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.

"'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."

Comments

What ISP was it?

[jhunsake]

Why are you censoring your post?

ISP?

[ktulu1115]

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.

Re:Read their AUP

[jusdisgi]

Not that I expect facts or logic to sway you, but...

First off, I'm interested to know whether Cox makes a profit on it's cable Internet business. Most of the cable companies don't. Actually, that's one of our pet peaves as a tiny ISP; those guys run losses so heavy we can't make money in this business or we look outrageously expensive.

Second, where in your grumbling did you get around to supporting your eventual conclusion that "it's not high-speed"?

Thirdly, quit playing with your units.

And finally, don't get so bent out of shape about the fact that you "can't even use it like it was a modem." Because a month @56kbps is 18GB of transfer. Yes, I can transfer that much in a month, but only if a)I try really hard, b)I leave kazaa on with my whole hdd shared and no bandwidth limiting, or c)I post my IP address and root password on alt.2600.whatever.

Now, it may not sound like a lot to you...but when you have a couple thousand customers and a business to run, it's not a small matter. Our average ADSL customer uses less than 200MB of transfer each month.

We have a contractual limitation of 10GB/month. That's just over 32kbps averaged across the month.

Now...for the record, I do not condone Cox changing its terms of service without informing its customers. We make them *sign* the limits. Why? Because we plan on enforcing them.