this goes without saying, but I'd let your wallet do the talking. If possible, find a new ISP.
(I admit, I'm spoiled by two overlapping cable providers, each offering cable modems, plus within range for DSL.)
(Yes, I read the docs for tc, and I'd love to have an HTB shaper instead of the standard qdisc one I use, but I'm too busy to spend that much time for the small advantages a truly custom firewall box would offer.)
They gave me a letter like that. Appearently 51 GB outbound and 6 GB inbound per month was "too much strain on the system".
Then they called my house to "figure it out". I told them it was a hacker got in my computer. They bought it. But long story short, don't run an FTP server on Shaw Cable networks (even if it is on a non standard port).
-------
Support Indy Music. Buy
However, I think that one of the biggest problems is the lack of information on exactly how much they say you are using - without telling information it is hard for them to define what excessive usage is and give you a baseline to modifiy what you have running. In short I think that the contract needs to define what excessive usage is in terms of bandwidth; and the ISP should provide you with some means of seeing how much you are using.
Being cut off the net and had to call the ISP to find out you've been accused of port scanning somebody's machine and that you must EMAIL the abuse departement in order to get everything straighten out before your connection is restored. This happened to me and I had to use a friend's machine to email those bastards. Ohh I found out why my machine was port scanning, cause my ircd was setup to scan proxy ports for whoever attempts to connect with an irc network I was partnerd with at the time, so some asshole of a user reported me in cause they didn't like getting scanned I guess. Lucky the ISP I was with at the time has long since died out which was DirectTV DSL...
This space is not for rent.
The contract I bought and paid for was 10/10mbps down/up from Multimedia/Roadrunner and unlimited usage. This was in August 1999.
Enter Cox. Hostile takeover. Changes contract, 3mbps down/256kbps up, 2GB/day max usage and/or 30GB/month.
I won't even get into their reliability.
However, I have not received any such complaints, and I tend to take down somewhere around 30-35GB/month (best guess, I have a convoluted network setup). I have yet to see policy enforcement. I hope I don't see policy enforcement, and I try not to push it beyond 35GB/month.
Here in Germany at universities you get told all the times you may not waste bandwith, so every download I start thinking if things like a Linux ISO is worthy enough.
This situation really sucks - actually you are sitting in front of a network, technically able to download but aren't allowed to - and nobody ever could explain why bits cost money. I mean, do cables burn if to much bits go through it? This whole ISP system is really annoying...
Firstly, I'd like to know who's ISP this guy is just so the Slashdot community is aware. Secondly, a recommendation would be to look into other companies providing broadband access - this policy is fairly absurd but not unheard of, unfortunately.
# fuser -v
#
There is a giant thread about this abover at BroadbandReports' Comcast Forum
Networking is always a matter of sharing. IWBNI companies like this would help; e.g. if proxy servers would reduce their costs, let them install one and tell you how to use it. If a decent mirror somewhere would stop you using bittorrent to help others (and would reduce their costs), likewise. RCN runs a nice mirror for 'cygwin'; I've always wondered why ...
Is there anyone outside the US that gets these kinds of letters from their providers???
Don't eastern (Japan, Sough Korea, etc) countries have faster connections and move even more data then US users do??
Evolution or ID?
I have a question for people who get these messages: What services are you using all of the bandwidth for? I know that I usually pass the two and three gigabyte limits many providers are enforcing with my cable modem, but mine is spread around all over the place-in other words, I'm not using P2P apps or downloading a whole lot of iso images via FTP. For those of you who are getting letters, what are you doing with the bandwidth, and how much of it are you using to download movies/software/music without paying for it?
Here in the UK, I'm aware that some ISPs have a limitation on use of Narrowband products. One of my favourite websites used to go down quite regularly, due to excessive bandwidth consumption. However, as best I've ever been aware, Broadband should be without artificial limits. I was also under the impression that the one limit of the technology was the inherent limit on the width of the pipe that you pay for. In other words, I thought that if you were paying for a 512k connection your max uplink and downlink bandwidth was set in stone.
Sign the FSF's Anti-DMCA petit
I think that's because DSL tends to have sane pricing.
Much the same here, my ISP recently had to bring in 1gb/day 5gb/week caps since they oversold their bandwidth so badly.
I'd be happy if they set reasonable limits and just charged per gb over that if their charges were similar to those from most hosting companies around here.
They don't seem to though, perhaps they only have a small % of heavy users and its not profitable for them to setup the traffic billing system and easier to just tell those users to f~ off.
Anyone with a nice fast DSL connection ever gotten one of these things?
That's funny. Tell another one.
who is your broadband isp?
Most DSL connections are charged per GB of transfer. You get a GB free (5 GB seems to be average) then it's some fee for every GB you go over.
Cable ISPs are ambiguous because they never mention specific numbers about bandwidth usage. this "100x the national median" is about as ambiguous as it gets, I smell a rotten fish.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
It has happened a couple of times now where my cable modem has just stopped working, when I give TW a call they say it is because I have downloaded an excessive amount of data and should stop, because I was most likely downloading music, which I wasn't I was downloading massive waveforms from work. I asked what acceptable was, they responding with Road Runner is inteneded to give people constant access to email and regular webpages. streaming media and mp3's should not be downloaded with roadrunner. Go figure, broadband is for the stuff a modem can get in seconds.
The only bandwidth-using app for me was Gnutella. I tweaked the client to conserve bandwidth capping it at 80KBs. We'll see if that does the trick or not... but I find that when my connection has been moving along nicely, the modem shuts down... I think that is their automated way of saying "slow down there buddy!" So I say, "okay, fair enough..." and reset my modem. The more I taper my bandwidth, the longer my connection stays alive. I'm thinking of connecting an X-10 device to reset my modem when my computers detect a loss of connectivity. ;) That way I don't come home to a dead connection needing to be reset.
Luckily I don't know about anyone who has gotten those warnings here in Sweden and I hope the Swedish ISPs will continue to be as liberal as in the past. Really, high quality (1,5 megabit/sec) moviestreaming (although pay per view) is one of the things Swedish ISPs use to market their services.. And there is a big VDSL competition among the biggest ISPs right now (Bredbandsbolaget, Bostream and Telia) getting more and more aggressive (you can get uncapped 26 megabit both up and down for $30/month).. I don't think they dare to get a bad reputation until that race is settled.. If one of the ISPs get a reputation for harrassing P2Pers they will just switch to one of the other ISPs.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
To me this implies that if I keep up a massive amount of traffic, and everyone else does so as well, the national median will rise.
Broadband companies and their "terms of use" are rediculous. I still havn't found one I can stomach. no landline either. no internet at my home.
Something similar happened to me with Rogers Cable in Ontario. In my case, I was running an FTP and an HTTP server, not exceeding bandwidth limits. They didn't send me a letter, email me or phone me. Instead, they just cut off my service and waited for me to call them. I told them not to bother restoring my service and switched to DSL.
In my entire time in the field I've never heard of anything like an ISP trying to restrict the bandwith a user is paying for. In case they make any problems I wouldn't even bother taking legal action but just switch to a better ISP.
I live in the midwest, and use to be on Charter cable. While never recieving a warning, I did notice my cable get severly capped. When I first got it I got 500k/sec down and 100k/sec up. Before I canceled, my max up was 50k/sec and down was 12. I switched to DSL, and now enjoy a max down of 350k/sec and up of 30k/sec, and have never recieved a warning.
Dsl = good.
What ISP are we talking about??? Speakeasy (mine) has an explicitly casual policy regarding excessive use. That's one of the reasons I signed with them; my usage is pretty volatile, and if I need to download a few ISOs I don't want to have to spread it out over several weeks, or have the Piracy Police second-guessing my activity.
So if that letter came from Speakeasy, I'd like to know.
Life is like surrealism: if you have to have it explained to you, you can't afford it.
Why even post this if you're not even willing to tell us what ISP did this?
You can, of course, cancel the account. But Internet Service Providers would love to be able to offer and advertise "unlimitted accounts" but only have light users sign up, use them minimally, and pay the steep price. Your leaving would not be a great loss to them. The bad press they get over doing this, and the number of people who go elsewhere because they don't want to deal with nonsense like this would be an issue, however. The best thing you could do is say who they are.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Here are some tidbits from their stuff:
As far as I know, and as far as I saw, Multimedia never oversold their network. Speeds were always blazing fast, even during "prime time". 500KB/sec or more was not unheard of.
I have Road Runner, and i have been transffering for a couple months straight now. I have seen or heard nothing about to much bandwidth. Thats very wierd
If he told us the ISP then we could look up the ISP's AUP. More than likely it has a clause restricting usage and he doesn't want us to see that.
In other words, RTFAUP!
Most people would be "HEY! THIS SUCKS! FIX IT!" to their ISP. I have decided to hold off for a bit.
I am often bittorrenting and VNC home from work - this speed has been only a boon for that stuff. Bittorrent never gave me the speeds I get now, and everyone on the other side is my new best friend. At work, I often have to upload giant inDesign files and hundreds of megs of photos. From work (with the normal speeds in place) such a task was estimated at 10+ hours. From home, it took an hour. Nice - less babysitting from me, and I get to go home early.
That said, I wonder why I *haven't* gotten a letter since my upload speed is beyond even the top level service they offer, and is often maxed out.
The nice thing is that this is their fault and not me 'hacking' it.
I wish this was a 'feature' that I could choose on a web interface: "Choose 760dl/128up or 128dl/760up".
That would be great for the times when I want to dl the newest trailer from Apple, then switch over when I am uploading files to my websites, or running an Unreal server for pals.
"I just came home from work to find a letter waiting in the old snail mail box from my Broadband ISP. It has very nice titling on it: 'Notice of Acceptable Use Policy Violations' and also has an 'Abuse Ticket Number' associated with it. Has anyone else received these from their Broadband ISPs lately? Are they being overly cautious or are they working towards throwing off any users who might possible tax their network? I am trying not to be paranoid about this, but what are other people seeing and/or doing in this situation?"
FYI- I've been using your PC to relay spam for about a year now. Just let me know what the acceptable use limits are and I'll cap my uploads accordingly. Thanks.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
I ran a dinky webserver for personal use. No one hit it that wasn't a personal friend of mine, save for port bashers and scanners, and it was basically just a small file server. My ISP shut down port 80 and told me not to open another webserver or they would cut off my service. They never bothered to look at 8080 :) I think they just like to let you know who really owns the bandwidth. It's more of a power trip.
Sierra Tango Foxtrot Uniform
Because there is so little demand for any kind of SLA on home connections, there's no volume and thus the price for a real Internet connection is ridiculously high. If everyone had a real connection (multiple static IPs, servers allowed, no arbitrary caps) then it wouldn't be expensive.
Problem with this is that just about every AUP out there has a clause that reads along the lines of:
"[isp] reserves the right to terminate this agreement at anytime"
So they dont even have to give you a bandwidth number. They alright got you to agree to let them cancel your connection at their discression.
In Cablevision (Optimum Online) cable modem land, they throttle your upstream bandwidth down to 10KB/sec when they think you're up to no good. No notice, no nothing. If you want to get back to full speed, you need to call them up, and then sit around till they call you back. Then, once you're on the phone with the head goon, he will chastise you for a bit about how you're doing bad, and grudgingly let you back on "just this once".
If a provider tried to enforce this, a lawyer could probably have a judge find this contract "unenforceable" and possibly even be able to get you a hefty settlement. The problem is that sudden changes to the terms of a contract without notification is inherently unfair to the other party. Now if they sent you a warning that you have exceeded their current limits, a judge may find in their favor. However, that warning would probably need to state how much is "too much", otherwise they're leaving themselves open to another "unfair contract" suit.
BTW, IANAL, but you should talk with one anyway. Dollars to doughnuts says he can make it happen.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
the hog who goes up six times. Then
they make you leave.
Now imagine the buffet or internet where everyone is the bandwidth hog.
Right or wrong? Who's to say? Terms of Use wise may
be technically accurate, but you still may
be taking to much "chicken" from others.
I used to run a FTP server on my home machine so that I'd be able to put my personal and work stuff on it, so I'd have a handy way of shuttling files back and forth between my home and work computers.
:P
Well, one day I found in my InBox a nice little email from Shaw (main ISP for cable modems in western Canada) complaining that I was currently using more bandwidth their business users, and "to keep things fair" please consider either switching over to a business payment plan, or to turn off all P2P programs (assuming I was warezing mp3's, no doubt). They said that I'd been downloading about 37GB and uploaded about 20GB.
Needless to say, I was quite flabbergasted. I quickly checked my FTP logs, and sure enough, there was a whole bunch of mysterious IP addresses who connected to my FTP server, and had been using it as a Warez Joint over the past couple of days. I quickly shut down the FTP server and moved over to an encryption-based system instead.
So that was one example where a bitch-fest from the ISP actually help me quickly shut down a problem
Hm, I'd be more interested in knowing if anyone actually has a nice fast DSL connection.
I just got my first warning ever. I think the ISP was more worried that my connection had been hijacked than worried that I was using too much bandwidth. (64GB down and 24GB up in December.) I don't normally use that much, but I had a couple weeks vacation, so I was downloading more things during the day than I normally would.
They DO say that they want me to try to keep my use within reasonable limits. They never define numbers, though.
Here are some helpful ways to reduce bandwidth usage. Recommend these to your friends and family and save the net for us all!
Here is what I don't understand -- what is the point of Broadband if you cannot utilize the bandwidth? I mean, if you are given 1 or 2 or 3 or whatever Mbits down stream, what is the point of having blazing fast internet. If I wanted to have fast web surfing then I would subscribe to a service that give 128K down, not 3 Mbits down stream.
The views expressed are mine own and do not express the views of my employer.
Gives me a 10 Gb limit (each way) per month. Each gig above that costs approximately $8. While I don't find this limit too much of a problem (there are only so many torrents I can let fly at once) I do object to the fact that these limits are NEVER advertised.
I had to look through the fine print at the back of the manual they sent me to find what the limits were, and also found a URL that tracked my usage for me (useful, I admit).
Gotta look at it from the perspective of the ISP. They can't possibly support all the activity of the torrent/warez kidz, and if they don't impose limits it's going to fall on the backs of the regular users. Isn't 10 Gb enough? If everyone was actually using the net for legal purposes, I'd imagine only a very small minority would be finding that limit constricting.
I say this is all fair, though it should be made much more clear to the consumer what they're paying for at the time of sign-up.
Wait, considering what I mainly use broadband for, it IS the same question.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Here are some snippets from Comcast's AUP. Say farewell to free speech:
(ii) post, store, send, transmit, or disseminate any information or material which a reasonable person could deem to be objectionable, offensive, indecent, pornographic, harassing, threatening, embarrassing, distressing, vulgar, hateful, racially or ethnically offensive, or otherwise inappropriate, regardless of whether this material or its dissemination is unlawful;
>>If we don't like you or your opinions, we can pull the plug.
You must ensure that your activity (including, but not limited to, use made by you or others of any Personal Web Features) does not improperly restrict, inhibit, or degrade any other user's use of the Service, nor represent (in the sole judgment of Comcast) an unusually large burden on the network.
>>BitTorrent? You're one of those hackerz aren't you? *Snip*
Full link is here:
http://www.comcast.net/terms/use.jsp
If I don't get an exact number to follow, then I do what I always do.
I have recieved several of these notices over the last few years. Each time I either ignore it or call them up and ask for the numbers I am violating. And most of the time, they won't give them out. I have never been kicked off my ISP for overusage, but I guarantee they would get hell from me if they did.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
There is no concept of too much "broadband" (I hate term, it doesn't mean highspeed) with the ISP that I chose. They have a fair quota (I don't even know what is as I've never come close to exceeding it), and they're very clear about the excess charges (CAD$2/GB).
Too much bandwidth to them means you're swamping their network and affecting other customers. Even on a 3.5Mms/800Kbs DSL that's rather hard - it takes being DoSed or colocated to cause them problems. If you do affect customeres, they'll pull the plug on you until they can contact you or temporarily filter the culprit ports, or both.
I gotta say I'm very happy with the situation. There's no ambiguity and I think it's a fair deal (did I mention the paltry sum I pay each month service - it's fantastic).
Back when I lived somewhere were I couldn't get DSL I had to use these bastards. Funny thing was when I signed up it was for "Unlimited Internet" and all their advertisting was supporting this, no clause, nothing.
:D
They disconnected my service for a week after saying they warned me. I had to physically go downtown to their building and raise some hell. Needless to say they switched it back on. Also our household usage was something like 10gigs/mth and they said that was 100's times more than ANYONE else (*cough* bullshit *cough*).
Since being back on DSL I've had ZERO problems. Granted the service support on Telus is brrrrrrutal, but when it works it works good.
R4NT.com - A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
Source, please - where do you get your information?
I cannot speak for "most", but neither my DSL nor that of the three other people I know personally who have DSL have any cap on their transfers save the cap set by the number of B channels assigned to their connection.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Like they know what the median is? Not likely. And until they give you an easy way to check your usage, how do they expect you to know either?
Someone should be suing them over false advertising over all this.
Ok, here is the deal. Comcast has been sending these out over the last few months. There are several HUGE discussions ongoing right now at dslrating.com in these forums. (sorry, I don't have the time to find and link to them). Basically the jist has been that the people they are sending these out to are ones that do not have an alternative source for broadband (or at least a "competitive source"). This is the only real trend that people have been able to discover. The other trend is that unless you SEVERLY DECREASE your downloads (i.e. basically pull out the plug from your connection for the next 3 weeks for 24 hours a day), you will most likely be terminated and/or forced to pay an additional fee and deal with their support people (well not really the support people but their violations people). The main complaint is that they are advertizing as unlimited downloads, when in fact they mean "read your email and browse to cnn.com, and/or msnbc.com, but if you do anything else with your bandwidth you will be violating the TOS". But like I said, it seems to be targeted at areas that do not have alternatives like DSL or other cable modem broadband services (because they would definitly lose their customers in those areas).
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Most DSL connections are charged per GB of transfer. You get a GB free (5 GB seems to be average) then it's some fee for every GB you go over.
That's a nice generalization you have there. BellSouth doesn't do that, and Telocity didn't either. SpeakEasy doesn't either. That covers a pretty wide swath of customers right there. How does that qualify as "most"?
If they advertise as always on internet then I can't see how they can kick you out for taking advantage of the always on connection. I haven't seen any of these either. Who is your ISP?
Also if they aren't going to tell you exactly what your usage was then how can you be held liable? Its like being thrown in jail without being told what you are being put in jail for.
Of course, many times the response you hear is to fight the man! The problem is, the man has you by the balls. In many areas there's only one high-speed provider. So, while you could take that ISP to court for breach of contract, that means that there would be weeks/months as the court goes over the case where you wouldn't have broadband at all.
Is it worth it? Not to me. I ~need~ my DSL. It's the only option I have. Scare tactics they may be, but the amount of time being without broadband that it would take to get things cleared up in court is enough to keep me in line.
~D
This sig has been enciphered with a one-time pad. It could say almost anything.
See, if you were on a line all by yourself, or with only a dozen or so people, you could freak out and download everything off the net. They don't care. You aren't going to affect the performance of those other 12 people.
However, if you are on a node that requires you to use less (re: not enough hardware to support the subscribers) you are expected to play nice and throttle your download/uploading.
Of course, this only applies if A) You are using cable, not DSL, and B) You weren't given an actual Byte-limit per month.
By not specifying just how much is 'too much' (and they never will, ever, no matter who you talk to) they can arbitrarily impose download limits on those they need to in order to keep their overused nodes from being discovered by the average user, who would otherwise only notice a small drop in performance.
Disclaimer: I know this, because I've seen the internal memos, and done the actual statistical work using the tools at my workplace, and confirmed the findings with other workers from my, and other, ISPs.
So the answer is no.
Although I believe there is a transfer limit somewhere around 1GB a month for residential users, they don't seem to police it. I've been using SpeakEasy for over 3 years, have had some months with much more than 1GB used, and never a letter stating that I went over.
Perhaps if I maxxed out my connection (1.5 down) for 3 days straight, they might say something... But then, that's to be expected. The more you use, the less availability for everyone else. Unless their network sux, it should take a good number of people maxxing out to really cause a problem. After all, your end is capped.
Sometimes I even pull out the old Spice Girls album
and make a mix with other big Divas.
I have been search for a while for a good Linux app to monitor bandwidth ussage for my network. I want to see how much I use per hour, day, week, month, etc. Not throughput, but actually data totals transfered.
Does anyone know any good resources ?
Broadband reports has been reporting that Comcast has cut off people for violating unspecified download caps while to refusing to state a clear bandwidth limit.
Adelphia also has a 'no servers of any kind' policy. Seems to me that running a Bit Torrent, while good citizenship, is itself a violation of TOS, AUP, or whatever else you want to call it.
I'm on Adelphia, and I hate their policy, especially the blanket nature of it. Seems to me it's impossible too, because isn't responding to a ping kind of acting like a server? How about running IDENT so you can use IRC?
Given availability of DSL, I'd be off of Adelphia in a heartbeat.
I don't know where you live, but I live in the USA in Pennsylvania and no one charges per GB for DSL. It's "unlimited". I've downloaded and uploaded several GB a month with Verizon and haven't gotten any nasty-grams yet.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Until broadband providers halt their bait and switch tactics, there are no usage limits as per all of their advertising. When you advertise unlimited, that's exactly what they are selling.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
Twice already! I had had a 384 Kbit/s DSL link for several years, when back in march (I think) 2003 my ISP upgraded it to 512 Kbit/s. Last month they upgraded it again, now to 1 Mbit/s. Way cool!
Just unplug your cablemodem, wait 60 seconds, and then reconnect!Ah, that's nothing! My letter stated that "the change has taken place already". Sure enough, the syslog from the night before concurred. :-)
I live in Denmark by the way.
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
100 times average ... this is meaningless. The average could be 1 MB / day, and you could be getting 100 MB. Or, it could be 1 GB / day, and you are at 100 GB. Big difference, since the absolute amount of bandwidth is probably the chief consideration on their part.
... or anything else which gives you a sense of the distribution, i.e. how many people you are "stealing" bandwidth from.
Now, if they had a clue, they could report percentile, or standard deviation
I can't imagine the military/guard is too happy about the "stop loss" order.
I am pretty confident in speculating that your service agreement (and that of most of the other folks complaining here) specifically prohibits running a server. If you're keeping BitTorrent going most all the time, you are basically running a server. Also, I would guess that a number of you are running honest-to-goodness servers of other sorts.
If I'm on the mark here, all the talk about your provider violating their terms of service is rather disingenuous.
#DeleteChrome
After that, you can go further and use the raw snmp tools to write perl scripts which do pretty graphing or logging or whatever. In my case, with a InsightBB cable modem, these two commands display the total number of bytes in and out:
snmpget 149.112.50.65 ihkstk88 interfaces.ifTable.ifEntry.ifOutOctets.4
(where "ihkstk88" is insightbb's community string, 149.112.50.65 is the hard-coded internal IP that my cable modem responds to)
Comcast has a 3.0 Mbps top download speed, while Verizon DSL's is advertised as 1.5. I am actually synced at exactly 1,792,000 bps right now. Doesn't seem very slow to me. Slower, yes, but also $15/month cheaper.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
If you have cable, you're sharing bandwidth with other users. If you use a lot, everyone else's connection gets slower, which might cause some people to get rid of their cable modems. This reduces the cable company's revenues, so they have an incentive to try and stop it, even if it means losing the customer using "too much" bandwidth. With DSL, you don't have this problem, so the ISP shouldn't care as long as the cost of the bandwidth you use doesn't exceed what you're paying for the DSL connection (and since bandwidth is dirt cheap, this is very unlikely).
Remember the days when Republicans were the party of fiscal responsibility?
and it's best to fight fire with fire. File a complaint with the FCC. I had to do this over the reliability with my bellsouth connection. They advertise "always-on" but my connection dropped 10-15 a day.
when you file a complaint like that, you should get someone from the office of the president of that company. It should put them right in their place.
http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/complaints.html
I doubt that my ISP will do something similar any time soon. Afterall, one of their slogans is "free usage at a fixed cost is just something you should EXPECT from a broadband service".
I received one of those Comcast upgrade letters as well, I've noticed maybe a 25% improvement in speeds overall over the past month. Not sure where I saw the article, but supposedly Comcast sends out letters each month warning of excessive bandwidth usage to the top 1% of bandwidth consuming customers, which was in the range of 90+ GB per month. I use BT just like everyone else...but if you're approaching 100 gigs a month in usage on a regular home account then you should be prepared for the attention you attract.
Huh? Since when? I've been a DSL subscriber (on 4-5 different providers) in two states over the past 4 or so years, and have never seen size limitations. In fact, the only limit I've seen, other than the obvious speed limitations, is a lower cost 2-hours-on/2-hours-off plan offered by QWest.
But if you're concerned, get a real DSL ISP who won't cap your speeds, block ports, and will actually believe that you know what you're doing (and still give you tech support) when you tell them that you're running a linux-based firewall with a small server farm behind it.
Do you really need reason for beer? Wingman Brewers
My host for my web server charges me $5 for a lot of 3 gigs of transfer. So for me the cost of a gig is $1.67. Not much in my opinion...
Everybody won. Their customers get to keep their free Usenet access. The ISP gets to provide an additional service at no cost to themselves. I get a connection that's rock solid, responsive tech support, and no bandwidth hassles.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
"We reserve the right to change the terms of this agreement at any time without notifying you."
:-/
Owned.
I remeber getting warnings back in the day from MSN periodicaly when dial-up was all I could get back in the day but not I do an average 15GB Down / 5GB Up a day with Cox cable (3MB/256K Service) for the past 9 months (yea...it took me a while to find Direct Connect) and I've never heard a stray word from them once or a cap (just the expected downtimes associated with cable) and thier site I'm supposed to do a max of what I download in a day in the timespan of a MONTH. *shrug*
I have used several different cable modem providers, all of which have been lacking in one way or another. Speakeasy, on the other hand, does static IPs, is server-friendly, and treats DSL like phone service--an always-on necessity--rather than like cable television, which is handled as an entertainment service. If you can get DSL, do so.
--- Where's my car, and why are these grass stains on my pants?
I don't know where you are from, but I have never heard of such a thing.
I admin five systems that run on various flavors of DSL, located in three different cities in Indiana. They all use somewhere between 5 and 100 gigs of upstream transfer a month. And I know quite a few other people who have DSL that use it like crazy and have never heard any complaints from their ISP.
Would you mind pointing out some references for where this DSL capping is used? I may be rolling out a nationwide DSL project in the next few months - this would be very relevant.
I get 5gigs total 3down 2up per month. Thats at 55 us dollars plus modem rental. The thing is I live in arkansas and the provider is cablerocket.net who is based in canada. The local office is full of morons that cant even answer questions like why is my service down 1-2 times a week for hours at a time and when will it be back up. I live outside of a city and they are the only game in town so...
I can get a webhost with 60gigs of transfer per month so why does my isp only give me 5 for x times the amount of money. It is impossible for them to be paying that much more for bandwidth. They have 8-10 T1 lines (at 700 each per month with unlimited bandwidth (I called about getting one myself to check on this from the actual people they get their connection from))connected to a fibre network in the next town. They have 500+ subscribers at at least 50 per month their next level of service is 70 something and their "business account" 20gigs transfer is 200 per month and its only a 1024/256 connection. They know that we have no choice and so they fsck us and smile and laugh about it. Their day will come as another isp is building a 8megabit per user wireless network that will be up and running in a year or two. I dont care that its 100 a month they have already stated no limits whatsoever. Do what you want when you want.
I will say this. I go over my 'limit' everymonth 9gigs here 15gigs the next and the only time they actually charged me was when I did 23gigs in a month so I payed the extra and the next month did 12 and got nothing but the automated email at 5gigs. These are pieces of data going through wires there is no way the actual costs of equipment/upkeep come near the amounts charged.
Damn I got going there didnt I? sorry bout that. Someday we will all have uber l33t broadband with high definition video on demand. No worries right?
Made the mistake of putting a disclaimer within less-than/greater-than signs in my comment. In my neighborhood, DSL, which I just switched from, is both slower(384-ish, though sold as 768) and about $10 per month pricier.
Here
there was an articale a month ago in the Toronto Star about Rogers@home highspeed...
they said that basically %1 of their customers use %75 of the network... and they explaned in fairly loggical and decent terms what the top %1 and the rest of us were downloading in terms of Movie trailers or MP3's it was well written and i agreed with them, sorry i couldnt find it.
my question is.. i know how much bittorrent, and kazzaing i do.. how much network games, IRC, and IM'ing do i use?????????
The More Knowledge you have the Luckier you Get- J.R. Ewing
I have SBC DSL. They used to suck. But, they are getting steadily better. The contract I have with them says my usage is unlimited up to the cap on the line. If I want more bandwidth, I have to pay for a faster line.
The key difference between DSL and cable is what part of the network is shared by mulitple users.
In a DSL network sharing starts at the DSLAM which is usually served by an OC3. Because of the difference between up line and down line speed the out bound part of the OC3 is under utilized and the limit on up line speed tends to regulate down line speed. The result is that a single customer can't have that much effect on other customers.
In a cable network sharing starts in the local connection. Each user on the local leg of the network takes bandwidth away from other users. So, a heavy user can have a serious effect on other users on the same leg of the network. That means that they have to limit some customers to keep them from ruining the experience for everyone else.
Stonewolf.
P.S.
I used to have a job doing network architecture work. I'd like to have another job someday. But, I read in the paper today that a graduate degree in computer science and 30 years experience is $5.15/hour. Maybe its time to explore other career options.
http://help.sbcglobal.net/article.php?item=441 Not bad...nothing about bandwidth that I saw at first glance...actually seems pretty fair...
I once used a network monitor to get an idea of how much bandwidth is used for playing games like wolfenstein enemy territory and call of duty.
It used alot more than any downloads I have combined. If I get any shit from my ISP telling me I can't play games due to high bandwidth use, I'll cancel the account in a heartbeat.
I'd paypal you funds for that purpose.
So my systems at home are constantly downloading and uploading lots of information and i've never had a problem.
I do about 1gig of traffic to my website a month, in addition me and my GF love porn and we download about 100mgs of porn a day (so around 3gigs a month roughly), and I play FFXI for a couple hours a night. Throw in AV updates, Windows updates, Driver updates, Video Game Patches, etc.. I'm guessing I do an easy 5gigs of traffic a month on average.
Now you also have to account ISO that gets downloaded every now and then that could push it higher, but i've never had an issue. I pay for a $40 for a 768k/256k DSL connection (the 768 is the speed cap for my area the $40 flat rate for all speeds up to 1.5)
I've never had a letter, but I'm not sharing files on kazaa or bit torrent either. If I did I could see my bandwidth usage doubling but even 10gigs of traffic a month doesn't seem to be in the "OMGWTFBBQ" range.
Ave Molech Setting
I dont think many people even realize how much they are using. I'm sure there is software you can use to track it. I personally have 3 computers and an xbox using it on a daily basis and I really have no idea what my monthly average is.
They sell you "unlimited," but there is a limit, but they won't tell you what that limit is and unless you track your usage you won't know. Buncha pricks.
Someone who has gotten one of these letters needs to call attention to this via their local news station's "consumer watchdog" reporter. No matter what the fuckin' EULA says, unlimited means unlimited-- I see no disclaimer on their TV commercials that says otherwise, they're all too busy telling me how fast their shit lets me download (read: steal) music.
If Comcast is grossly overselling their network capacity, it's their problem, not yours.
Thank God I live in an area where I could ditch them for DSL when I got tired of all their restrictions.
A friend received that letter in his snail mail box last September. He curtailed as much usage as he could, but when asking Comcast how much was too much, they couldn't tell him. When he asked what the acceptable limit was, they couldn't tell him. All they could tell him was that he was using too much bandwidth and was being unfair to his neighbors.
/.). Their definition of too much is too much. They have not quantified it; they only obfuscate the issue by talking about "the top one percent of our users..." There will always be a top one percent of their users! Well, until they have no users left, there will always be a top one percent of their users to cancel!
Rich arrived home yesterday to find that his Comcast service had been turned off. I guess his definition of too much was not the same definition as Comcast had. When he called last night, they could tell him only that he had used too much bandwidth, but they had no idea how much that was. They told him he would have to wait 12 months before he could join them again.
As mentioned elsewhere, there is a lot of discussion on the net about Comcast's AUP (there was even a thread here on
Why don't cable companies just meter bandwith, like any other vital utility (gas, electric, water, etc)? I'd happily $.05/GB or whatever it costs them, as long as I didn't have to worry about violating their rules.
Does any company do this yet? It seems technically feasible, considering how much smarts are in cable modems these days...
---- I made the Kessel Run in under 11 parsecs.
would use so much bandwidth?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
yup. vdsl. ~38Mbps. all data, no video. $59.95/mo
I was looking for just this info, since I'm a speakeasy customer (and fan.. that tells you something about their service). Can you tell me where you found this?
I found a clause in their TOS along the lines of, "If you're consuming excessive bandwidth that is affecting our service or equipment, we will ask you to stop", but no numbers or anything...
-Zipwow
I don't know which is more depressing, that 2/3 didn't care enough to vote, or that 1/2 of those that did are crazy.
I'm in Montreal and have a DSL connection with Bell Sympatico..no bandwidth limits whatsoever...
you really shouldn't be thinking altruistic as you say you do with bandwidth; the way i understand bittorrent, when you download something you're already contributing bandwidth to others, so once you've recieved what you wanted, that's it, you've given back as much as you got so leave it and don't try to be overgenerous.... redhat is a billion dollar company, they can afford to distribute their material even if they market it as "community" stuff, whereas you are just a guy with a residential subscription who shares his bandwidth with his neighbourhood... leave it to the big guys of bandwidth on the internet and trust that they are many, the network will survive without you and the likes of you... don't be a damn annoyance to your neighbours, and aside from the readiness to interpret their actions as mean-spirited, do you really want residential networks to have their bandwidth strangulated by unnecessary junk, i don't... i'd understand the part of you downloading but stop leaving it on for others, please... and it's good that ISPs are taking action to prevent such things happening...
- Virus, worm, or trojan (malware).
- File sharing software set up with default configuration (thereby becoming a server to the world, usually without knowing it).
- Genuine heavy usage.
When we realize someone is using a ton of bandwidth, we give them a call and see if they know it. About 60% of the time, it has been an infected computer. We get them to run the Symantec cleanup tools, and suddenly their usage drops to invisibility like most other normal customers. Another ~40% have set up a music-swapping program and don't realize they are sending out files all the time. ONE customer turned out to be downloading music all the time. When he saw his usage stats, he upgraded his account to commercial level and everybody was happy.Among normal users, even gamers and teenage kids whose usage is intermittently high don't reach the limit. Gamers run the graph up briefly, and a download of an ISO runs it up. These people know more or less what they're doing, and are not a problem. It's the clueless being used by outsiders that are the problem, in our experience.
The Deep Space Network has just announced that the Spirit Rover on Mars has just been notified that its downlink connection is being terminated, because its usage is more than 100 times the median.
>> Most DSL connections are charged per GB of transfer.
>Source, please - where do you get your information? I cannot speak for "most", but neither my DSL nor that of the three other people I know personally who have DSL have any cap on their transfers save the cap set by the number of B channels assigned to their connection.
[America Centric]
I'm aware of only ONE or two ISPs in my region who meter consumer DSL access based on per byte use in anyway what so ever. The local telco doesn't offer metering...nor do any ISPs that I know of that are connected via the local telco, with perhaps one exception. Earthlink doesn't ofer metering the last time I talked with them for their DSL service. I can only think of ONE company that was listed in www.dslreports.com who was noted as having use limits at all. I knew of one other personaly, but they were not listed on any published list that I was aware of. I actually tried to talk them out of their per byte limit, and dispite the fact that I used them as an FTP dump without limits @15.00 a month, they were not hip to the idea of me paying $60 a month for unlimited. So hey... great!
I can't speak for the rest of the world... but I have a choice to either choose the odd ISP that offers limits... or many others that just just meter.
To be kind... I typicaly do my big arse transfers at night when everyone else is sleeping, but I'm not required to do so.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Speakeasy doesn't say 'unlimited', they sell you bandwidth, and you can do whatever you want with it. Run servers, do VPN, run Bittorrent 24/7 -- it's all good. It's your bandwidth, you paid for it. As long as it's legal and isn't disruptive to other users, Speakeasy is happy to have you as a customer. (ie, you can't DOS people, spam, or scan/attack networks you don't own/manage, but pretty much anything else goes.)
They're linux-friendly, can do either DHCP or static IPs, have good latency, essentially zero packet loss, and they're happy to HELP YOU share your network connection with your neighbors.
As far as I'm concerned, Speakeasy should be considered the Gold Standard in ISPs. Obviously, they can't reach everyplace cable does, but if you can get Speakeasy and aren't, you may be doing yourself a disservice. Yes, they're probably a little more expensive than your current provider, and you probably won't be able to download as fast as you sometimes can on cable, but you will always get the bandwidth you were promised, you'll get low latency, good support (although the web-based support is pretty slow about responding.... call them if you're in a hurry), and best of all, you'll never get The Letter.
Some local providers can be great, too. Sonic.net in Northern California was excellent when I was there five years ago, and my brother says they're still great now. But national providers, by and large, suck rocks.
BTW, my relationship with Speakeasy is strictly 'I send you money, you give me bandwidth.' Other than that, I'm not affiliated with them. I'm just a very happy customer.
I agree with Mancide...
I believe my Cox cable terms specifically prohibit running servers.
With cable modem, you're sharing the bandwidth with everyone on your block (or an even larger area) and it only takes a couple of people running 24x7 servers to hose the rest of us who are using the network for its intended use as consumers, not proprietors. (Yes, you're running your server for free, but it's no different in terms of its impact on the rest of us.)
Oh I see, you reduce your cap by 50% each time you get a nastygram from your ISP. You'll get down to 56k modem speed in no time.
They aren't capping to save on costs. There has to be a good ol' slashdotting conspiracy here. Lets see if we can figure it out. SCO and Microsoft pay them so you can't download too many linux iso's. The RIAA pays them so you can't download too many songs (although the hidden backdoor in windows okay's it if you're using iTunes). And the MPAA pays them to prevent dvd images from being downloaded.
I think I summed up the real problem. The only solution is to make everything free and open. Then utopia will be complete...just as long as all those jobs in IT come back to the US.
I've a nice speedy 1.1 sdsl connection from Speakeasy, and have never had any problems from them, dispite a generally high, constant legitimate usage.
But then again it's Speakeasy, who's got one of the best AUP's in the business...
Go check out www.broadbandreports.com they have a message board that shows anyone that has recieved the notices undoubtedly recieves the second notice of termination. They also show that these letters are generally sent to people who have no other viable broadband option other then the cable company they are with.
1,500,000 bits per second * 60sec * 60 min * 24 hrs
== 129,600,000,000
10% of which is 12,960,000,000, or 12.9 Gb/day,
or 1.6GB per day. (But hey, it is between 2 and 3 isos)
I got it too. Now it is back to what it was when @Home was running it.
I miss those guys. Too bad they had incompetent management.
Have they told you "how much" you are allowed to use?
Did (or do) they advertise the service as "unlimited" internet access?
If so maybe you should quote Daniel Webster's definition of "unlimited" back to your ISP.
David
I live in a large city (~ 1 million peons) with a single cable internet provider. They are known for ruthlessly shutting off service to get you to call them and find out how you offended their AUP. While at my old house, and from other friends stories, they usually start calling around 5 GB of traffic per month, where I am now, I did that in a week and have heard nothing. Also, unlike my friends who's dynamically assigned IP's change quite often, I have been running my linux box off the same IP for almost two years now. The only time it changed is when I changed nics.
;-) but maybe they don't consider my area a high consumption spot or failed to purchase enough monitoring equipment. The only time I have ever heard from their abuse department is when I reported being the victim of a spam attack, and they shut down MY connection for spamming. Maybe it's just literacy.
I won't mention the company (hint: look at the parent post), as I don't wan't to loose my loophole
Telus out west here (I am in Calgary) has an official limit of 10GB down/5GB up on my business DSL. We generally pull about 250 down and push about 35 up per month. I phoned Telus one day and asked what they thought about this - the general answer : "you pay 5x more than a home user, so we don't really care". This is handy since I am a home user who just happens to pay for the higher speed line (4MB down 640K up). Something to think about if you are a Bittorrent user like myself.
I find it very interesting that it's mostly cable providers sending bandwidth notices. While cable speeds are on average twice as fast as DSL (at least in my area). Cable providers (at least TW/RR) have considerably cheaper operational cost. They own the entire network down to the line that runs into your house. No leasing of lines, or space at the local CO. While the FCC has made sure DSL providers could get those for a song, its still an expense.
The past is just the present only older -me-
Their terms of service aren't totally anti-consumer, like the other big "broadband" providers.
I have 6000/608Kbps connection with SBC Ameritech DSL. I have been downloading constantly since I've had it installed. In a month I probably download around 200GB per month and upload around a good 60GB. Never heard a whine from them :)
I just came home from work to find a letter waiting in the old snail mail box from SCO. It has very nice titling on it: 'Notice of Unacceptable Linuz Use' and also has an 'Abuse Ticket Number' associated with it.
"'Oh, no!' I think to myself, 'They think I'm Linus Torvalds!!!' But further reading sheds more light on the subject:
According to our usage records, during December 2003 your linux account exceeded the right usage limitation, that is zero. This illegal Linux activity was more than 100 times the recommended by Microsoft. This level of activity violates SCO Copyright, and you may qualify as a terrorist in the FBI's database, according to the Patriot Act III, wich terms are confidential and undisclosed to the public.
-
Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, find / -name '*base*' |xargs chown -R us && mv zig greatjustice
I'll trump your pathological example with my own: I, Bill Gates and 8 friends of mine are sitting in a room. Using the mean, the people in this room have a average net worth of about $5 billion. While LearJet might like to hear it, it isn't a valid description of the actual net worth of the people in that room.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
If you unplug your modem, they'll move away without telling you their new address.
For example 1Mbps connection can transfer (1000/8)*3600*24*30/(1024) = 228.5GB/month.
Thus transferring over 114GB/month would be unreasonable.
For example 10GB/month limitation is ridicilous since it allows to use only 4.5% of the advertised bandwidth.
Yeah...I got one of those letters and ingnored it. I usually run a crap load of bittorrents. So I'm pretty sure that's the cause ^_^; After I got the letter, I toned down my bt usage...but started it back up again. The next thing that happened was they set my cable modem on "Abusive mode". During the inital setup/connection phase, the dhcp server will issue you an internal ip address instead of a public address. They didn't even send a letter or call me. They waited for me to call and stated that my service was on suspension because of excessive bandwidth usage.
I am now looking for another alternative to comcrap service. I'm getting tired of connection drops which I've noticed happens a lot in bad weather for some reason (they had to splice a new line cable line to the neighborhood box because it was damaged underground).
What really gets me is the at the bottom of the letter. They letter informs you that there is a business class version of cable internet. I called up that division of sales and they refused to help me because of the letter I got...said "We [business class service] can't help you because you're generating too much traffic." and suggested a t line. No way I'm spending 500bucks a month for a t line.
They're just in it to get the money. IMO, it think it's completely insane to offer business class service which **still** rides on the same physical medium connected to the neighborhood! This is why I'm shopping around for new service.
right now I'm off suspension, but they said if it happens a 3rd time, I'm terminated. hopefully I can find a better isp before that happens!
Good thing that they sent you an actual letter on paper, because God knows that, in this day in age, there is no other effective way that they could have communicated this important information to you...
When you buy bandwidth, its like you have at your disposal that whole bandwidth for the period you paid for. If you cant use that bandwidth, then you DONT have that bandwidth at your disposal.
An ISP buys a 100-mbit usage permanent connection with some backbone and resells it. They sell 1-mbit DSL connections to 300 customers (considering on the average, a customer uses his Internet for 8 hours a day). But the ISP realizes theres no shortage of people who will only use the connection for 1 hour a day but will pay for the full connection, so they figure, scare away the heavy users and keep the 1-hour users, and you can have 2400 customers. Now THATS profit.
The major problem is even those customers wont buy the service if you advertise 1 hour Internet per day, you HAVE to advertise unlimited high speed.
So what are they left with? Threaten the ones with P2P software and servers, block port 25 and 80, and use QoS to slow down the gamers. Tell them its all for security. Another possibility is to reset their connections after several hours and give them a new IP... the DHCP leases expire rediculously fast.
And of course, implement bandwidth caps, after sending out one email warnings. Then charge them up the wazoo. That sure beats getting more customers... just overcharge the current ones.
The Internet was cheaper mbit for mbit 4 years ago in Toronto. Rogers and Sympatico have paired up to royally screw the populations, and whats troubling, all those smaller ISPs have to buy their bandwidth from Bell, owner of Sympatico.
So my friends, as soon as this monopoly is broken, in any city or country, you can imagine the bandwidth costs just plummeting. Over time just like moores law, we get more cables laid, better cisco and Juniper routers installed, more chinese satellites launched, and more bandwidth available, so theres all the reason for the costs to come down in a smooth curve. Seeing Internet prices jacked up for 4 years straight means someones getting filthy rich, and as soon as that monopoly goes, competition will make it all that much cheap.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
I do some work for a wireless ISP and we had a customer on the network fire up a copy of bittorrent. Myself and the owner have enacted a fairly liberal usage policy. If you get our attention you are probably doing something bad and will be delt with. This one guy was using over 20 times the bandwidth of any other customers. We immediately started looking closer and found he was running bittorrent. We just gave him a simple choice at that point, if you want to run bittorrent find someone else's network to do it on. If you are running bittorrent you will get someones attention and that is usually not a good thing.
Got Code?
"I know it sounds bizarre in our GOP/conservative dominated culture,"
What does that have to do with anything?? You think republicans as customers don't expect to get what they pay for also or something? Do you think that just because someone is a card carrying GOP member and they subscribe to one of these services and the company doesn't follow through, that they're going to just sit there and take it because of their political affliations? Adding that stupid little bit completely invalidated your otherwise reaonsable point.
I'm pretty sure that'd be an invalid clause for a contract. The best they could hope to get away with would probably be something like "We reserve the right to change your bandwidth entitlement under this agreement through adverts in local/national press".
PenguiNet: the (shareware) Windows SSH client
Network, Bandwidth, Data Storage and Other Limitations
You must comply with all current bandwidth, data storage, and other limitations on the Service established by Comcast and its suppliers. In addition, you may only access and use the Service with a dynamic Internet Protocol ("IP") address that adheres to the dynamic host configuration protocol ("DHCP"). You may not access or use the Service with a static IP address or using any protocol other than DHCP unless you are subject to a Service plan that expressly permits otherwise.
You must ensure that your activity (including, but not limited to, use made by you or others of any Personal Web Features) does not improperly restrict, inhibit, or degrade any other user's use of the Service, nor represent (in the sole judgment of Comcast) an unusually large burden on the network. In addition, you must ensure that your activities do not improperly restrict, inhibit, disrupt, degrade or impede Comcast's ability to deliver the Service and monitor the Service, backbone, network nodes, and/or other network Services.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Winfirst/Surewest has a 40gb per month limit.. at least in Sacramento, CA.
Comcast, otoh, is unlimited (for $58 a month they better be).
By definition, data pipes have only limited bandwidth. So, if too many people use too much of it, the ISP has to buy more pipes and equipment to counteract the increasing demand and maintain the QoS.
I do.
there is no bandwidth limit at telus, they say its like 10gigs but they have no way to track it and they don't enforce it.
One of the things I like about the Bell's sympatico service is that, not only is it clearly stated (section 5) that there are no bandwidth limits, they even provide you with a page where you can check you consumption, which to me is such an obvious service to provide I'm surprised that not everyone offers it.
They want to control what you access. They don't like how the internet works. Thats why they are limiting the upload speeds and now limiting the download speeds as well. They want internet to be web only and one direction only. They don't want you to use ftp, ssh, host webservers, bit torrent, or whatever. They just want your computer to be like a television. And they really want you to connect to their home page. Thats as far as they want you to go on the internet.
It also says: But don't pay attention to section iv, as they have a page that specifically tells you that you can set up a NAT router and firewall, but servers are still a no-no (even though I know at least one person who has his own DNS, email, and the like running. I guess if nobody complains then they don't care.)
I recently switched from one ISP (sympatico in canada) to another (local cable company). The main reason was I didn't like the 10 gigabyte transfer limit per month. A friend of mine got an extra $25 charge one month for going 2 gigs over the limit. When I called to cancel, a very nice french person (all sympatico customer service reps are french), told me sympatico did not have any such restriction. I wonder if they bill people and only retract the policy when people threaten to change, like I did. I would suggest that anybody who gets any sort of letter from their ISP call and cancel their service and switch to another provider. Most areas have at least two or three providers, and you can bet at least one of them will offer no transfer limits just to piss off the ones that do enforce limits. I wanted to run my website (www.cgff.net) from home prior to switching, but got a webhost instead because I didn't like sympatico's policies. Cable is better anyway. Hope that helps.
http://www.cgff.net/comics.html
If they are going to threaten to turn off your service for using "more than 100 times the national median", then they should offer to refund the monthly service charge to users who use "less than 1/100th of the national median." But, of course, they won't.
This whole relativistic crap is a scam. By dropping the top X% of users, they lower the average bandwidth usage (since those users were pulling far more than the average). Then the next month, they can do the same thing and drop another X% of users -- even if those users aren't using any more bandwidth than they were the month before. Suppose your company told you that they would lay off the 5 highest paid employees every month. If you're number 7 this month, you better start looking for work.
I don't think that the cable companies care as much about how much bandwidth we are useing, as they do about how other users are being effected by the bandwidth we use. We have to remember that cable (unlike DSL) is a shared resoure, and our useage effects others around us.
I have Cox high speed internet. In my neighborhood, I am one of only 6 people on the cable ring with high speed cable internet (most of my neighbors with broadband either have DSL or use the other cable provider in town, who until last week offered twice the speed as Cox. I live in apt where the other cable co does not service, and DSL is 44.5 feet away...) However, because there are so few other internet users on my ring, I can use as much bandwith as I want without my use really effect any one else on the local ring. For the last 3 months I used well over 40GB of traffic, no letters of complaint, no calls, nothing.
I have a few friends who live on the other side of town that get letters for using over 20GB/month. One of them is a comercial account that specifies they don't have a limit, but they get letters anyways. Their local ring is fairly saturated, and we know neighbors on the ring are complaining of slow speeds. It seems that after every batch of complaints that they take action. YMMV.
As I have mentioned before... (Score:4, Interesting)
;))
by teamhasnoi (554944) on Thursday January 08, @02:19PM (#7918259)
due to some missed upgrade of my DSL modem, my download and upload speeds have been reversed. I u/l at 760 and d/l at 128.
Most people would be "HEY! THIS SUCKS! FIX IT!" to their ISP. I have decided to hold off for a bit.
I am often bittorrenting and VNC home from work - this speed has been only a boon for that stuff. Bittorrent never gave me the speeds I get now, and everyone on the other side is my new best friend. At work, I often have to upload giant inDesign files and hundreds of megs of photos. From work (with the normal speeds in place) such a task was estimated at 10+ hours. From home, it took an hour. Nice - less babysitting from me, and I get to go home early.
That said, I wonder why I *haven't* gotten a letter since my upload speed is beyond even the top level service they offer, and is often maxed out.
The nice thing is that this is their fault and not me 'hacking' it.
I wish this was a 'feature' that I could choose on a web interface: "Choose 760dl/128up or 128dl/760up".
This is little more than effectively giving you 760/760, but making it inconvenient to enable. It's also not practical from the ISP's standpoint because its easy to abuse, especially with some simple scripts.
What would make more practical sense is to have this as an option per account, which would make the ISPs happy and the customer happy. I can buy an account which my intent is to only host something, so I'll buy 760 ul but 128 dl. That way I can run a machine where I know I'm pushing more info than I'm pulling, like a webserver (or your local warez/pr0n site
What would truly make a customer happy would be 3.0 up and downstream for only 19.95 a month, but I'm working within the parameters that the ISP has limited people to.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
You might have thought you were buying 1.5Mbit link, but ISPs were only intending to sell you 15kbit (perhaps an exageration, perhaps not!). I sympathize with ISPs that lose money on a customer if they use 100% of the available bandwidth all the time. Of course, the amount of money they make on a "normal" customer is insane. Really, normaly people will go online for a few hours a day and spend most of their time reading/browsing the webpage rather than actually downloading.
Personally I think ISPs should advertise not only their peak bandwidth rates, but their maximum amount of transfer per month. If it's a condition of your service, they must state it clearly BEFORE you buy it. It's not always easy to find this information out before you buy either, I've called ISPs and they actually lied to me claiming there is "no limit", but when I get ahold of their acceptable use policy the limit is mentioned (but not always clearly stated).
Perhaps as customers we should demand a clear and easy to understand metric (not this 95th percentile stuff business ISPs use either). But something obvious like "10Gbyte/month combined(in both directions)". And a customer should be allowed to view, at any time, their current usage statistics.
Oh well it's wishful thinking (although some cable modem providers use this kind of metric in their AUP, they don't usually openly advertise it).
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
*cragen
I was capped at 15kbps for using "excessive" bandwidth. No letter or notification. When I called them (after 3 hours on hold-- literally), I was told they'd have to get back to me. Finally I spoke to someone and they told me that according to "some formula" I had used too much bandwidth. They could not tell me what the formula, only that it would not get triggered unless I was using "lots of bandwidth for hours and hours". They uncapped me, but told me that they could terminate my service if I exceeeded their cap again.
Optimum Online is a division of Cablevision, which is big in the Long Island area.
I wasn't using more than 75-80kbsp on average for perhaps 5 or 6 days (torrents) before they capped me.
So if you're wondering why your uploads are going so slow, this might be it. Is anyone else's service doing this too? I find it very underhanded. I should at least be told exactly what the cap is? 50kbps? Fine, just tell me.
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
Have reset it back 3 hours in my time zone, lets see what happens...
It probably depends on your ISP.
My (locally-owned) ISP doesn't care about bandwidth used by their DSL customers. Their AUP (acceptable usage policy) explicitly says that their quota policies do not apply to anything downloaded to your PC (or uploaded, I imagine, as the upload BW is much smaller than the download BW).
However, they do care about the (http, ftp, etc.) bandwidth used by hosted services. For these, there is an explicit quota, which varies by account type (1GB/month for basic DSL, but there are additional-cost add-on services that increase the monthly limit). Cost is $4.95 per GB, above the limit (I think you can also auto-disable your hosted services if you go over quota).
That's like saying your phone company can't tell you what phone calls you made (monitor), because they can't record (inspect) your calls.
Monitoring traffic and inspecting traffic are completely different issues. "Inspecting" implies that you are "listening-in", whereas monitoring simply means that you are aware of the usage. I can't imagine any ISP that doesn't do some sort of monitoring.
--
Slashdolt
Judging from your letter it sounds like you are using comcast. I havn't had a letter to sent to me, but I do read over the interesting threads at DSL Reports forum.
It seems Comcast is targetting people only on high use nodes. There really isn't a consistent amount of bandwidth that you have to be lower than to avoid it. Comcast has not said how they determine whether or not you are violating TOS. Instead, they throw out statistically useless comments such as "100 times over the national median" or downloading "over 50 full length movies a month".
I personally believe that if you advertise unlimited service, you should provide unlimited service. If your infrastructure can't support that, you shouldn't have advertised it. Comcast may also try to get you to upgrade to business cable. The same ToS provision is in the business level cable, so don't bother.
See here for one of the more interesting threads on this subject. (Warning: it's long!)
I most certainly do. I get about 1.8 megs down and I do 350kb up.
That is exactly what I pay for. I reach those speeds all the time.
If you are not happy with your DSL speed don't forget that DSL isn't cable. Cable is rather straightforward, they hook you up and bammm you get what you get.
DSL is, well DSL can be a mess. The phone company only cares about the line to your house, after that it is your responsibility. You realize that there is nothing stopping you from running a dedicated phone line out to your switchbox on the side of your house?
I know it sounds bizarre in our GOP/conservative dominated culture,
Yeah, conservatives are really happy about the gutting of contract law that goes on today. After all, contracts only form the basis of business, it's not like it's all that important...
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
This is why I like my ISP. It is run by what I believe that it is the only (or maybe just the biggest) independant municipal telephone company in Canada (tbaytel.net). Thier "official" bandwidth cap is 4gb per month downstream and none upstream. I found this out when I asked the installation guy and he said
:D
"well it is 4gb but they don't enforce it at all"
apparently they really don't care what I, or anyone else uses, they have never even asked anyone to slow down on thier usage. I would know
History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it - Sir Winston Churchill
forgot to vent one other thing. Comcast sent notices/advertised the upgrade in network speeds. before the upgrade, my max was close to 200kbytes/s down and 15kbytes/s up. The upgrade basically doubled the bandwidth to 380kbytes/s down and 30kbytes/s up.
My major complaint concerns this upgrade! If you double the bandwidth, shouldn't you also double the cap?!?!? I think the whole bandwidth limitation thing sucks big time!
I'm a speakeasy dialup user here - never once have I been disconnected. No time outs either.
I use Linux with an external USR 56k, that must help, but I think speakeasy has a lot to do with it too.
Is that like being punished because your spanking new expensive broadband connection happens to be faster than the average 56k modemers around the country?
You should read your contract terms with a magnifying glass, and discover the _real_ bandwidth they're selling and set up a suitable traffic shaper.
Yes, I know your pain. I'm a resident at a campus where they have 100Mbps to every room and they like to pull the plug if you have sustained over 100kbps traffic.
I'm getting ~1350/~690 out of my 1500/750 Speakeasy DSL connection (through Covad). It's way faster than the old Comcast cablemodem (~1270/~90) I had before I moved, especially because the puny upload cap on the cablemodem was far too easy to saturate which would kill your download speed. Apparently Comcast doubled their caps recently, but the upload contention is still a problem.
For a point of comparison: Downloading a Redhat 8 ISO on Comcast shortly after it was released (bittorrent): 4-5 hours, downloading a Redhat 9 ISO with Speakeasy (bittorrent): about an hour, despite the fact that the download caps are the same.
I read the internet for the articles.
blarsted pirates. Yarrrrr matey.
I'm in Alberta and I've gone through 3 ISP's.
1) Videon. Charged $5 for every GB over 10 up and 1 down.
2) Shaw. Phoned me up every month saying I was using to much bandwidth.
3) TELUS. I download around 1.5GB every day and have yet to hear from them.
I recently moved and when I did I switched to Comcast Cable from Verizon DSL. My DSL experience had been excellent. The bandwidth I had paid for I recieved at all times. I never had an outage that was Verizon's fault (several router/modem lockups, no biggie) over 2 years. So Imagine my suprise when I tried to use the 256Kb upload that I am paying for from comcast and I could only get 20-30Kb. No matter what I did, modem/router resets, TCP/IP configs, port forwarding/DMZ, I couldn't get a faster upload. And when I say 20-30Kb that was the fastest it would ever go, as an average I would say I would get 15 outbound. So I called up Speakeasy.net and switched back to DSL. No problems since.
We have a very interesting situation. ADSL is a somewhat new here (about 3 years where I live, not much older in more developed regions). When it came out there was not such thing like caps but now, as the user base is expanding fast, the companies are trying to implement this kind of limitations but they have a problem: the old broadband users like me. Our legislation forbid them to change or cancel the contract unless the other part agrees. So you see on TV and papers, adds about new broadband plans at a lower prices and bonuses for the suck^H^H^H^H users wanting to "upgrade" to the new plans but the catch about the caps only appears in the contract and who have the patience to read EULAS and contracts after all? ;)
Scientia est Potentia
So where is the scoop? Why was the offending ISP censored? Wouldn't it be best to counter this in the market?
You have two formulas :
- one that charges by the minute, for about 2.55 euro/hour (or about 2.55 dollars normally, but since it's value dropped 3.55 dollars)
- You can also get the other account wich is 'unlimited for about 20 euro's but (and this is the catch)you get charged for every megabyte over 250mb/MONTH. This is limited to 10 euro's so your max bill will be 30 euro. But it's tsill not intersting since it's only Max. 512 Kbps downstream, Max. 256 Kbps upstream, so no good.
Furthermore belgium has a few operators who are pretty much used to high-traffic customers. Most of them clearly stipulate the amount of montly traffic in their contracts and advertising. Most of the DSL isp's have different accounts for different needs.For instance, belgacom : offers a "ADSL go" account (with a montly total traffic of 10 GB) for 41 euro's and "ADSL plus" account (15 GB) for 45 euro's. with the "plus", you also get a extra upload speed of 256 kbps.
If you go over your maximun amount you get capped to the speed of a 56k6 modem. So you can still check your mail, even though it takes an hour to get it.
No problem! Belgacom offers 'Volume packs' (really , I'm not making this up) which you can buy. One volumepack is 5 gigabytes extra traffic for just 5 euro's.
I recognise your isp's behavior from the cable provider I was with before. In 1998 I joined them, then we had 5 Mbit down 1 Mbit up. Nobody really bothered me (while I was using loads of traffic, running an FTP locally and having +40 Gigabytes/month).
Later they started sending out letters, as you describe, threathening to disconnect me after the third.
It hasn't come to that, since round the time ogf those letters came an upload cap of 256 Kbps for the entire network into effect. So I had to close the ftp anyway.
Just before I was about to revieve the third letter, they changed their policy, capping everyone who goes over 10 gigabyte to phonemodem speed. The DSL lines were upgraded for 1 to 3 Mbit donwspeed so it was bigger competitor on the broadband market here, guess they got bored of losing paying customers.
--> Insert Funny Sig Here
This is one reason why I keep track of the BW that I use on my cable connection @ home. In case they start to come after me. Then again I use very little (unless a new version of FreeBSD/OpenBSD comes out). That and the fact that I have 60+mb/s connection here at the office :). The reason I am keep track, both of data I requested and the crap they decided to let come to me (virus/port scans/etc..) . My reasoning behind this, is that I am a curious as to if they ever send me a letter, I want to see how close our data is.
:) ), with a 512k/256K dsl circuit ($34.99), and they complain that it is too slow, and they thing it should be upped to 1.5mb down/768k up as this is a nominal amount of Bandwidth. and they don't think it should cost them anymore. That is what they hold button is for, to laugh at them, and then come back and say it can't be done.
As for work, we use BW caps to basically go after abusers. It is the same as the "unlimited dial-up account". IE if you camp on the line 24x7 we are going to charge you more. The price you are paying is based on the assumption of an over subscribed network. If the network wasn't over subscribed, no one would want to pay what it really costs to provide a guarnteed 3mb/s to everybody. I know I will probably get flamed, but I am sick and tired of people wanting something for nothing. IE Well we replaced a ptp t1(For $1500US/mnth -- in the sticks
For our dsl accounts that are BW capped, we provide a tool in our usertools that allow users to see how much they are using, so if they wind up over, they aren't surprised at the end of the month.
To E-mail me, replace the first period in my domain with an @
Purchase a business-grade account.
That's what I did. They start at just over $100/month from most carriers.
Really, if you're sucking up 300kb/s upstream and downstream every single second of the day, you're transferring a terabit per month. If you think that's only worth $49.95, methinks thou doth protest too much. I mean, really, a 155Mbps OC-3 costs, what, $30k/month? That would support roughly 500 people with a sustained suck of 300kbps. That's about $60 each, meaning your ISP would lose about $5,000 for every 500 users who think they should only pay $0.03/Gb/month. Come on. THREE CENTS Gigabit? Regardless of if they say "unlimited," try to be real here.
You can get a 384kbps synchronous line with a service level agreement from Covad for like $160/month. That's 2Tb/month for $160 or roughly 12Gb/$1 or EIGHT CENTS per gigabit. Oh, the pain, the pain.
Think of how many WinMX/Gnutella/Kazaa users are out there before you think "but I'm an ubergeek, I'm the exception not the rule." Everytime you're using a WiFi hotspot and feel like you're on a 300bps analog modem because there are fifteen !#^%!ing Kazaa idiots sucking up the entire outbound line, just multiply that over your ISP. When you're done, write the stinking $160 check and get over it.
It seems alot of isps are trying to lower there bottem doller at the expense of the User.. I had a notice a while back from my isp that said that I was using 30% to 50% more bandwith (upload and download combined) than there average user.. but there a catch in my ISP's AUP agreement there is no bandwith restrictions on my package, its only suppost to be when I am interfearing with other peoples use of the internet (I'm on Cable highspeed) but It seems I wasnt taxing the system at all they had no compaints from ther users on my branch.. Then I asked them what the Average user was and I couldnt get a straight responce from them. and they monitor my bandwith up and down and combine it into 1 number. And from what I have heard from My isp's other customers makes me think that the average user isnt the average user.. they are expecting a 1997 upper usage level in 2003, this dosnt make sence. plus I put a bandwith monitor on my gateway, and its often quite out of wack with what my isp has said I'm using.. its aggravating
I suggest you check out www.DSLreports.com your and my storys are not unusual.. unfortuatly
Unlimited does not mean 'Unlimited Bandwidth', it means your account is not metered by time.
The term was created when ISPs started to charge flat rate monthly prices instead of the traditional 'by the minute' model that the three big players, AOL, Compuserve, and Prodidy were using at the time.
I think hey could have chose a better term but they didn't.
Uh, I think the term "unlimited" existed elsewhere before ISPs dreamt up flat rate tarriffs. It's just that, in many cases, their definition of "unlimited" is actually the opposite of the one that you'll find in a dictionary.
My personal experiences with "unlimited" tarriffs has been mixed. British Telecom decided that unlimited didn't mean unlimited at all and cut me (and thousands of others like me) off without so much as a thank you, despite being happy to profit from me when I paid through the teeth for metered bandwidth (and by the teeth, I mean a phone bill that had in excess of 150 pounds, ~$250, of ISP related-calls every two months). However, when I switched to Freeserve, I had no such problems.
BT's definition of "unlimited" has changed at least twice while I was a subscriber, and no doubt it has changed even more since (always to the detriment of the paying customer). Freeserve's hasn't.
Currently, I don't use either company's services, because I'm a cable subscriber, but if I'm ever asked for an ISP recommendation I tell people to go to Freeserve (which is also one of the less expensive ISPs) and avoid BT like the plague. If they ask me why, I tell them why.
But I digress. "Unlimited" means "unlimited". If ISPs want to say "any time" they should use "any time", rather than trying to co-opt "unlimited" into meaning "any time". At best, this practice is misleading. At worst, it's decitful and fraudulent.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
I am in UK, and saw this coming a while back so for that reason (or 'tha treason' as I just typed) I bought a business ADSL deal (also I wanted 5 'real' IP's). Bloody expensive, though, but I do have no bandwidth worries.
They are bound to start this, much the same way ISP's introduced the 2 hour cut-off here on 56 dial-up when FRIACO was introduced.
Guess I should take my pr0n torrent links down before my ISP decides to fsck me over
I've definitely seen clauses like those in contracts. They shouldn't be enforcable, but I wouldn't be surprised if the companies can get away with it.
They don't have to respect your freedom of speech, just like a mall who's owner refuses to allow protesters inside. You don't like it, you're free to find an ISP that does provide an acceptable-to-you AUP...but there's nothing in the Constitution that says your ISP has to let you do whatever you want.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Brazilian's biggest DSL provider started to limit how much you can download for month in their new contracts. You have just 3GB to spend per month, they are crazy... Jair,
Didn't the collapsing telcos get government bailouts after squandering their IPO money on excess bandwidth? What happened to the bandwidth glut? This is an artificial bandwidth shortage, designed to monopolize the power of publishing by the media cartels who own the broadband industry. Freedom of the press belongs to the owners of the presses. Tell a friend!
--
make install -not war
I have had PacBell DSL since the day it was available in my area (near Bay Area, in N. Cali), and I have never had any warnings regarding bandwidth. Of course it helps to have enhanced DSL service, but even with my 1.5mbps down / 384kbps up service, I have gone a couple months straight using P2P apps (and most of my bandwidth) without any warnings from my ISP. I guess thats what you pay for when you get enhanced package.
First off - the internet content is clearly dropping because the telecomunications uindustry has found a way to sit on the golden egg and squash it.
Second - it is quite clear that the telecommunications carrier technology is about as computerized as any other aspect of the tech revolution and hense they enjoy the same cost reductions as everyone else. The exception is that these cost reductions are generally not passed on to the customers.
If you look here: Interconnection, Peering, and Settlements You can read a very good analysis of one aspect of the industry.
The problem is that peering arrangements are "negotiated" and the flip side of this is that the organisation with the most power is able to generally impose ineterconnection fees on smaller organisations. This means that your ISP has to pay for bandwidth you use with no regard whatsoever to the cost of providing the capacity or for that matter Who is providing a service to whom
Quoting from the paper: This assertion of role reversal is perhaps most significant when the generic interconnection environment is one of a zero sum financial settlement, in which the successful assertion by a client of a change from client to peer status results in the dropping of client service revenue without any net change in the cost base of the provider's operation. The party making the successful assertion of peer interconnection sees the opposite, with an immediate drop in the cost of the ISP operation with no net revenue change. "
This means that small fish always pay big fish. It was pointed out in an Australia study that when the client of a small ISP sends an email to the client of a large ISP, that the small ISP pays the large ISP for the data transfer. When the client of the large ISP reply to the email then the small ISP pays again for the delivery. At the time this was used to evaluate a review of Australian Perring arrangments. I have not heard the results.
Now - as it applies to you - it means that even though a fiber optic line for instance can easily carry say 100 mb/sec with the use of two allied telesyn ethernet to fiber line drives which cost under $1000 bux and will drive for over 75 km... and even though the cost of 6 pair overhead fibre cable for instance is only about 25% more than copper - and costs less than $1.50 per foot - that the telecomunications company who installs it feels they should be able to charge upwards of $50,000 bux per month for the rent of each "circuit". This is what your ISP faces. Wholesale usary charges.
I calculated a while back that 100baseT is about 2/3 of a T3 (155mb/sec) and on a short haul dedicated circuit to connect our servers for instance to the local backbone - the local telco would recover their total capital outlay in less than a month. Of course - once the data from our servers is in their backbone they can ship it to their customers about as easily as if they had obtained that data from the POP's that connect into the US backbone.
The simple matter is that if we for instance choose to co-locate in the US that our local telcos will be viewed as "customers" of the larger USA carries and be expected to pay very heafty fees to connect via the POP's (Point of Presence - IE a router). On the other hand any content their customer base obtains locally from our servers results in us paying them instead of them paying the USA. So they really try to put the screws on and their "bandwidth charges" would make you choke.
What you are looking at is the consequence of a system that is totally broken and not in anyone's interests... not even the biggest carriers. The reason it is not in the biggest carriers interest is that in order to be the biggest carrier they have to overbuild and take on massive debt that they cannot in many cases handle. This is why PSINET for instance didn't make it.
So we have stupid risks to be the biggest shark and everyo
I've used about 100GB /month for 5 months and not a peep out of em.
This P.I.G. will walk on the water, This P.I.G. will walk on the sea, This P.I.G. will walk whereever he wants.
Internet is more than just Newsreading and e-mailing, personally i would never agree with bandwidth limit terms when choosing ISP.
I broke 100g total bandwidth several months ago, and average around 60g per month for the past 2 years but have never received any complaint. I share home videos with family members as well as lots of bittorrent anime. There is some illegal software/movies/music in there but I would say it's less than 10% my total traffic.
here's the relevant section of my isp's (current) policy. notice how it states that they get to define what violates this standard.
also, this isn't a contract that i'm aware of. it's a terms of service. they say here's the rules by which we'll give you X service.
you go into a gentlemen's club and the sign clearly states "no touching". that's the terms of service. if you get your self a table dance or whatever it is, and you break those terms, you'll unsurprisingly find yourself all bruised up outside the establishment.
F. CUSTOMER shall not utilize excessive "bandwidth" (i.e. volume of data transmitted or received) arising out of the Service at any time and on an on-going basis. PROVIDER shall have the sole and unreviewable right to determine whether CUSTOMER'S use violates this standard. CUSTOMER must comply with all current bandwidth, data storage, and other limitations on the Service established by PROVIDER. CUSTOMER must ensure that CUSTOMER'S activity (including, but not limited to, use made by CUSTOMER or others of any personal Web features) does not improperly restrict, inhibit, or degrade any other user's use of the Service, nor represent (in the sole judgment of PROVIDER) an unusually large burden on the network. In addition, CUSTOMER must ensure that CUSTOMER'S activities do not improperly restrict, inhibit, disrupt, degrade or impede PROVIDER'S ability to deliver the Service and monitor the Service, backbone, network nodes, and/or other network Services.
Violation of this policy may, at PROVIDER'S option, result in termination of Service or imposition of excessive bandwidth usage charges, as more particularly described in the Conditions of Subscription.
G. CUSTOMER may not use CUSTOMER'S account for hosting server software operating on commonly recognized TCP/IP ports.
I remember 10 years ago I asked my local tlelphone co. about isdn and they said that 1)It was for business user (64k at like $1000us/month) and why would I want it...these tel companies have determined the current rate we pay for internet access (just prove to me the $/bit we currentlly pay for broadband was not based on old business models that came from 10 or so years ago). The simple thing is that ISP's equipment is gettin smaller (moors law), fiber speeds are getting faster, cpu's/memory/hard drives are following the same trend...even Tel co.'s are going to switch the phone system to internet packet switching, so they cannot tell me some arbitrairy "NORMAL" bandwith user is the norm and I must abide by this norm (while they make tons of money). A good example is 10 years ago in the provice of ontario in central canada when a small community owned cable company was selling cable services for about $2us/month when the artificiall high commercial companies (Shaw and Rogers) were charging $20+, these comapanies got the federal gov. to squash this and tell the community cable co. to raise it's rates to this $20+ figure. This sort of crap is what MS and these cable firms want us to believe it costs them to provide these serveces...so here we are in 2004 with all these companies saying that we have to pay all this $ for services which should be getting cheaper, not more $....???
My ISP has been sending those out as well recently. See, they sell their service as UNLIMITED internet access, and call it high speed broadband at that.
Now, the access isn't terribly fast, but I assume unlimited to mean just that - I can use it as much as I want, whenever I want, at a flat rate cost. As it's wireless, I figure the lower speed is alright for the convenience of being able to get online from anywhere in the city. However they recently changed their AUP, such that there is now a 4gb/mo limit on what you can download. Exceed it, and you run the risk of being shut off. Now I don't download that much (we have OC3's at work - guess which one I'm going to use for big stuff like ISO's and the like) but friends have been getting nastygrams in the mail with "cool it or get out" wording.
So what's up! At what point do we require an AUP to agree with what the service is called? IMO this is blatent false advertising, and dirty pool on the users.
No you are not paranoid you just love abuse Change carriers
I've managed to max out my 512K, think it works out at something like 220GB a month
"WebTV: bringing the Internet into the shallow end of the gene pool since 1995" - Martin Bishop
They also refuse to do anything about it because they claim its a best effort service, and they find 700 Kbps down the lowest acceptable speed. So in their eyes, at 1.2, I'm flying.
Lying Bastards
You need to hold your ISPs up standards. It's not that hard.
I've got a 640/256 DSL line. I've got no terms of service, beyond that it costs $20/mo. Period, end story. Got a static ip by just asking (under most ISP setups, if you're using have constant on connections, this doesn't really cost anything).
Maybe, I've gotten lucky, but these are reasonable terms.
Another useful bit, pay for your connection for a period ahead of time (I'm on a quarterly billing cycle). What's this mean, yeah, they can threaten to disconnect me, but they've offered the service, I've paid, they've excepted payment, contract made, end story.
Don't accept companies that want to be able to terminate you at any moment. That gives them a great deal of power. My connection is vital to my life/profession/academics, I need lead time to switch ISPs. I've got 3 months notice.
BTW, DSL providers are generally much more reasonable. The fact they give you solid bandwidth numbers take a lot of wiggle room out of the deal.
I've had them for almost 4 years, in two houses, run my own domains and servers, telecommute, download the occasional ISO, don't play games or read much Usenet. I pay about $100/mo (with a recent price DECREASE) for 1.5/768 ADSL. Hands down, no question, the best ISP I've ever had. Rock solid. Excellent customer service. Non-Windows friendly (including Mac and the free *nixes). They may be more expensive than budget DSL or cable service, but I'm not a typical web browsing, flash watching, email reader. Speakeasy is worth every penny IMHO.
Find a friend that uses Speakeasy, and get them to give you a referral. Tell the to buy you a lobster dinner with the $50 they save.
Make the switch, [joke] because hey, at least its not a Mac. [/joke]
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
You can Never have too muchj bandwidth what are you talking about
MonkeysKickAss
And I better not get a nasty-gram for using it.
Unless they change it to 'readable', and define what reasonable is, they can take a flying leap. Of course if they do that, then they lost a customer anyway as ill move to a different provider, considering my bandwidth sucks most of the time anyway..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Let me get this straight... people here are complaining that they are forced to reduce their bandwidth usage if they are in the top 1%?
Aren't these the same people who believe the "wealthiest 1%" in the US need to give more of their wealth to the other 99%?
I love double-standards.
In Ireland we all get really low caps. I'm with IOL and I'm 'lucky" 'cause my cap is 8GB per month. ireland offline
I have DSL through a local provider (Zoomtown/Cincinnati Bell). For $40 a month I get 768Kbps down and 384Kbps up. Sure, not the jaw dropping numbers you can sometimes get from a cable modem, but those connection numbers are rock solid, always. I've had three service interuptions over the past two years, none lasting more than 20 minutes.
I've never received any flak for excessive usgae even though I do leave torrents open from time to time. I just looked at the terms of service and although they reserve the right to cut off my connection for the standard list of unacceptable usage, I couldn't find anything relating to a "bandwidth cap" or "excessive usage."
They're afraid that you're downloading pirated movies and software. Just write them back and tell them you're only downloading kiddie porn found in the public domain in newsgroups and everything will be ok.
If you haven't noticed yet, ISPs market home Internet connections based on the downstream bandwidth speed, and give you about 1/10 to 1/5 of your downstream as a upstream channel speed.
Their networks are designed assuming that you are a standard web user... URLs up, big image-filled content pages and webstreams down. It wouldn't surprise me that the people who are getting the letters are those who are offering up Linux ISOs and other open software on BitTorrent. Even though they're not in copyright trouble, they're guilty not using their web connections for "interactive" browsing, which is something that the the AUP usually says something about. They don't mind people who download all day since that doesn't clog their networks as badly as people who are uploading all day.
If you really want to share open source software with the world, get yourself a cheap dedicated webserver that has tons of bandwidth usage with it. Set up BitTorrent there, and let it fly. Just make sure you don't go over your quota for bandwidth and you'll get close to 700GB out for only $99 a month.
In the recent past, I've downloaded over 50 GB per month for several months straight without a peep from my DSL provider. I'm sure that one reason they don't complain about usage is that speed maxxes out around 750K vs 3M for cable.
I know the rules for one ISP that provides "free traffic as long as it doesn't conflict with other terms". This very unprecise definition of "free traffic" should be understood like this:
- They allow some customers to use extreme amounts of traffic compared to how much they pay. The turnover for some customers is as low as $1 per 1000 GByte bandwidth (!).
- A lot of the bandwidth is free, because they are peering with other ISPs, so the customers can actually use enormous amounts of bandwidth and it doesn't cost them anything.
- They don't want to kick customers because of bandwidth usage, because it gives a bad reputation.
- Only those customers that use big amounts of bandwidth that costs them money will get warnings and eventually kicked.
- It differs a lot from market to market (country to country), how many customers an ISP can kick without getting a bad reputation. It also differs, how much bandwidth costs - for instance, bandwidth is much more expensive in Germany than in Sweden and Denmark.
I believe that many other ISPs think the same way. This means that:
- Things like BitTorrent might be more acceptable to ISPs, if more bandwidth stays within the same ISP or to geographically close ISPs which have a higher probability of peering with the user's ISP.
- Since users don't know who their ISPs do free peering with, it can be very difficult to determine, what amount of bandwidth that the ISP doesn't like.
...another story from the "evil-isp-won't-sell-me-$500-service-for-$50" department.
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
Yes....i have....i actually got a phone call from a tech while working on a friends computer telling me they were going to be forced to shut me off doe bandwidth usage....he was actually going to do it then and there...he said i had been a problem in the past but now my computer had been "hijacked"...he couldn't get a ping reply back from my machine....i told him i had a popular website hosted on the site at the time....he said there no way that could be possuble...i shut down apache to show him whats going on.....he said..."ohh....ok....thank by" since that covad has been really cool with me....
I mean...you take the risk that perhaps all your bandwidth will be consumed when you over sell. Doesn't seem fair to me. If my ISP did that I'd hire a lawyer.
Blar.
>Adding that stupid little bit completely invalidated your otherwise reaonsable
>point.
How did that extra statement have any effect on his argument? Would it have made any difference if it were tacked onto the end of Einsteins Special Theory, or the blueprints to your house? No, it wouldn't.
i have insight cable and i've been downloading between 100-120GB per month for the last two years, never had any complaints.
Which is exactly how the average wage is worked out by Governments' suppressing the HOI POLLOI. Nick
Never got one in all my time with Speakeasy for general usage - they only seem to restrict NNTP as far as consumption goes, and I imagine that's cause they farm out to Stupid^WSupernews or Giganews or something. Only time I had a hint of a problem was when we capped out my wife's NNTP account while downloading Frank Zappa MP3s.
This sig no verb.
If they want to limit your bandwidth to xMbps, then why don't they just limit it to xMbps and be done? Seems like extra work on the part of the ISP to write letters and complain about something they directly control and can easily tweak.
But then again if they are as dumb as my ISP they may not be capable of turning the knob down.
Ditto. Speakeasy absolutely rules. The BEST tech support I have ever gotten from any tech company ever.
Great company. The best people. I pay a little more $$ than most for it, but it is worth every penny.
If they are going to hold me accountable based on a certain usage....Then their "unlimited" advertisment should include a cap. If they want to limit me to 50 Gig a month...Cap me at 128k. That way YOU and I both know what the game plan is. You won't have to worry every time a new version of Slackware comes out (and I want to share it with as many people as possible...) and I won't have to worry about counting bytes...and turning my computer off on the 10th of each month.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
When I got my DSL I did not even sign a contract. I called my local phone company/ISP and told them I wanted DSL.
Then I asked if I could run my own servers. They said as long I was not reselling the serverice, that they did not care.
Also, I do not use that much bandwidth. I have never used and P2P apps and such.
Here is roadrunner's policy, doesnt specify many actual constraints but says they can limit: ...
...
(b) The Road Runner Service may be provided by Operator subject to certain maximum "throughput" limits (i.e., limits on the rate at which data may be sent to or received from the Subscriber at any time). Operator will provide Subscriber with information regarding any such limits from time to time.
(c) The Road Runner Service may be provided by Operator subject to certain limits on the maximum amount of bandwidth consumption available to Subscriber per month for the level of Road Runner Service subscribed for by Subscriber. Operator will provide Subscriber with information regarding any such limits from time to time.
(d) Subscriber acknowledges and agrees that Road Runner and Operator shall each have the right to monitor Subscriber's "bandwidth consumption" (i.e. aggregate volume of data that may be sent or received) at any time and on an on-going basis, and to limit excessive bandwidth consumption by Subscriber (as determined by Road Runner and/or Operator) by any means available to Operator or Road Runner, including suspension or termination of the Road Runner Service.
I've dealt with Covad for forever. They acutally encoraged me to push my line because they wanted me to buy more lines. I think in the DSL world, when you order 768,1.54, etc they know the cap, so they can figure out a profit ratio. I'm sure that if you tie up a line to it's max, they will make pennies, but i'm sure they don't create a senario where they are in the red.
With 15k DSL upload speed its pretty much impossible to use an abnormal amount of bandwidth
I know I shouldn't post after too much beer and wine (and a lot of whine...)
Probably get flamed as well, Oh well here goes nothing...
Most (if not all) contracts have a notice period on both sides.
A CAP warning is an ISP's way of saying, you have a month (or whatever the period is) to mend your ways, or take your unprofitable business elsewhere.
For those wanting to get out of their contract, possibly without penalty, this may be a good way to do it.
Just going to get my asbestos underpants...
mailto:EatSpamAndDie@princeweb.com
I'd just be happy with a stable internet connection. Around Feburary of 2003 I got Sprint DSL and about 2 months later I went from the 512 package to the 1.5mb package. Everything was peachy keen and I was hosting a nice little NWN server for fun and a programming excersize to write scripts for the module.
Then about late September or early October the connection started crapping out on me. I basiclly have to restart the modem to regain a network connection.
Originally I hooked up by linking the modem to a nice 16 port switch using PPPOE over all my machines (Running 3 at the time, with 1 24/7 for the server.). Turns out after 3 support calls I finally found out they flipped a switch to force people to go through an internet connection sharing setup or a router. So I bought a router.
Turns out after I got the router I was still getting disconnected from the internet. Modem would crap out regularly and I'd have to restart it. Eventually the replaced the modem but that didn't work either. (NOTE: I'm not going in to the nightmare of my first experience at configuring a firewall in the router D-Link 604 series.)
Well it's January 2004, I still get disconnected regularly from Sprint even though they were suposed to scale me back to 512 cause I'm so far out from the DSL office and my router or modem has just flat out refused to allow me to host any more NWN servers even though I opened all the ports and made them UDP like the help files and everyone said.
My question isn't wither how much bandwidth is enough, my question is wither or not I can get a simple internet connection anymore and not have to dork around with firewalls, ports, and little packet fairies that deny me a simple pleasure of creativity and having fun with other people.
I feel better venting now and look forward to contact Comcast Cable to get an internet connection thats hopefully better as far as stability then Sprint DSL. I also hope they have better support people who actually give streight answers.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
This 'OMG CABLE MODEMS IS SHARED BANDWIDTH LOL' needs to stop. All bandwidth is shared. All of it.
Notice how it also doesn't define in any way, shape, or form, what exactly constitutes excessive use, or how the customer is supposed to be able to tell if he or she is improperly restricting, inhibiting, or degrading other users' use of the service. If they're not gonna give their customers a way to tell if they comply with this nebulous restriction, why would they have any legal standing to terminate anyone's service, even with those terms accepted?
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
cisco's standard is 5 nines or 99.999% (5 minutes a year downtime)
-green is the color of the rainbow
If you signed up for unlimited use of a such and such speed bandwidth then that is precisely what you should get. It is also what the law should upbold. Anything else is a breach of contract on the part of the ISP. Courts look askance at one of the parties to a contract rewriting set contract unilaterally.
It's not a contract. It's a policy. Policy's are freely able to be changed without the expressed consent of all parties.
Read the recent Ask Slashdot on this very topic (submitted by me). Lots of comments by people who received threatening notices were left alone after pointing out that their TOS says "unlimited access."
I went through this in OZ.
I kept going until I found an excellent ISP.
I've never seen a DSL service put on a cap like that. Speed limits yes, but no caps. I have a business DSL (that I pay big bucks for) and they leave me alone. I get 1500 down/768 up consistently (I'm always within 90% of those speeds).
-- Galen Rhodes grhodes@the-chatter-box.com Journal: http://journal.the-chatter-box.com/users/grhodes "Consistency
That must be a very small ISP indeed. You would not want to do that with my ISP (xs4all.nl). Or most others for that matter. Or do you host just their own private usenet groups?
:) Do you support your ISP?
If they would complain on my connection (which they won't) I would do something back too though. I already create an ADSL FAQ once, and I am thinking about writing a site on their "advanced" usages (spam filter settings, ssh access, bsmtp, ipv6 etc).
Yes, I like my ISP
I have Speakeasy DSL service and run servers, consistently use several gigs of transfer a week (sometimes per day), etc. Not a peep from them on my bandwidth usage. They are very cool with consumption of the 'net. They must get some sort of monster volume deal from InterNAP.
It's not always all sugar and cream, though. The one thing that is bad about Speakeasy, though, is some of the front-line tech support folks. For example, I got noise on the voice portion of my phone line and called SBC to take a look at it. SBC fixed that problem by disconnecting my Covad circuit. It took almost seven weeks and escalating the ticket four times to get my DSL back on. The escalations were almost all like pulling teeth, too.
The problem at the end? Splitter card at the CO - SBC didn't want to replace the hardware, and was stonewalling Covad. Granted, this isn't the front-line tech's problem, but some of them are surly and others are outright rude. There are some really good and really knowledgeable guys over there, though - especially Jesse and Mark, who immediately come to mind as really helpful whenever I have to contact Speakeasy.
Also, in Speakeasy's defense, they really went above and beyond the call of duty and never gave up on my problem, even down to putting down some coin to resolve the problem. For instance, they told me I needed a pro install on my circuit before Covad would issue more tickets for techs to work on this issue, and I was about to get upset that I would be out $150 for something I knew wasn't related to the problem. I was told not to worry about it because they were going to pay for it. On top of that, they gave me a month free for each week that it had been down.
Speakeasy took me at my most angry and disgruntled and turned it around to make a customer for life. Although dealing with their front-line tech support at times lives up to its poor reputation, they did the right thing, and continue to do the right thing.
I think it's because they must be geeks at heart. At about the five-and-a-half weeks point of my DSL being down, I told the executive escalations manager I was dealing that I had become Zen with it. "It's okay - there's no rush. I've gotten used to my dialup service again." I think those were fighting words to him, or maybe that gave him a clue that somebody somewhere had really dropped the ball. All the same, it's all good again, and I really love my Speakeasy service.
You've been using your broadband too much.
Apparently, Comcast (in at least Fort Wayne, Indiana) had to unblock incoming port 80 because of complaints that some instant message programs could not send files.
I've been getting 3.5Mb/s from Comcast for a while now. It was good timing on their part because I was about to switch back to DSL. DSL in this area maxes out at about 1.5Mb/s, but at least it doesn't go out (along with the cable) several times a month. Also, the high speeds were a lot more consistent with DSL--until recently at least.
Despite this, me and several neighbors have been talking about setting up our own LAN and getting business DSL. Last I checked, I could get business DSL for $75/month with a static IP, no download cap, and as many computers as I'd like to hook up. If Comcast even thought about threatening me with this crap I'd ditch them in a second at take at least two other of their current broadband customers with me.
I had a similar problem in a hotel with High Speed Internet. I had left my machine downloading Red Hat ISO's and when I returned my connection no longer worked. Called tech support and was told that I had been disconnected due to violation of their AUP. It took a lot of pushing to find out that my violation was excessive bandwith usage. I this point a had them fax me their AUP and highlight the portion which I violated. The AUP I received had no mention of excessive bandwith usage. The highlighted section was something along the lines of "anything that results in decreased quality of service for other users".
We are only given about 5 gigs down, and 2 gigs up per week and they use some packet filtering device that makes almost all online applications, except ones that use standard HTTP ports, practically useless. All this at 40$/month! Their excuse is that it is a educational network... yah, right, and yet it takes 20 seconds to resolve a hostname.
This reminds me. Anybody seen a Bittorrent client for MacOSX that will allow caps on uploads? I'm using the official reference client from Bram and I have to use Carrafix to cap my uploads. Carrafix is a kludge, and I don't like having to use two programs when one should work -- but this is the only solution I've been able to find.
i dunno. i agree the system is all fscked up. what's a guy to do. get a direct connection to the internet? stay off line? use dial up? even the fairly cheep dial up in my area, copper.net, has limits on hour usage
on a side note. lots of things are up to the discression of the interpreter. public intoxication. are there specific guidelines on that? the MADD folks have tried to put specific limits on the DUI laws, but most others i'd say don't carry them. for that matter, obscene behavior, indecent exposure, etc, etc. these are all examples of things that society (and or local judge) re-evaluates from time to time to decide what the current standard is.
If you think that's only worth $49.95, methinks thou doth protest too much.
Not only hast thou changed thy pronoun from formal (you) to familiar (thou), thou hast also misconjugated thy verb: He or she doth, thou dost.
Now write If you think that's only worth $49.95, methinks thou dost protest too much, upon thy slateboard a hundredfold times.
I have been knwon to download 10 gbs or more in a month through comcast and that doesn't inlcude my brothers computer usage. I have never recieved a violation (or if so I have never been informed by my dad which is HIGHLY unlikely), however the other day I was watching the mac keynote speach and suddenly I had to watch it on 112 kbps instead of 560 or whatever because I all the sudden had "insufficient bandwidth". Are bandwidth issues handled by saying, ok now you can only transfer x amount of data at once because you were too greedy? I still have several torrents going and get decent speeds. . .
just stop running bit torrent when you finish the download. might not be the niceset thing but it will stop the isp from disconnecting you and chargeing you fines.
I do make exceptions when asked; one user wanted "alt.binaries.furniture" or similar to upload pictures he'd taken of his woodworking projects. Basically, I don't filter by content at all and I have no interest in doing so, but my little DSL pipe just isn't fat enough to host alt.binaries and still have enough bandwidth for me to play with.
Yes, I like my ISP. I've never had any technical problems with my service, and their sysadmin has been very responsive about doing things like setting up reverse DNS to my liking and so on. I try to keep my usage down out of respect and appreciation for the owners and staff as much as anything. They offer good service and a good price and I don't want to ruin it. :-)
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
A contract is a "meeting of the minds."
I don't consider an agreement that basically states NewCo can make the agreement whatever they want when they want a "meeting of the minds."
It is an unconscionable agreement. No reasonable person would agree to such an agreement. In law, unconscionable means:
: unreasonably unfair to one party, marked by oppression, or otherwise unacceptably offensive to public policy
Here in Finland 99% of all non-dialup connections are DSL based, except student networks and a cable provider or two.
I've never heard of anyone getting a letter because of too much traffic, except for friends I know that have a 10mbps student network connection. They usually get automated nag letters from their "ISP" from time to time. Apart from that, they get throttled for a few hours to 500kbit/s or something, with packetloss and lag.
But no, no commercial ISPs here does this as far as I know. I use a Sonera 1Mbps/512 ADSL and there's usually something going on the connection since I share it with my flatmate. No complaints in six months, at least...
The best part is that all they do is sign on AIM, check their e-mail, and surf the web (I ask before I sell, don't want to interrupt my usenet downloads). So as I see it, I'm getting free DSL, along with a small profit on the side, which pays for a night out drinking or something with my friends. It's a sweet deal.
How did that extra statement have any effect on his argument? Would it have made any difference if it were tacked onto the end of Einsteins Special Theory, or the blueprints to your house? No, it wouldn't.
It would to me. It tells me a great deal about his psychological state. It is evidence that he is seriously motivated by politics, to the point of trying to use it in an argument where it's completely uncalled for. That type of person generally doesn't respond well to criticism, and doesn't hesitate to start arguments based on what normally would be constructive criticism. As far as blueprints to my house, if I'm hiring him to do something, I don't give a rat's ass what his political associations are, but if he puts the fireplace where I wanted the bathroom to go, he better fix it rather than claiming it's because I created a conspiracy all to keep him from turning a profit because he's a card-carrying member of the opposite political organization as me.
Little statements like that can tell you a great deal about someone, even if you haven't taken a psychology course. Even the best argument in the world can be invalidated by a statement that's at best, arrogant, presumptuous, and inaccurate... and at worst, lying, deceitful, and manipulative.
"It's better to have a gun and not need it than need a gun and not have it." ~ Christian Slater, True Romance
Quit hogging up all the bandwidth, or schedule your heavy transfers for late at night. Or, continue pissing bandwidth away, screwing over your neighbors and forcing your cable company to upgrade its network, which in turn, ups costs for customers.
You probably ARE using too much bandwidth. Go ride a bike, or read a book for awhile.
My experience with Comcast has been very pleasant. Great service. Incredibly fast speeds, except when the occasional neighborhood Kazaa leech goes at it. And they just doubled my downstream bandwidth for free. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
I have a feeling these caps from Comcast et al are less technical judgements and more about trying to push heavy users (ie those who actually use their bandwidth) onto ultra expensive business accounts. Everything I've seen indicates these companies are MORE than happy to talk about upgrading to a business account.
Most of the major ISPs can (and in some cases already do) implement traffic shaping to mitigate the impact of heavy usage on their networks. The national ISPs usually have their own private backbone and excellent peering agreements, so I highly doubt a few gigs a month is costing them much. The upload caps in particular are rather silly. 7.5 GB a month? That equates to about 2.8 K/sec which is pretty much equivalent to 28.8! Or a 30 GB/month download cap is about 11KB/sec over the entire month. So much for broadband. More like fraudband, if you ask me. And that's assuming they aren't doing something nasty like using the HDD manufacturer definition of a "Gigabyte" (Oh I'm sorry, you thought you could download a full 30 GB? You actually only get 27.9GB. Per our ultra vague AUP that allows us to modify the terms at any time without renegotiation or even notification, you are now cut off. Have a nice day)
The truth of the matter is these ISPs are not offering "unlimited high speed access" by any definition any sane human being would expect. What they're offering is throughput that's a bit better than dialup (but still not in the true broadband realm), with the ability to burst up to 1.5MB/s or 3MB/s or whatever for short periods of time.
Comcast and the like are probably hiding their caps because then you'd be able to see for yourself that you aren't getting true broadband. The fact that they wont even tell affected users how much they used, or help them curb their usage is appalling. And don't tell me they can't - if they can monitor usage to rank bandwidth consumers, they can damn well see how many GB that user has used because they must be counting bits to make said judgement in the first place. If they don't have a means to poll this data or don't provide it, they need to fire the moron that came up with their monitoring system, since it could be implemented relatively simply and at virtually no additional cost. Hell, colo providers have had this figured out for YEARS. Providing the user with a tool to monitor their own usage is a GREAT way to avoid nasty bandwidth disputes. (Then again, colo providers have also figured out pricing models that fairly charge users proportionate to their resource consumption, while still allowing everyone to burst - it's called the 95th percentile model) Oh well. Enough ranting.
I am fortunate that I live in the Dallas area and have access to August.net which is one of the more sensible ISP's around.
Realizing that as an ISP they have to pay thier upstreams for the actual bandwidth used not just theoretical speeds, they vary their prices by allowing users to determine just how much bandwidth a month they want to use. You can enter in at the "email and web only" 5 GB/month or go all out, run bittorrent, and buy 40 GB/month. I buy in at the 10 GB level and usually come in just a little under, in the months I'm over, the charge all of $5/GB extra. This way nobody can complain that they are paying the same amount as someone who is using 10x as much bandwidth.
All in all a very sane way of doing things.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity -RAH
great, all of us should make sure we disable apt-get -u dist-upgrade in our daily cron jobs...
my blog
What you're saying is reasonable and correct. My problem is that my cable company won't tell me what the limits are.
They just say "we'll tell you if it's too much". Give me hard numbers, and I'm okay with that. Tell me that it's just controlled by somebody's whim, and I'm not happy.
My original agreement had no provisions for bandwidth limits, through it did have provisions for acceptable use, mostly meaning no servers of any kind allowed. My only unanswered question at the time was "What exactly is a server, does X Windows or sshd count?". I decided not to push since tech support might be dumb enough to decide they did.
Since then my account has been purchased by ATT Wireless and Comcast. In neither case did I get much useful information about the changes to the AUP were, and my only 'agreement' to the new terms was not not cancelling my account.
One the other hand, I've never gotten one of the letters despite standard heavy geek use (VNC, Gaming, ISO downloads, etc), plus rsyncing a very large collection of volital files from the office to the house every night at 3 AM.
plus-good, double-plus-good
One place that does this is here. It sucks but then again I don't do business with them.
if I pay for unlimited bandwidth usage, or if I'm paying good money, I do not want to get crap about actually making use of what I bought, and if they cant handle you actually using your connection besides for email and web browsing, they need to get out of the highspeed business, or use all that money they're getting from overcharging people and make the network stronger.
also, I bet it's prolly imposed on them by the RIAA and the MPAA to assume those who use bwidth are mp3 traders. or pressure from the govt to stop spam.. or, just because they're tightwads.
In the us anyways, all 3 go hand in hand.
My broadband ISP (Comcast Cable) has never sent me or my family any kind of similar letter. I pay for 3 MBits/sec downloads and we use the available bandwidth as much as possible. My oldest also uses BitTorrent to download animes and such while I download ISO images of various Linux distros for testing along with driver updates and OS updates.
If I would get such a letter, then I would tell them to shove the broadband connection and hook up with someone else.
i use netspace and for AU70 a month i get 8 gigs at 512/128. no excess usage charges and i can check my usage on their website
Actually, downloads do not attract that sort of attention from the broadband ISP's. They are targeting and eliminating customers that run servers. Not just occasional servers, like a personal web page or blog, but the type of servers that see a lot of traffic 7 x 24. Heavy and continuous P2P traffic is a good example of the type of usage that they are trying to eliminate. They use the conditions of their EULA as an excuse to get rid of these customers. You can "cut down" on your download bandwidth usage all you want, and it will have no effect on their behaviour. If you continue to run a P2P server, they will terminate your service eventually.
I also really like speakeasy, which is why I've stuck with them for over 4 years despite being sometimes tempted by cheaper dsl or faster cable. They also just doubled my speed for the same price I've been paying which is nice. I host my vanity site and it's always been a solid connection. I recommend them to everyone.
People using Windows and wanting to throttle upload/download limits should look at NetLimiter.
The caps are still there. They are simply hidden now. If you go over their unstated caps, you will feel the sting.
...Steve
In Australia this is a fairly typical scenario for ADSL. We currently have a 4Gb plan, and get charged a per Mb rate for excess traffic.
Friends with Cable connections generally get bandwidth throttled back to a 33.6 modem for the balance of the billing period if they exceed thier plan download allocation.
Some ISPs track download only, some track download and upload. Some discount the traffic volume at certain times of the day or to particular network partners.
Under our current contract we could download 16 gb under contract if we we grabbing from within the 'neighbourhood network' between midnight and 7:00 am.
cheers
Sara
a Macgrrl in an NT World
I'm here in Vancouver, BC, Canada. With the lovely Telus providing ADSL.
They do actually have a page where you are supposed to check how much bandwidth you have been using (sorry don't remember where, somewhere in the account setup/config) I've looked at it once in a while over the past two years I've had DSL, not once was it actually reporting anything. Over the past 6 months I got my self a little program taht monitors how much bandwidth I am actually using, and it's at least 5 gigs per week.
No letter yet.
A lot of people are saying speakeasy is great, and I've got a friend that's used them forever, and they have treated him well.
I've personally been using megapath (SDSL 1/1) for around 4 years now, and I've found that my experience matches the speakeasy folks. Megapath's tech support is astoundingly good (3 rings, phone's picked up, first line tech is working on the router checking things for you, etc, usually). It doesn't go down, and the speeds are what they say they are and don't get bogged down. No nasty usage letters.
I recognize I sound like a shill, but you can check dslreports.com and see their rating - they really are good.
It is more like they charge you a flat rate for 'typical residential' electrical usage. You then decide that since you have a flat rate, it would be a good idea to install a new aluminum smelter which uses obscene amounts of power. Naturally that would be unreasonable. A typical residential application does not need more than 5 or 10 gigabytes of downloads a month. Most people only use it for web surfing, video games, email, music streaming and downloading movie trailers. Anything more than 10 gigs has to be heavy duty P2P usage or a business of some kind.
IANAL but from what I learned in my contract law courses in college, if the TOS and AUP are considered a part of the contract, then it is a breach of contract for them to change them without due consideration to you. Consideration between parties is one of the things that makes a contract enforcable. For example if an ISP gave you a contract that said "We will give you 1.5mbps unlimited access service" and you both signed it, that isn't a contract since you offered no consideration to the ISP. The contract "We agree to give you X service, you agree to give us X money" is enforcable since each party provided consideration, service on there part and money on your part. Now for parties to change a contract, even if they both agree to the change, there must be additional consideration (when there is not, it is really abandonment of the old contract and creation of a new one.) So for the ISP to change the contract they must provide additional consideration (maybe an increase in you bandwidth cap, or a lower price) for it to be enforcable. Now that is if the TOS and AUP are considered part of the contract, if a court found they weren't then you are SOL. In summary a contract cannot say either party can change the contract at any time, and such a contract would be voidable by either party.
If the ISP gives you upload capacity, does it make a difference to them if it's saturated by server or client traffic? If not, why the no-server clauses?
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
At 1.5 mbps so frequently and yet aren't contributing back at even 256kbps? That's a real extreme imbalance. If anything, I always bitch about my upload and I wish they would shift the bandwidth allocation in it's favor a little.
Hell, make it dynamic! A SNMP settable string on the cable modem or something. Because shoddy upstream means I can't host a game server or web/ftp serve or anything effectively.
Plus it ruins bittorrent.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
The internet was designed to be a peer-to-peer place, and this sort of mentality plays into that idea.
IAAL and this is wrong. It's possible that their statement that they can modify the contract is not enforceable, but it's certainly not the case that you can modify it just because they say they can.
This is a real story from a real speakeasy customer, not a paid actor, YOU TOO can be one of the happy people who use our service, only $44.95 a month.
Use the BEST bittorrent client :)
;)
http://azureus.sourceforge.net/
Java based works on Win, Lin, and Mac OS X
enjoy
Pointing a wireless can to your buddies house is one thing, reselling to all your neighbors is completely different.
It may suck if you're one of the 50 or 100 people, but if you look at it abstractly, there's nothing else [than kicking out a few high-bandwidth users] an ISP can possibl[y] do.
That is absolutely not true.
They can configure their equipment so that, during usage peaks, the heavy user's connection is throttled down to a "fair share" of the currnet bandwidth usage.
(Note that I'm talking about an instintaneous throttling, not a daemon that reconfigures his modem on an hourly basis.)
If the uplink can handle, say, 45 mbps and 45 users are all transferring flat-out, he should get 1 mbps throughput - as should the other 44.
And it is the ISP's job - not the customer's - to configure their equipment so that this happens - and beat on their vendor (or find another) if the equipment can't do it.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Get a Better Bittorrent client
http://azureus.sourceforge.net/
Java based,
good CLI,
more info than you ever wanted to know,
limit uploads, downloads, queue, prioritize,
Stop AND Start Seeding based on need....
About the only thing it wont do is clean the screen after you watched the latest Celeb pron flick....
All you people get off, you're stealing my banwidth, and stop you whining!
Depends on where you are. For example, here in the suburbs of DC, you'll generally get offered a number of different plans, some of which are capped, others of which aren't. I'm on ulimited local calling. Inside the city, though, as with most large cities, they are likely to cap local calling...just in case you're actually a business or something.
Law is whatever is boldly asserted and plausibly maintained. -- Aaron Burr
I read most of the posts that respond to The Letter issue. IMO I think the word "unlimited" has been corrupted by the marketing departments of the ISPs. I read "unlimited" as I did during the glory days of dial-up ISP on a 14.4 modem. Unlimited then meant you could dial-in and leave the connection open without extra cost. In the strictest sense, even then "unlimited" referred to hours connected per month and because there are only a finite number of hours in a day and, by extension, days in a month, "unlimited" was false advertising. No one challenged it. The term is accepted to mean something it doesn't. really, "unlimited" never meant truly unlimited access.
if your looking to point a finger, blame the marketing/truth in advertising watchdogs that let this one by.
First you need a method for knowing how much throughput you need for your personal use. Then you need a method to find the total throughput you have used so far in the current billing period.
If the ISP will complain that you are exceeding their standards for throughput, they must give you a method for knowing how much throughput you have used in the current billing period so you can stay within their limits. If they will not provide this, they cannot ask you to monitor yourself.
The system:
1. Take total allowable throughput.
2. Subtract your average throughput and maybe a little extra for emergencies or for known extraordinary events, such as the imminent release of software you will want.
3. When using BitTorrent for your own use, leave it running until you get what you need. Keep it on a little longer if you know that the current files are in high demand, such as one extra day after the release of a new core.
4. Calculate how much extra throughput you have available without passing the limits.
5. Starting on your birth date (day of month), turn on your filesharing program for others to use. When the throughput reaches the number from step 4, turn it off.
6. Near the end of the month, turn it on to use any leftover throughput.
If everybody starts running it on their birth date, there should be a good distribution of people running the software for the first 28 days. The "use up what is left" will assist with the lower number of birthdays at the end of each month.
The only hole in this system is the first few days of the month, and that may be covered by people forgetting to turn the software off at the end of month. If you (accidentally) leave it on for the first 2 days of the month, then you should just have less throughput available at the end of the month.
I am assuming that your allowed throughput is enough to keep the software running for at least 3 days during your "assist others" phase. Even is you break the limit, it should not be by much, and you can tell your ISP you are trying to meet their standards. Hopefully there are enough people who do not have to worry about throughput issues to cover the low availability periods.
This system allows you to meet your needs while being a good filesharer without getting in trouble with your ISP. Maybe BitTorrent could include these recommendations so enough users would follow them to make them popular.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
i want to start a lawsuit against comcast and others, email me pimpgallant@comcast.net i have a lot of infomation about this
I understand your concerns as an ISP, but hear my argument as a customer. As a customer, I don't want to cause you to go out of business but I also want to be able to use a fair share of bandwidth. You're right that most customers want fast speed and low usage. But as a "high bandwidth user" myself, I find throughput capping and extra charges for overuse offensive.
However, I think a compromise is in order. I think that 10gb per month is WAY too low. That averages out to about 3 or 4 kilobytes per second at 100% connection saturation, which, by the way, I almost always have 100% saturation on my connection.
50gb per month is a more acceptable throughput limit. But even still, at maximum speeds on a cable connection I can transfer hundreds of gigs a month at 100% saturation.
The compromise I speak of is an opt-in speed capping for users who think they're going to use 50gb per month. At 50gb per month, your connection could be capped at 20kps and you will exactly reach 50gb per month at 100% saturation, give or take a gig.
Granted this system will not solve all problems, but I could easily live with 20kps cap if I was allowed to use it at 100% saturation with no questions asked. If it were applied to an adaptave bandwidth allocating program, perhaps my connection could start out at 20kps but as time goes on, if I do not use the bandwidth, my speed is gradually increased so that can always match 50gb per month each month. (Or perhaps never match it if the connection goes majorly unused.)
Under this compromise, power users get their bandwidth at acceptable levels without nazi-like fines for exceeding limits, and ISP still profits due to the fact that most users will never approach this limit.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
I had a anonymous-uploads feature turned on, and I noticed that some shady people started using it.
/dev/urandom into them.
But all I got were some weirdly named files (probably SHA1 hashes) a megabyte in size. They were using my FTP as a public drop box for their own freenet-like software.
The files didn't look like they had internal checksums, so I just put an equivalent amount of data from
Next time maybe they'll play nice.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I got my copy of Fedora via bittorrent and just want to say Thank You for keeping your client up!
Unused bandwidth is wasted bandwidth.
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
Bandwidth that they have to pay for is used only when I DL/UL elseware on the internet.
Now...about your bill. That 768/128 line is going to cost, oh...$300/month.
That remark is just inane. Companies could easily avoid oversubscribing by having a good rate structure.
For example, 1Gbyte of data transferred during peak hours might cost you $0.50 (or whatever it takes to avoid having oversubscription during peak hours), while 1Gbyte of data transferred at 4am might cost you nothing at all.
All of a sudden, all those "apt-get updates" and "bittorrent" sessions would move to 4am where they don't bother anybody and everybody could be happy.
Instead, the ISPs oversubscribe and then send out meaningless and annoying letters.
Dropping those who use more than 100x the median usage will not result in losing either a fixed number or percentage. It will eventually truncate the curve, however. If you draw the curve on paper, and cut the area under the curve to the X and Y axis, they want a shape that has the middle of its weight more than 1% from the Y axis.
I suspect typical residential bandwidth usage patterns follow a Poisson distribution shaped curve-- and that's probably what the ISP is expecting. It has a few bumps up top from the filesharers and Linux ISO loaders, no doubt... who are using far more throughput than the ISPs expect from a typical user. On a poisson curve, the chances of being 100x out from the mean are something like 1 in 2e158.
Of course, as available bandwidth increases, more applications will arise, and more people will want high bandwidth-- which is good for those who sell it. On the other hand, the more applications, the more throughput the individual people using the bandwidth will want-- which is bad.
What the companies who are concerned about this should (IMHO) do before putting these "stop or die" letters out is first add some info on everyone's bills-- to wit, the throughput of the average user on your plan, and your (billing cycle)ly throughput. Then create modified plans-- you get up to Foo GB per (billing cycle) at high-speed, and past that you get throttled to 56K modem speeds. You want more than Foo? Well, you can get a 2 Foo limit plan for an extra $20 per month, 3 Foo for an extra $50... or whatever.
Yes, it's similar to a telco phone type plan. Just make it clear where the damn limits are, let people see measurement of what they are doing... and don't EVER require anyone to drop below 56kbps unlimited throughput if you want to keep your business.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
"The number of Americans connecting to the Internet over broadband is growing at a rapid rate , according to a new Nielsen/NetRatings report"
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
ISPs are concerned with good response times during peak usage and otherwise have excess capacity.
The solution? Introduce peak/off-peak plans. You get 5Gbytes of peak-time usage per month included in your basic fees, you pay $0.50 for each additional Gbyte during peak time (or whatever it takes to get the traffic down to where everybody is happy), and you get unlimited (or much cheaper) off-peak usage.
That way, people who have a choice will do their Windows/Debian/OSX/RedHat updates late at night, download and exchange video and images at that time, and people can browse the web responsively when they are awake.
Just about any industry other than ISPs has figured this out. Maybe ISPs should move into the 21st century and start using some modern business practices?
I whole-heartedly recommend Speakeasy. I've had them for, oh, six months now, after burning through the following broadband providers:
- Prestige Cable (12/99), later purchased by
- Adelphia Cable (6/2000?), and then I moved and got
- RoadRunner (2/2001), which then got switched (in my area) to
- Cox (fuckit, who cares?), which sucked, and so I got
- Verizon DSL (1/2002), and then my house burned down, so I was in a rental house with
- Verizon DSL again (5/2003), which was awful
I ordered Speakeasy on their website. I'd run a promotion with them before and I quite appreciate their gaming servers, so I was happy to give them my business. It took exactly four days to get the DSL kit to me from date of order, and when I hooked it up that night, everything worked.
I've experienced exactly *zero* service outages. I'd love to say they were helpful, but I've never needed it. They called me a week or so after install to ask how everything was going and give me a customer satisfaction survey. I gave them the highest marks on everything and apologized that I couldn't offer any criticism from which they could improve.
I pay $80 a month and I have 1.5mbits down and 768kbits up, along with a bunch of email addresses, 2 static IPs, some web space, included dialup, etc. They have cheaper plans if you're interested.
I can't say enough good things about them. I'm extremely satisfied.
(I'm in Fairfax, VA, for those interested. Service quality here is awesome.)
Every once in a while I like to masturbate a new word into my vocabulary, even if I don't know what it means.
Many ISPs specificially ban the use of servers. If yours does this, then you are definitely violating the acceptable use policy. For a broadband user, I think a 1 GB/day average should be sufficient, averaged over the course of a month. Of course, that's just my opinion--then again, I could be wrong.
"Care about people's opinions and you will be their prisoner." ~~Tao Te Ching~~
I use Speakeasy internet (http://speakeasy.net). They don't send such threatening letters to my knowledge, as I use most of my piddly 384 SDSL all of the time playing SOCOM (sick I know) or for listening to my home music collection while at work, and I have never received such a notice.
Speakeasy is notably a user friendly provider. They seem to understand that I lease the line with the understanding that I get 384 (or whatever that actually comes out to in the real world) kilobits per *second* of bandwidth up and down..
That does not mean 64kilobits some of the time, with spikes every now and again (as long as it's *reasonable* whatever reasonable happens to be today).
If the providers of the world want to limit bandwidth, they need to do it up-front, in big/bold/obvious lettering, and with clear intention so that the client knows exactly what they are buying (so they can't complain)..
ISP's advertise "always on" XXXkbps-up/down. Not, "sometimes on" XXXkbps sometimes less-kbps most of the time.
So if you can't stand PPPOE, and you hate the back-biting policies ISP's are pouring out their rear quarters, try an ISP like Speakeasy.
I don't mean to plug any particular company, I just don't know of anyone else who is like them, and I'd like to see more people have a positive experience, instead of getting gouged by SBC, Yahoo, AOL and friends...
The best deal you can get from these bandits is a 256k cap (both directions) with a limit of 2gigs/mo for $69nzd/mo. Anything above that is $.20nzd/meg (yes, that's $200nzd/gig). Needless to say, this has been rather a shock for me since our move from the SFBA (where for $80/mo I had 5 statics, 1.5/256k, and unlimited bandwidth from PacBell/SBC).
Ironically, I've found that even with the expensive bandwidth, it's still cheaper for me to exceed my monthly usage when using VOIP in lieu of PSTN. Since NZ Telecom is a monopoly, they charge like one. And I found that it's cheaper (bandwidth and dollar conversion rates factored in) to use Vonage and make an "international" call than to use my landline. The only exception is for free local calls. So, if I want to call Auckland (I'm in Wellington) I save about $.30nzd/minute by using VOIP and calling "internationally" from the States, even if I exceed my miserly 2gig cap. I realize there are also prepaid calling cards which can cut this cost even more, but the convenience factor of Vonage is worth the extra cost IMHO.
ehintz
I live in western Canada, and my provider is Shaw Cable. I've recieved nasty letters, emails and phone calls from my ISP about my bandwidth usage before. In the past, their policy was that 14GB down and 2GB up per month was considered reasonable use, which I thought was a little low. Since then, they've changed their outlook on bandwidth usage and now allow 30GB up/down combined, which I believe is pretty reasonable. Since they raised their limitations, I have not had any complaints.
I used Mindspring (before Earthlink ruined the name) for 5 years. I signed up for their unlimited $20 dealie. I setup Red Hat 6.2 (yeah, 6.2) to connect constantly, and when disconnected, pppd would respawn and redial automatically. After a few years, I got regular emails from Mindspring saying each month for over a year, I'm connected for an average of like 23.9 hours each day (.1 for redialing because the kicked me off every 24 hours out of policy), and that it's against their policy to run a server over the connection which I wasn't .... much. That was 28.8k dialup too, it was humorous and tragic at the same time.
I got broadband to USE bandwidth. Any company that wants to cap it isnt truely a broadband provider. Go with someone else if you cant go with someone else than move to an area where you can.
Cox San Diego has been limiting us to 1gig daily. I believe it's up AND down traffic which sucks ass. 1.5gig down would be more reasonable so I can download 3 isos
This guy is way out there
...how long would it be before you unwittingly ended up with a big stash of K1DD13_Pr0n on your machine?
And how much longer would it take for the authorities to find it, confiscate your equipment and charge you with posession of the nasty stuff?
Lotta reasons to button down that access to your machines...
The subscriber has "unlimited" connect time at 0 Kbps, as opposed to dial-up plans that bill for any time connected over 150 hours per month. This does not imply that the subscriber has "unlimited" data transfer.
I have road runner in Austin and San Antonio.
2-3 Mbits/s down 368 kbit/s up
we probably use a good amount of it, I have never seen the connection speed bog down, there have been technical problems where service sucked for a day because of maintenance, and when it was up you would get like dial up speeds
However their use policy is sooo out dated. They have all these restrictions on running "servers". Even if it s just apersonal website, you cant do it, and they say this because it will use too much bandwidth, when clearly the p2p apps are the ones that suck up the bandwidth.
I have always run my webserver on port 8080 and they never noticed. But a friend of mine ran his on 80 and within days they canceld his service, he had to call to get it reinstated.
Outdated policy if you ask me... and selectivly enforced.
Sure, everyone would love to get massive bandwidth for $10 a month.
The question is, are you (the ISP) being charged by the GB used or a flat rate per Mb/s?
If it is by the GB, then this cost is easily passed on to the customer. In fact, that cost SHOULD be in the customer's contract.
If it is a flat rate, then can you throttle their bandwidth as their usage climbs? Just break the bandwidth down into 5 or 10 segments.
1 = people who download/upload less than 1 MB per month. These people get 1 Mb/s to themselves and they should NEVER see any delays because they aren't moving that much to begin with.
2 = over 1 MB but less than 5 MB. These people get 1 Mb/s to themselves. The might see more slowdowns than group 1, but not much.
And so on and so forth until you get to group #10 and they are downloading/uploading 50GB or whatever a month. These people get 1 Mb/s and they have to share it with all the other hogs.
Now, when the lower groups are not utilizing their bandwidth (late at night?), the higher groups can share that. But when someone in a lower group comes on, they get the bandwidth allocated to them.
Sure, the numbers would have to be worked out a bit, but the logic sounds good.
You provide service for the largest portion of your customers while allowing the higher bandwidth hogs to use the leftovers when they are available.
New customers get put in the lowest group and, as their usage grows, they move up the groups.
Is that possible?
...where all the file downloads are legal and everyone's bandwidth usage is below average.
Comcast decided to stop providing their customers (in my area anyway) with unlimited Usenet about 4 months ago. They directed their customers to a deal they had set up with Giganews that allowed for a 1GB/mo. download (including headers). I use up about 1/4 of the allotment for headers alone...Yes, I'm addicted to Anime.
*sigh*
Looks like I'll have to get a *real* news service soon.
Telstra BigPond, and later OptusNet Cable, both pulled this stunt in Australia a couple of years ago. They had nothing in their AUP related to bandwidth usage, and randomly started kicking people off the ISP.
Bigpond were forced to introduce a 3Gb cap while I think the people they kicked off were allowed to rejoin the service thanks to the AUP not actually prohibiting their actions.
OptusNet maintained their unlimited state for a while and then introduced the "no more than 10 times the 'average'" rule, where 'average' meant the mean usage of the middle 80% range of users. That was effectively a 24Gb/month cap.
Eventually OptusNet realised that introducing this 'NetStats' plan actually encouraged people to use more, mostly out of spite for the ISP, and switched down to 3Gb, 6Gb and 15Gb plans.
Of course people on these plans still use every last drop of their allowance, just to spite the ISP. Hell, I know I had 1Gb left at the end of November, and I chewed that up sucking down Linux ISOs I would never actually install.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Here's what my ISP has to say about my service
n e_faqs.asp#pipeline_11
Will my browse time be monitored or restricted?
No, your browse time will not be monitored or restricted.
http://www.charter.com/service/faqs/charterpipeli
Dropping those who use more than 100x the median usage will not result in losing either a fixed number or percentage. It will eventually truncate the curve, however.
And when you truncate the curve, you lower the median. The median is the middle value in a distribution, above and below which lie an equal number of values. Take some of the values away at the top side and the median shifts down.
I suspect typical residential bandwidth usage patterns follow a Poisson distribution shaped curve-- and that's probably what the ISP is expecting.
I would not expect that at all. There are sizeable groups of people at each end of the curve. There are many customers who only use their broadband to check e-mail every other day. What's that use? Maybe a meg per month? At the other end, you will have lots of users who do filesharing, ISO downloads, Bittorrent, etc. I think that you would find that the usage curve would have significant up-ticks at each end.
Of course, as available bandwidth increases, more applications will arise, and more people will want high bandwidth-- which is good for those who sell it. On the other hand, the more applications, the more throughput the individual people using the bandwidth will want-- which is bad.
Right. Broadband companies want to entice people with streaming video and "unlimited" Internet access then punish those who do anything more than moderate surfing.
This story is pointing out something that I've been saying for months: BitTorrent is going to break the usage models at many ISPs, who structure everything for a much higher download than upload rate. Look at what's happening in the gaming industry. You don't download 50MB patches and demos from the game companies' servers. You download them from various subscription and ad-supported servers. What happens when those companies start using BitTorrent links? What happens when the movie studios go to a BitTorrent style of P2P downloading of movie trailers? Broadband companies are not going to be able to keep customers if they tell them that they can't download the movie trailer that they want, can't get the patch for their game, because of something as obscure as what protocol is used for the download.
The internet was designed to be a peer-to-peer place, and this sort of mentality plays into that idea.
.com because it wasn't meant for commercial use.
Careful, if we were to try to turn back the clock to the way the Internet was designed to be, you might end up dropping all of
... the point is that it costs them time and effort to implement that kind of rate structure. Heavy downloaders cost them money. If they can make life shitty for heavy downloaders, they will. Heavy downloaders are not some kind of well-funded constituency that's going to rise up and knock heads. We're a minority, and the ISPs can and will piss on us as much as they possibly can.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Sounds like one hell of a good company (or at least more enlightened that the clueless marketroid ISPs many people have to deal with!)
As such, could you please post this company's name and/or URL?
For that matter, will anyone with really positive feedback about their ISP please post it, so we can all "vote with our feet"?
After all, one of the great beauties of the free market system is that companies that provide what lots of people really want, can become richly rewarded and grow... while making many customers happy at the same time...
Part of the Second American Revolution!
and I've got comcast. I'm probably the only person on this cable "ring" though because I live in a trailer park. I can often get upwards of 450KB/s, too. No complaints here.
Man, that's awesome.
Kinda reminds me of the way some people got rid of their trash during the New York City garbage strike in the seventies... he'd bag it up, then put it in a gift-wrapped box, and leave it on a doorstop somewhere. It would, invariably, vanish very quickly.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I'm running DSL with SBC Yahoo and I've noticed that they tend to limit my bandwidth on a particular port after a couple days of intense usage. So after getting 100+ kbps, it will drop to about 5 kbps. If I change the port on the application, I get my regular fast speeds again (for a while...)
Unfortunately, connecting|point is local to a small town in Northeast Nebraska. If you're from there, I highly recommend them, but I doubt too many Slashdotters are local to my home.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Maybe I am just taking this way to logicaly.
If you pay for a 512/128 connection are you not allowed to use that to its full extent.
I am currently still on dialup, would my isp with in there rights to tell me to download at 3kb/s instead of 5.
I think they just don't want to cut into there profit margins by being cheap and not buying a larger pipe.
Cheers.
That's pretty upsetting to hear about. Myself I'm running a web site (trace jkansoft.mine.nu) on my Comcast cable line and I haven't received any threatening letters yet. One of my friends' friends however has MSN DSL and apparently their approach to limiting bandwidth usage is to block all public server ports in the direction of the end user. My friend has Ricochet wireless and they just have a bandwidth limit where you get kicked offline for exceeding it. Especially with the new administration in the government some of these ISPs are getting way too much power to decide how you can use your bandwidth. From my point of view it's absolutely valid to run a web server from your home line if the bandwidth has been allocated to you anyway. Otherwise they're simply lying to you as a consumer.
Maybe try BroadbandReports? Somewhat poor signal-to-noise ratio, but best place to find lots of user feedback in my experience.
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. -- Francis Bacon
-1, Flamebait? Nice moderating, retards.
I have no problems getting access to the internet. I just do it at work or when it is convenient. I use this new net called sneaker net. Its so fast, my bandwidth is about 10 times what I was getting through comcast cable, and doesn't have any spam or legal issues or fees. In fact the feds don't even know how to snoop it, yet. :)
I implore you to do without for as long as you can, if you think a boycott of these ISPs will give 'em a kick in their complacency, like I do.
They don't really want my money. I mean, just look at how they're acting. If they want my money they'll uncap uploads and stop bitching about anything related to bandwidth usage, the PATRIOT Act, DMCA, etc. etc. etc.
#!/bin/bash
while(1)
do
feltch http://goatse.cx &
done
Un-news
if you want "No More Hiroshimas" then I say "You First. No More Pearl Harbors."
It is up to the ISP to determine what groups he wants.
You don't like it, you find another ISP or YOU USE LESS BANDWIDTH!
hahahahahahaaha
I really dread the thought of moving home to Canada one day when I read these kinds of things. Here in Tokyo, Japan I have ADSL to my home. It is 8MBdown/1MBup. I am about to upgrade to 45MBdown/3MBup for oh, about $35-40/month. It also has IP phone services with it so I can call overseas to the US/Canada for EXTREMELY low rates. 100MB FTTH is also quite common in most areas and many apartment complexes come with it standard with the apartment/home. There are no qualms about download caps or bandwidth caps here. Japan (and Korea no doubt) is internet heaven. I understand the nature of it though, both Japan and Korea are smaller countries and thus much easier to wire than say North America. Also, is the fact that North America's infrastructure is quite archaic compared to Japan's all digital switching. This allows for much more bandwidth to be handled by the internet infrastructure here. North America, however, really better get on the bandwagon FAST as they are really falling behind.
I'd sign up for Speakeasy if it wasn't relatively expensive compared to other ISPs. I can get 1500/128Kbps DSL with a static IP (and sometimes with faster upload speeds) for $50/month. Speakeasy wants $60 or more for a similar package.
Your processor is so fast that you're running into the effects of relativity. If you underclock your CPU, the problem should go away (or at least lessen).
...like Telenor, one of the big providers here in Norway. They have download caps, and when you pass those you get throttled down to 64/64k (ISDN speed). You can keep it running 24/7 if you like, and get more than your quota, but then you will have slow access for most of the month. On the other hand, if you don't hit your cap you have the full peak speed. And if you need a one-time bump they sell that.
They're very up front about it, so I think that's a nice alternative. The unlimited services here *are* unlimited (they'd get slapped pretty bad here if they weren't). I got an unlimited account, and it's always busy. Pricy though.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I've recently discovered, to my cost, something very similar to what's been described here. Despite paying 30/month for a 512kb/s connection, it would appear that I'm not allowed to use this connection as much as I would like during a month. Tiscali believe that I've been using it excessively, and have taken the rather drastic step of slashing my connection speed to just under 100kb/s. Surely this isn't on? If I'm paying for what is advertised as 512kb/s, shouldn't I have also been told in those adverts that I can't use much during the month?
And tomorrow the stock exchange will be the human race
I know Speakeasy rules, but I would be shocked if they didn't also oversell their bandwidth.
They are monopolistic, price-gouging wankers, and since the NZ government backed down and ran for the hills on local loop unbundling, the majority of New Zealanders will continue to be grossly overcharged for internet usage, phone service, and anything else Telecom can manage to gain a monopoly over.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
..when you truncate the curve, you lower the median. The median is the middle value in a distribution, above and below which lie an equal number of values. Take some of the values away at the top side and the median shifts down.
.1-1.0 range. Kill everyone more than 100 times that-- well, that might be all of 11 people. Recompute, and your median is now at about user #700... and your median value is STILL in the 0.1-1.0 range (essentially unchanged), and all remaining users are under the limit of 100x the median.
True, it shifts down. However, it will not shift down indefinitely, Xeno, if you base on distance relative to the median value (IE, "drop everyone who uses more than 100x the median user"), instead of absolute rank ("drop the highest 1% of users"), and if it is a typical homogenous statistical distribution (IE, tending to taper off at the extremes).
Suppose (pulling numbers out of my ass, as my engineering professor was wont to do) you have:
300 users who use under 0.1GB/day,
1000 users who use 0.1-1.0 GB/day,
100 who use 1-10 GB/Day,
10 who use 10-100 GB/day, and
1 who uses over 100 GB/day (due to a bad porn habit).
1411 users, Your initial median is at user #706, who is still in the
Throwing out those vastly far from the median will have a larger effect on the mean than the median.
I would not expect that at all. There are sizeable groups of people at each end of the curve. There are many customers who only use their broadband to check e-mail every other day. What's that use? Maybe a meg per month? At the other end, you will have lots of users who do filesharing, ISO downloads, Bittorrent, etc. I think that you would find that the usage curve would have significant up-ticks at each end.
Somewhat true. So there's three groups: people with more money than patience (and/or brains) at the low end, who delight the ISPs with a free ride; the "normal" users; and the ISO grade crowd, who cost the ISPs money. I'd bet each of those follows it's own Poisson curve, with a different average value. (As I recall from Statistics 101, Statistical distributions usually follow either a linear, Poisson, Gaussian, binomial, or occaisionally a chi-square curve; Poisson tends to be used when there is a lower limit, but no upper. A Binomial might be a better fit, but there's not much shape difference for first passes.) I also suspect that the low group is quite small compared to the middle (based on my experience at work, where most low-demand users I support at my job haven't sprung for home high-speed yet).
So, yeah, there's a bit of a lump at the top-- that's what the ISPs have noticed. And it's those people who the ISPs think should move to a premium level service, and who I'm throwing out from the normal set as "bad data". =)
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
So the biggest bandwidth users always get the smallest allotment of bandwidth, and therefore generate lots of extra network traffic with ping requests?
Doesn't sound like a good idea to me. Wouldn't it be a better idea to prioritize packets based on location, rather than just cutting the bandwidth back?
That way, when no one else is using the huge connection, the bandwidth hogs can have it, but as soon as someone else needs it, they get it.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
here in Sao Paulo, brazil, Telefonica (almost as loved here as AT&T when it was a huge monopoly) ported every user to the new version (new contract) of their adsl product.
Now they will start charging R$0,10 (about U$0.0333..) for every single Mb that exceeds 1.000Mb (not even 1Gb) per month.
I did the math, and using the same as i use today, i would be spending R$5.000,00 (US$1,694.00) per month
As you can guess. I hold the old version of the contract and they will take it only from my cold, dead fingers.
Do they count the constant hacker and worm traffic that my firewall blocked from Comcast Cable (when I had it) in the totals?
Is there an easy way I can monitor and record my monthly usage? I have a Debian Linux machine acting as a NAT firewall on my cable modem ... What tool is best to do this? I would need to measure all traffic through the cable modem, since I do some private web/ftp hosting on this box as well as using it as an Internet gateway for my home LAN.
After a quick call to their tech support line, the guy said that the following would flag you as excessive for a residential downloader. 8 gbytes downloads over 20 hours and/or downloading enough to cause problems for other people in the service area. He also said that it shouldn't raise a flag if it's something like 3 gbytes/day for a month. Also, they mostly instituted these policies as a way to make sure that no one person was hogging enough of the pipe to make other cable users connections slow.
"For years, I struggled with reality... but I'm happy to say I finally won out over it." -- Elwood P. Dowd
first i fell off my chair then i started crying ...
Back when I had dialup via a local ISP called Wirefire they would automatically disconnect any dial-up user who had been connected for 4 consecutive hours no matter how active the connection, or what you were doing at the time, every 4 hours I got to hear a little *click* from my modem telling me I'd just been kicked off again.
I can remember the nightmare days of having to check the time on my connection before playing any games to be sure I wasn't getting near the 4 hour limit before getting into any in-depth gaming. It was not fun. If I was approaching 4 hours I'd have to disconnect/reconnect before I could be assured a contiguous game.
Question everything
I installed GNUcelus a file sharing program, and then they shut off my DSL access, claiming virus-like activity. I scanned for viruses and none were found. So I had to tweak the max bandwidth of the GNUcelus program when they switched access back on to a much lower level. They never complained again.
I was promised unlimited bandwidth as well. But going over that limit was called "Virus like activity" and my access was shut off.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
" One place that does this is here. [mytelus.com] It sucks but then again I don't do business with them."
I do and have since adsl started except for awhile when I was with radiant before they went down hill. I am generally happy with them. There have been months when I'm sure I was over their cap, but not a peep from them. I wonder if it's there so they can go after someone if they want/need to without that person coming back with 'but you said it was unlimited'. Instead they have something concrete that they can point to.
a freind of mine was told that the DSL ISP firewall software will prevent viruses and trojans from infecting his system and that his AV software was no longer required and could be uninstalled. So he did.
Then he called me, his system couldn't work and would not connect to the Internet. Installed AV software and found like 30 viruses and trojans. Yes, software firewall let them through.
I used to work for a DSL help support line. Some users had their DSL top speeds capped for a reason, we had to tell them that they had poor line quality and thus have lower bandwidth. The real reason was that they exceeded the average bandwidth usage and had their line capped to a lower rate. No such thing as unlimited access.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
I live in Ontario and I am now an ex-Rogers cable subscriber has has gone through the same crap as you describe. It started a few months ago when I got an automated voice call telling me that my usage is 100x above the average user and that I make up the top 1% of users (or something like that). Then my service was cut off the next day! I called and had to wait to listen to a 2nd level rep explain to me why this is happening. I agreed to lower my consumption and got my connection back. I went back to my previous usage (ie. stopping torrents) and had resumed the same level of usage that I had been doing in the past 3-5 years.
The following month I get another automated phone call telling me I am exceeding my bandwidth. I then call customer service, thinking that there has been a mistake. No mistake, I was flagged as not reducing my service "enough" and therefore I was being banned for 7 days, with the next penalty being a life banishment from the service. Needless to say, I was somewhat pissed since I had made an extremely conscious effort to use the system the way I had been for years and to ease off the extra transfers. Talking to the rep got me nowhere. This is something like the conversation that I had:
me: So it has been determined that I am using too much bandwidth, how much is too much?
rep: You will need to reduce your usage, you are in the top 1% (or whatever) and using it 100x more than the average user.
me: Ok, I've reduced my transfers, how much more do I need to reduce it by?
rep: I can't tell you that. There is no exact number, you will just have to reduce your usage.
me: So you can't tell me what an exceptable level is?
rep: You just need to reduce you usage.
me: Can you tell me how much I have done last month and the month before that?
rep: No, that is confidential information.
me: You must have logs or records detailing all my usage or else I wouldn't have been flagged.
rep: I do not have that information with me Sir. It is the [security?] department that has determined that your usage exceeds normal usage.
me: Can I get the logs from them?
no: No, that is private, only for our use.
me: Then do you have any sort of system where I can check my usage?
rep: No.
me: So you are telling me to reduce my usage but you can't tell me how much or what I have been doing in the past? Do I just keep reducing it until your phone calls stop?
rep: You will need to just reduce your usage.
me: Well I can't wait around every month hoping you are going to just randomly cancel my service.
rep: Sir, we do not pick on our users.
me: So you are telling me to reduce but you can't tell me any numbers. This is useless. Give me your cancellation department.
(and that is it)
So... after that inane conversation, I researched a few things....
1) The cable company(s) have recently installed software to monitor usage. They are trying to pinpoint bottlenecks in their service.
2) One rational of determining a bottleneck is by user complaints in the networks nodes. Any complaints and these nodes are scrutinized.
3) There are sone "troublespots" in Rogers cable network and these are being actively research to reduce complaints and problems. Whether or not I was the only one on my node, or there were 10 others like me doesnt matter. It seems as if they are trying to reduce/eliminate the highest users.
4) The reason they can't give figures is that it is all relative. If only you and a handful of people are in a node, your bandwidth will be endless. If you are in a high-use neighborhood, your access is limited. This is what I found out after I moved areas.
5) Since the cable nodes work as pools, it appears that they are at the mercy of someone taking one too many cups of water(bandwidth) from it. Not sure why they don't cap the modems (more than they do).
6) I have also heard rumours that Rogers has be
The only way this issue will ever be solved is when the ISP's are forced to put into writing what the actual limits are, until then you can bitch all you want to and it won't mean a thing. So get busy writing or calling your congressmen or electing one that will do something about it.
Explain to them that your cable company is imposing limits and threatening to terminate service without disclosing such limits. Be sure to have names of employees and managers from the cable company and better yet a written explanation from said company saying why they cannot give you such information.
Present it to the PUC and they should sort it out for you.
Your taxes at work.
My netgear router gives stats, but all I have is uptime [719 hours, right now] and packets sent and received [10's of millions] but no indication of total bytes...
Hmmm... a karmaphobic. Never seen one of those before. Or are you just karma-whoring with this most recent post? =)
True story.
It sounds as logical as saying: "if everyone use his car and goes to the same bridge, the bridge will be jam packed." Common sense!
But, NEWS FLASH: On a cable, you're plugged on the same cable than your neighbors. For the DSL, you are ALONE on your cable thats wiring you to the DSL building (whatever its called).
But, you're right. On top of that (whatever connnection type), the ISP cannot provide more bandwidth than it got.
"...a generation of kids has grown up thinking Trance is the shittiest music since country and western." - Paul van Dyk
I find it interesting that the U.S., after so many years, still has such an expensive price for good ADSL, and now seems to be getting worse and worse with quality. Especially not delivering what they advertise.
I understand that it is much cheaper to lay cable in Japan (especially Tokyo) where each mile of cable will get you way more households connected. So, I won't bother even comparing this.
However, the quality over here in Japan is much, much better, and this includes the advertising. In the larger Tokyo area, most ADSL providers have a 1.5Mbps, 8Mbps, 12Mbps, 26Mbps, and now a 45Mbps plan.
These are all your maximum theoretical download speeds. Now note that they do NOT cap the connection, so your physical location in relation to the telco, along with your fellow users hogging the bandwidth, is what will slow it down. Not caps. Also, the cost difference for the various services is usually within a dollar or two per month between each speed.
In reality, they suggest a specific speed based on your distance from the telco. For example, if you are relatively far away, the 1.5Mbps plan has a better chance of providing a higher real-life bandwidth than the 8Mbps plan, and so on so forth.
In advertisement, it is common practice to say the bandwidth is the maximum theoretical speed, and the YMMV (they call it the "best effort" model) and may be way, way slow. So, they're honest. But better yet, I've found that in almost all cases, the speed is fantastically good. I get close to the maximum speed I expect to get.
And now transfer limits. There are none. Unlimited. I haven't heard of a household-level ADSL service which had a limit. And they don't hound people that over use the "unilimited" bandwidth policy. I know, because I have had a server running on my ADSL line (with DynDNS) 24/7 for the last 18 months. (No down time! Hurray, OpenBSD!!) I've been using it to transfer some pretty seriously large chunks of data (full throttle maxed out up AND down for 80 hours straight) and no complaints.
So what we have over here is service that exceeds the advertisement, and I must say I'm a really happy camper. I get this feeling that most people in the U.S. would be willing to dish out more money for their ADSL service if they could actually get the quality they were promissed.
Hey, what was the point of capping the DSL service last summer for some month and then removing that cap? That was a weird move from bell (videotron too, i think)
"...a generation of kids has grown up thinking Trance is the shittiest music since country and western." - Paul van Dyk
These same lemmings (non-savvy people?) are the ones that leave kazaa running 24x7 and do end up using a hell of a lot more than a few emails and some surfing worth of bandwidth only because they're too stupid to uncheck the "start with windows" option and/or realize it's running in the system tray.
Median - the middle value of a set (i.e. of a set of 5 its the third).
Average - the mean value of a set (add em all and divide by how many).
Homer: All you can eat - hah!
Hutz: Mr. Simpson, this is the most blatant case of fraudulent advertising since my case against the film, Neverending Story.
It shouldn't be too hard to keep a daily count of bits downloaded/uploaded.
If they start losing bandwidth in the middle of a download, so what? That just means that their download will take longer. If it is in the middle of a game, then that's the way it is. If they don't like it, they can go to a different ISP. But if you don't throttle the bandwidth, they will ALWAYS have a sucky connection for their game. This way, after a few days of playing, you'll know what bandwidth to expect.
Why would they generate lots of ping requests?
If you prioritize packets based on location, how does that help the bandwidth issue? If you have a T-1 (1.54Mb/s) and another server on your high priority list has a T-3 (45Mb/s), your T-1 will still be flooded from a download to that high priority site.
The only way I see is to limit the bandwidth available to people based upon their usage of it.
Anything more than 3gb :-)
The first month I got the RoadRunner service I downloaded about 20 gigs (Dec of 2002). This past New Year's Eve I downloaded 12 gigs in 12 hours. As of yet I haven't got a notice about too much bandwidth used. I asked when I first signed up how much "unlimited" meant. The woman said there was no hard value but there was indeed some threshold and that I'd be warned if I hit it. I guess I know that I can at least do 20 gigs in a month and be okay. I've done it twice so far in the past 12 months of having the service.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
Umm, has this phrase ever been uttered in your (conscious) presence:
You Get What You Pay For.
res ipso loquitor
QED
In other news, astrophysicists have announced that they now know what all that dark matter is: it's stupidity.
The benefit is here: Q: Can I run my own servers?
A: Yes, unlike HSE and Rogers, you're free to run servers. We do not block any ports or IP protocols. We may temporarily block or redirect ports for network performance or security reasons. We STRONGLY advise against running servers on Windows unless you consider yourself an expert on Windows security.
Basically, power users have to make a decision. They can stick with the "unlimited" providers, but they'll be restricted from running servers, ports may be blocked, and NAT may or may not be allowed. Or, they can pay for the bandwidth they use. If an ISP is charging by the gig, why wouldn't they encourage servers? They're making money from it!
You download a 60 minute mpg, watch 5 minutes of it... then download a different one tomorrow and watch 5 minutes of that...
Just keep watching the same one starting in 5 min increments till you reach the end. This way you'll feel like you're in a relationship and the bandwidth cops won't be after you.
Ecce Europa - Web Design for Business
The only thing allowing evil corporations to control speech is the power granted to property holders by the state. If the state is not permitted to abridge free speech, then the state is not permitted to contract with a monopoly medium whose express policy is to abridge free speech.
Their network quality is better than anything I've used except PacBell's.... when I was on PacBell DSL, it was very very low latency and really great. But I was one of the very first customers of PB when they lowered the price, and I heard horror stories about the later connections. Mine was always super, although the slow upload bugged me.
My biggest complaint with Speakeasy was that they had relatively high latency -- never packet loss, but much higher latency than I used to get with PacBell. They've been doing some major upgrades to their backbones, however, and over the last few months my average pings have dropped by half.... right this second, I have several hundred Call of Duty servers that are 50ms or under from me. (I don't have a filter set up for an exact count, sorry.)
I've troubleshot dozens of home connections over the last few years, and I can tell you with great assurance that if you want the best possible network connection for a reasonable price, Speakeasy is the way to go. Liberal AUP, awesome network, great support.... just an excellent, excellent company to deal with. And they like Linux!
I am not kidding. If you are using substantially less than the average, you are also part of this problem (though your ISP may love you). At least try to increase your usage to closer to average, or even slightly above average. If everyone did that, then the average would move up, and everyone wins.
Acceptable bandwidth usage is like hugz and luv: the more you use, the more everyone has.
This was actually from one of the Canada's major broadband company. Shaw recommends 5GB Download 1GB Upload and they "ignore" you until 15GB Download 5GB Upload They call more often for uploading then download, since they don't allow servers to be run
I'm about to sign up for Cox internet and TV since they're the only one available in my neighborhood, plus their bandwidth speed is double the other services in the area, so I found this interesting, though when I went to their site to check on their AUP it doesn't seem to seem to support your figures at all.
For their "Preferred" (normal) service (3Mb/s down, 256kb/s up) the monthly bandwidth limits are 30GB/s down and 7.5GB/s up.
I get 92.6kb/s (11.6kB/s) average download rate over the month. Almost 4x the figure you're claiming.
Now, back when I was on the college network this was about what I pulled down on eDonkey with it running 24/7 (so after including other bandwith I would've been over). Now that I've broken that addiction, I don't really think these limits would be much of an issue for me. Plus, I doubt I'd even get good enough speeds on it over cable to keep up the same downloading I was doing back then.
If you still seem to feel that this service isn't enough for you, check on their Premier package. It's pretty expensive, but you get 4Mb/s down 384kb/s up and 50GB/month down and 12.5GB/month up.
YEs, but as I pointed out in another thread here, if everyone is so paranoid and timid that they drastically reduce their bandwidth usage, then the AVERAGE does down, and then people who were previously average end up above average and targetted by the ISP. Therefore, if at all possible, always try to use AT LEAST as much bandwidth as the average user, if not slightly more. They can't cut off 50% of users, or even 40% of users. In fact, you could probably be in the top 10% without getting complaints. Let's be conservative though, and choose to use only enough bandwidth to be in the 75% (i.e. top 25%) Imagine if everyone did this. If everyone tried to do this, the average bandwidth usage would gradually increase, making it harder for the ISP to extort and terrorize power users. If the upward drift happens gradually, technology would hopefully keep up, and we would gradually get faster and faster bandwidth. Isn't that what progress should be?
If, instead, people reacted by cutting down on bandwidth and uploads, then the average might DECREASE. Then, the ISP could boot off the biggest users, reduce their infrastructure investment, hoping instead to make money off of the low-power users. After the pool of clueless low-power users is fully tapped, and with no infrastructure investment, the only further avenue for squeezing out more profits would be to reduce expenses even further by setting off another round of kicking off intensive users. With each successive wave of account terminations, the average usage would decrease, thereby decreasing the expense per revenue stream. There is a clear financial incentive for this scenario, which would ultimately lead to stagnation.
So, IF YOU ARE USING LESS THAN THE AVERAGE BANDWIDTH, then THIS IS YOUR FAULT.
It may sound like I'm joking, but I'm dead serious.
If you are using less than the average bandwidth, you are actually doing everyone a huge disfavour. Instead, you should be everyone a huge favour (including the industry, and hardware makers) by using MORE bandwidth. Share some torrents. Seed some even. Let it run for a few days a month. Try to be at least in the 60% percentile in terms bandwidth use.
In the long run, everyone will benefit.
Encourage technological progress! Use more bandwidth! (That is, you're not already in the top 5%. If you are already in the top 5%, then maybe cut down a bit, or just be careful and hold steady. Some day, if everyone else is as altruistic as you are (i.e. download and upload as much stuff) the average will move up, and you will no longer be the top 5%, at which point you could increase your usage accordingly.
It's easy to be an altruist. Get kazaa. Or edonkey. Or go to suprnova. Share some linux distros. It's fun, and it will make you feel warm fuzzies inside knowing you're helping the internet grow.
I work (actually contract) for the largest broadband ISP in Canada (at least on the dsl side), and recently all the employees got a inside memo stating that the synch rates for ALL our dsl customers (we have three different speeds: 128kb, 1.5 mb, and 3.0mb) will be doubling over the next few months. That means that the customers will be getting 256kb, 3.0mb and 6.0mb all for the same price. For example, you would be getting a 3.0mb download and 728kb upload, unlimited, for 44 bucks cnd (not counting the fact that it is half price for a year). THe moral of the story is, move to canada, eh.
You may ask, why the great prices? The reason is simple. They are for quebec (i live in New Brunswick), and in quebec, there are 3 broadband suppliers: Bell Sympatico (dsl), Rogers Cable, and VideoTron(dsl). Which means that he best way to have low prices is to encourage competition, and be right demanding of your suppliers.
Which is why it makes me so angry when i heard people say that our tech sector is suffering form lack of competition. IMHO, the states is the only place that has problems with monopoly. Your economy or government, or people, or something is breeding monopolies. I don't think i need to take the time to list examples
somewhere, on a Big Red Sign:
if(color==blue){speed--;}
The parent is right that the average is made up of highs and lows. And ISP's are now trying to cut away the highs. If they succeed, then the middle becomes the new high, just waiting for the next pogrom. From the perspective of money-grubbing, backwards-looking ISP's the problem is the power user. The REAL problem however, is the lows. The real problem is, in fact, not the power user, but the "wear user".
Just try to picture what would happen if everyone became so paranoid and timid that they drastically reduced their bandwidth usage: the AVERAGE goes down, and then people who were previously average end up above average. The ISP's wallet gets fattened by the cost reductions, but their appetite just goes up. The executives feel the need to continue their "growth" to satisfy the owners. The next round of victims gets targetted by the ISP. Revenue growth ends up being sought through the ultimately destructive strategy of a gradual reduction of "costs" which are in fact hardware investments, without which the next generation of bandwidth and applications could never arrive.
Therefore, if AT ALL possible, always try to use AT LEAST as much bandwidth as the average user, if not slightly more. They can't terminate 50% of users, or even 40% of users. In fact, you could probably be in the top 10% without getting complaints. Let's be conservative though, and choose to use only enough bandwidth to be in the 75% (i.e. top 25%) Imagine if everyone did this. If everyone tried to do this, the average bandwidth usage would gradually increase, making it harder for the ISP to extort and terrorize power users. If the upward drift happens gradually, technology would hopefully keep up, and we would gradually get faster and faster bandwidth. Isn't that what progress should be?
If, instead, people reacted by cutting down on bandwidth and uploads, then the average might DECREASE. Then, the ISP could boot off the biggest users, reduce their infrastructure investment, hoping instead to make money off of the low-power users. After the pool of clueless low-power users is fully tapped, and with no infrastructure investment, the only further avenue for squeezing out more profits would be to reduce expenses even further by setting off another round of kicking off intensive users. With each successive wave of account terminations, the average usage would decrease, thereby decreasing the expense per revenue stream. There is a clear financial incentive for this scenario, which would ultimately lead to stagnation.
So, IF YOU ARE USING LESS THAN THE AVERAGE BANDWIDTH, then THIS IS YOUR FAULT.
It may sound like I'm joking, but I'm dead serious.
If you are using less than the average bandwidth, you are actually doing everyone a huge disfavour. Instead, you should be everyone a huge favour (including the industry, and hardware makers) by using MORE bandwidth. Share some torrents. Seed some even. Let it run for a few days a month. Try to be at least in the 60% percentile in terms bandwidth use.
In the long run, everyone will benefit.
Encourage technological progress! Use more bandwidth! (That is, you're not already in the top 5%. If you are already in the top 5%, then maybe cut down a bit, or just be careful and hold steady. Some day, if everyone else is as altruistic as you are (i.e. download and upload as much stuff) the average will move up, and you will no longer be the top 5%, at which point you could increase your usage accordingly.
Set up a torrent seed on your grandma's computer, sharing a distro or something. Limit her upload to 5k. Let it run. She'll be doing her part to help make the world a better place.
It's easy to be an altruist. Get kazaa. Or edonkey. Or go to suprnova. Share some linux distros. It's fun, and it will make you feel warm fuzzies inside knowing you're helping the internet grow.
Or perhaps you could use the big, bad Telstra and now get uncapped/128 Cable for $69.95 whith no excess download charges and speed limited to just to 64K after 10Gig...
:)
Optus are now running scared (I'm an Optus cable customer) as they have suddenly given those of us on the 3Gig plans an extra 3Gig for the next two months before they announce their 'new plans'
Me thinks they will be close to Telstra.
About time telstra went with no excess data charges.
Damn typos: I said "wear user".... i meant "weak user"
Sorry.
Anyway, since I'm posting again I might as well add that corporate executives, and corporations, respond to market signals, and sometimes in perverse and destructive ways. It might sound weird that I'm advocating the heavy usage of a resource by people who might not otherwise need it. However, the reality is that if these low-power users increase, the "savings" don't get passed on to other needy high-power users, but instead increase the profits. This could set off a highly undesirable direction in shareholder expectations and set off management in a dangerous direction of "growth" through cost reduction. Such a path would choke off investment in higher bandwidth for the future. On the other hand, if these lower-power users become higher power, they will prevent or dissuade the company leadership from embarking on an immediately profitable but ultimately self-destructive project of "(revenue) growth by (technological) stagnation".
If the users don't allow the executives to achieve growth by stagnation, then the board cannot do anything about it. It's not the CEO's fault if the users want what they pay for. The CEO keeps his job. The stock holders give up their hopes for immediate profits through cost reduction. In the end, though, the CEOs need to find something to do to justify their existence and promise a path to increased revenue. And only if this path to increased revenue involves technological progress, will we see technological progress.
Penis bird!
> Is there any reason in particular that it *must* go through your mail server?
Yes. I use Comcast Cable in New Jersey. MAPS-DUL says smtp.comcast.net is a dial-up line, so I can't post to the gcc.gnu.org mailing lists, which reject emails from dial-ups and free accounts. I have to send the mail via ssh to my employer's computer and send from their IP.
Not overselling bandwidth would be the stupidest thing any ISP ever did.
About as stupid as building a 200-lane freeway between my 200-house subdivision and the mall.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
I live in Oulu, where OPOY (Oulu Phone Company or whatever it is in English) sells 8M/1M ADSL as the worst connection, and if you are lucky enough to live near a DSL center, you can get 10M/10M VDSL (Cisco LRE really). I happen to have the 10M/10M VDSL and average daily bandwidth usage is ~10-20GB and they haven't said anything yet. :) Nor have I heard that OPOY would have sent any kind of letters to anyone. ISP's vary, apparently. :)
Cable modem usage is sort of like the all you can eat buffet scenerio. Most people go into the buffet and have a little of everything and are comfortably full if not really full when they leave. Buffets are priced so that some food can be wasted or eaten by heards of terribly overweight people and not really eat into their costs. When you pull a chair up to the crab legs at the buffet your suddenly violate the unwritten rules of polite society. Not only are you making a pig of yourself in public your denying other paying customers access to food that they are paying for. When the manager comes up and asks you to leave do you suddenly get enraged and scream "THIS IS ALL YOU CAN EAT AND IM NOT DONE STUFFING MY FAT FACE? mmmrumph crunch mrumph crunch crunch"
This is essentially the same thing with the cable modem. Most "normal people" sit down at their computer and surf the web at high speeds. We dont run huge FTP servers or P2P servers. Perhaps when we are felling "piggy" we fire up our p2p program and share files with the rest of the community. We dont pull the virtual chair up to the buffet by leaving our computers on and running 24/7 with server software running eating bandwidth and slowing down other users.
Think of the letter from the cable company as a rude stare as you have just gone back for your 5th plate of prime rib. If you have any couth or manners you notice the stare and find something else to eat on the buffet or perhaps suddenly decide your full. If you don't and keep going back perhaps the manager might ask you to leave. The cable company luckilly has a policy in place and thats a good thing. Its not up to one person to start screaming in broken english "you bad man. you eat too much. you leave NOoooOOW!!!!!!!!!".
Thanks for the pop psycho-analysis. It was good for a laugh.
Actually, my argument isn't "completely uncalled for". It was central to what I was saying: the plutocratic direction the U.S. is headed in will soon make such lawsuits impossible.
All people are supposed to be equal, but as recent history shows us (be it Microsoft, Enron, O.J., or literally thousands of lesser known travesties) the rich are now far "more equal". Not just because of their ability to afford more effective council, but the deliberate conservative movement to punish judges who dare enforce the law against them.
Judge Jackson learned his to his detriment when he made the mistake of dressing Microsoft down like any other criminal after the prosecution proved its case. No one imagines a bank robber going free because the judge said bad things about him after he was found guily, but for a major U.S. corporation, there's a different standard.
Trademark law makes it so that corporations can just steal domain names from people who have owned and used them, simply on the basis of having more money. (The Onion lampooned this in the hilariously titled: "Tanzania Loses Name to Tanning-Salon Chain")
And patent law is a joke. It is not for no reason that Slashdot's patent icon is a picture of a fork, knife, and spoon.
Now of course Republican moderators can mark this as "troll" too, if they like. But it is patently obvious which political party is behind the subversion of our legal system.
I should be limited to something like 4G per month. That's what they publish as the limit for my type of service.
I downloaded the digital pictures I took with my digital camera (22Gb) from a computer at work last week (took just over two days).
Sure, just as long as you're not contractually obliged to stick by the policy. If you are, the policy's an addendum to the contract and has to stick by the same rules.
PenguiNet: the (shareware) Windows SSH client
What if I have BT running, and the traffic *never leaves* my subnet, because my neighbor is getting the data from me?
That was effectively a *free* transfer, because it didn't go anywhere. It's the bandwidth that leaves your ISP that is expensive, not the bandwidth inside of it.
An example that might make more sense:
If the only link I have to the Internet is a shared 56k modem that I share with three other people, and I need a file, should I look to see if the users of the other machines have the file, or should I download the entire thing off the Internet?
If another user on my home network has a file, I'd be crazy to download it elsewhere. The same applies with ISPs. BitTorrent can take advantage of this, and ISPs should seriously look into helping this sort of thing out.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Having said that, if you're on cable owned by the ISP, rather than ADSL, you may well be buggered.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
About 4-5 years ago when they first rolled out DSL service in this area I jumped on it, after all i had been hosting fansubs on a FTP and IRC fserv on a 56k for a long time and bandwidth would be greatly appreciated. So poof along i went serving not really paying attention to my usage, generally getting 700k/s+ upload alone. This of course meant nothing to me,i was happy to give back and loving the download speeds along with it. This went on for about 5 months when finally smart man from my ISP showed up at my door and just asked "WTF are you doing!". Turns out that they had had to fly people in to figure out why thier network was so slow and then were working with lawyers for 2 months to see if they could legally do anything about me. When they finally figured out that the easiest way to find out was just ask me they sent this guy out who was frankly amazed that i wasn't doing anything illegal and even more so that i was doing it with a k6-2 400 w/ 128mb pc-100.
Yes i had signed up for unlimited service, but most ISPs always leave that 'this aup is subject to change at any time' clause in there, and yes my isp exercised its right to rewrite its policies and place a cap on my connection. It was decent i still had about 50k/s up and was burstable (sudden things went really fast but it would throttle down long transfers). It was also quite a small ISP so I began correspondence with the Admins and they would on occasion disable my caps to see what would happen. They also never said anything about the fact that to this day i haven't shutdown my FTP or anything.
The moral? play nice, if they ask you to tone it down do, you can throttle your own connection. It costs them allot for bandwidth even if they do over sell it, but your probably making other users have more headaches becaue your using all of the over sold bandwidth. be a good neighbor, set it for 15k and leave it for a few days. Those 18gigs of porn can wait a few days to get there, anticipation is the best part. -cheers
I'm not so sure about your math. I'm also on Cox. Their website lists 30 GB/month and 2 GB/day as the limits for their AUP.
That looks like 24 kB/s for a day, or 12 kB/s for a month.
To me, these are at least decent. I believe I far exceed them anyways and haven't gotten a complaint.
It is sad that it may become more convenient/cheaper to use the USPS for P2P file sharing. With a 32 kB/s upload cap its faster to mail CDs for sure.
The end result would be about the same anyway.
Cool. Thanks.
Now I have Comcast (formerly AT&T) cable.
Before that, I had Covad DSL. Until they dropped me and there weren't any other DSL providers.
Before that, I had ISDN. It cost more, but it was broadband.
Before that, I had dial-up.
You can get a frame circuit or ISDN.
ISP's should be extremely clear when you sign on about what type of behavior is acceptable. If they want you to have X kb/s, throttle it to that level using whatever means is applicable, be it hardware limitations of DSL/cable, etc, or a software/firmware throttling in a router/whathaveyou. But in general, my assumption would be that if they do not specifically state when you sign on that you cant use the pipe you are paying for to full capacity, they can go call your lawyer. If they say you have 1.1mbit d/l and 768kbit u/l, then i think you should be able to top it out 24/7 by all rights. They advertise those ratings, and promise them, but they dont say, oh.. well.. you can only use it at an average of 10% duty over the course of a week/month... Lots of ISP's/colleges have pulled similar stunts. ISU for example has a capping method that as you use more bandwidth you get dropped into slower and slower access pipes until you basically cant do anything until it resets you. I somewhat understand it in a college situation, and especially when theyre up front about it, you know what youre getting. But when it comes to ISPs trying to pull similar stunts, it really gets frustrating. I can understand why they dont like 'servers' on non commercial pipes, and they seem to be relatively leniant in a lot of cases about that now, but it still lies out there as a trap in case they dont like what youre doing they reserve the right to drop you. Anyway, long story short, check your SLA/TOS/whatever you have for your uplink, if its not clearly stated in the agreement you signed/agreed to when you connected to the ISP, and any postal/emailed notifications of policy change where they give you a chance to cancel service if you don't agree, etc, and find out if you have any recourse. Talk to an admin somewhere, talk to a lawyer. Chances are they're pushing the limits of the fine print over the line.
After all, I pay for 256/256, and if they do not want to deliver, there are plenty other providers which will be happy to make that sale to me.
If they make a deal and regret it, fair enough, there is plenty of competition. But "unacceptable use"? If they only meant to sell me 128/128 they should have said so from the beginning.
Ditch them and get someone else.
...I've got a 2Gbps via comcast, and I download @ least 5GB/day--considering all the isos, and I usually leave edonkey open to finish up on some legitimate downloads.
speakeasy.net has never complained to me about being a bandwidth hog, but then again, my connection is only 608/128, so it'd probably be pretty hard for me to stress their network.
-Rich
They fire disabled workers when they get tired of paying for worker's comp...
I know this for a fact.
They fired me because I'd hurt my back lifting monitors (outfitting one of thier CNMC's) and they got sick of the fact that, despite doctor's orders requiring me to attend PhysTher once a week (which, after all the bending, stretching, etc required me to USE that Rx for 500mg Vicodin, despite the fact that the stuff puts me to sleep) and thus effectively "losing me for a day" because I refused to come back to work after the PhysTher appointments...
Your choice - the Vicodin WILL put me to sleep, so do I take the day off under Workman's Comp, or do you pay me to sleep at my desk? Because I *WILL* be asleep either way...
Yet they fired me.
Fuck WilTel... May they rot in the eternal bowels of Satan's deepest latrine.
I don't think you know just how much bandwith the binaries groups take. The news servers at my ISP has something like 4 gigabit interfaces each - and theres two of those servers - it would probably cost quite a bit of money for them to setup that connection for you and the network segment you are on so that you don't kill all the other traffic in the area
I know exactly how much bandwidth those groups take. That's why I don't carry them.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Am I the only one who thinks that if the isp can't produce numbers to back up that kind of claim, it makes the claim invalid? How can you know you're above the national median if:
1) you don't know what the median is?
2) you don't have an accurate picture of your usage?
sorry - didnt realize that, just mentioned them since its the only part of usenet I use anymore :)
I must have done something right in a past life, because I just love my cable modem provider. I average 400-500kb/s download speeds at anytime and aobut 40kb/s upload. Plus, no ports are blocked and they could care less how much of my bandwidth I use (which at times has been a lot). Plus, even though they don't officially support anything but windows, they do have help on their support website for setting up linux or a mac and even how to share your connection with multiple computers at home.
Oh, and one that one windows virus that kept rebooting everybody's pc, they were proactive with. They blocked the ports it infected other computers on for about a week to give people a chance to be up and online long enough to download any updates needed.
I guess it just goes to show, there are some good ISP's out there, but they sure seem few and far between.
Sounds insasnely expensive to me. A local provider offers a 3.5/800 connection, static IP, non-PPPoE DSL with unlimited bandwidth for $1000 Canadian a year.
Thier only caveat is that "Continuous daily saturation of download or upload capacity between 1200 and 2400 is not permitted."
I, of course, am still stuck with their 1.7/384 PPPoE service. $30 CAD per month, 25Gb per month plus unlimited between 0200 and 1000.
(And their colocation fee structure even includes a $10/month headache tax for Windows boxes).
http:/www.istop.com
---
Book(n): Utensil used to pass time while waiting for the TV repairman
I have found telerama to be as good or better
in all areas - especially more techincal ones
New Zealand suffers from the same high pricing for international bandwith. The service I subscribe to provides a 256k/128k (so called "Broadband") connection with a 10Gb monthly traffic limit. Traffic that doesn't flow through my ISP's international connection is 'charged' against my traffic quota at 1/10th of the rate as the stuff I get from overseas. ie: 10Gb international = 100Gb domestic, or - in the real world - somewhere between the two.
:)
As far as I can see, this system works pretty well. The customers that use 5% of their connection to surf the web, write emails, and etc, rarely need worry about the 10Gb cap. 'Power' users have an incentive to (at least attempt) locate content domestically , or at least moderate somewhat the amount of data they leech through NZ's somewhat constrained international pipes. On a personal level, it means that when I get up in the morning and see that I've finished downloading shrike2.iso via BitTorrent, I'd best stop acting as a seed for other users, or I'll have no traffic allowance left for shrike3.iso
I'll admit that for some, this comes after having a painfully large bill after running over the 10Gb cap and paying NZD$1 (roughly=USD$0.65) per international Mb (again, divide by 10 for domestic) for traffic in excess of the quota. The same shocking bills have also prompted some users to make a better effort at securing their boxen than they would otherwise have. Paying NZD$500/month to squirt out a squigajillion copies of Blaster is a powerful incentive for that regular visit to windowsupdate.
The other nice thing here, though - is that NZ ISPs have managed to get it right with both their advertising and their contracts, and all details are explained up front before you are connected.
What we're talking about isn't behavior, it's usage, and usage is a thing that's easily measured, analyzed, graphed, etc. If it wasn't, the customer mentioned would never have gotten a warning, because his ISP wouldn't have been able to tell he was using "100x the national average" bandwidth.
If the ISP wants to write some terms saying "If you use more than Xbps average bandwidth (taken as an average over Y hours), we will limit your bandwidth/cut you off/charge you more money/send guido over to remove a digit of our choice", fine, but they damn well better spell out what "X" and "Y" are if they wan't me to consider the terms seriously.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
the public indecancy/ obscene behavior changes only when society itself changes. currently, one can be totally clothed, but if you expose your manhood and take a leak on the street, you'll be charged with possibly either of those two. what constitutes indecance and or obscene are what fluxuates depending on where you are and what has been established. i imagine that 100 years ago, if women wore the same beach attire as they do today, many would be charged.
100 years ago, 100 bits per second was the same as it is today (although, the measurement wouldn't have meant much back then...arguments about early 20th century telegraphs aside).
If you had terms saying "You can't download anything obscene", you have legal questions when enforcement of those terms happens. There is no ambiguity with bandwidth limits...they can be clearly defined with no need for legal interpretation or judgement. Society's opinion has no bearing on data transfer rates.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
The business model relies on the idea that people will get it and not really use it. And most of them, in fact, do get it and not use it.
Look, just because someone uses the service a great deal doesn't make them "Main Customers". Heavy downloaders send in the same fifty bucks a month (or whatever). The whole point is that people get the broadband who don't 'need' it.
They'd like nothing more than for all their customers to check their email once a day and maybe visit cnn.com or something before signing off. As for the heavy downloaders, my guess is that they wish they'd just go away.
To summarize: No one likes you. Downloading a lot does not make you special. It makes you a pain in the telecom company's corporate ass.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
When Global Crossing built huge amounts of modern fiber technology across the oceans, and bankrupted themselves in the process, the cost of bandwidth across the Pacific started dropping rapidly. Southern Cross deployed their cables from the US to Australia in 2001 at 20 Gbps, and they've gradually cranked up the optics, to 240 Gbps last year and potentially 480-640 Gbps. That means that they've currently deployed about 12 Mbps per Australian, and that doesn't count the bandwidth of the other cable systems, like APCN or SEA-ME-WE-3.
Disclaimer: I'm a Comcast stockholder, so this is about 1 ten-millionth of an official policy statement from Comcast.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
D'oh! Yes, of course I know AT&T sold their cable modem people to Comcast... traded clunky for vicious...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks