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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."
"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)
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...
How about
btdownloadcurses --max_upload_rate ($something more reasonable)?
Here are some tidbits from their stuff:
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
Why not just tell Bittorrent to stop using as much bandwidth? There are many torrent clients out there that let you controll the amount of upload and download traffic you allow. I use BT++ myself and have had no issues at all.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
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"
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)
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.
It's worse than you think. I'm a Cox customer, and according to their revised AUP (not that I had to sign anywhere to accept the new rules) the customers aren't even allowed to use on average 56k6 modem speed over a month! If you calculate, you'll find that you have to throttle your connection to around 3kB/s to not exceed their limits for what's "abuse". Oh, and they don't have any CIR or guaranteed minimum speed. They sell the service on the *peak* speed, which you can't use a fraction of for any length of time.
They also block various ports, sometimes even both ways (which means they'll randomly block ports needed for legitimate return traffic).
This is sold as "High Speed Internet", and costs you $50 per month ($40 if you also purchase other services from them).
It's not high speed, and it's not Internet. Some legislation is needed, because this is slipping out of control. The cable companies clearly abuse the near monopoly they have in many market areas.
--
*Art
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.
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
No...our contract is fine, and better than anyone else is offering us.
Our bandwidth also costs us about a third of what it did 5 years ago. But, since we are in a relatively sparsely-populated area in the midwest, bandwidth does cost a *lot* more here than it does in big metro areas, or on the east or west coast.
And that's not the only thing that makes this market such a bitch for us...our LEC charges us $37.50/month for line provisioning on each 768/128 circuit. So...after we charge $54.99/month (yeah, go ahead and gasp at the outrageous expense) we get a whopping $17.49/month. Of this, we liberally figure we make an average of $1 profit.
Maybe this market is making ISP's rich someplace, but it sure as hell ain't here.
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.