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

Adelphia Bandwidth Caps and Newsgroups

[Eyah....TIMMY]

I have Adelphia cable and found the following in their Access Agreement:

"Traffic Consumption Allowances: Adelphia has the right to
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."

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.
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...

Cap your BT upload?

[theRhinoceros]

How about

btdownloadcurses --max_upload_rate ($something more reasonable)?

Cox Cable

[WTFmonkey]

http://support.cox.net
Here are some tidbits from their stuff:

What is the speed, of my Cox High-Speed Internet service?
Downstream data moving from the Internet to your computer is configured at 3 megabits/second (Mbps). Upstream data moving from your computer to the Internet is configured at 256 kilobits/second (Kbps). By setting the network equipment at these levels, we are able to deliver consistent high-speed Internet service.

I bought an 'unlimited' service. I asked you if the Cox High-Speed Internet service is rate limited, and you said no. This doesn't sound like the 'unlimited' service I signed up for. What happened?
Cox provides, as advertised, unlimited access to the Internet. However, Cox neither advertises nor provides unlimited service; as bandwidth is a finite commodity. Cox High Speed Internet is still advertised as being "downstream speeds up to 100 times faster than a 28.8 telephone modem" and remains the best service, quality, features, and speed for the price.

1. Maximum downstream speed: 3 megabits per second
2. Maximum upstream speed: 256 kilobits per second
3. Maximum monthly consumption cap: 30 gigabytes downstream; 7.5 gigabytes upstream
4. Size per email message: 5 megabytes
5. Size per email account/address: 10 megabytes
6. Personal WebSpace account size: 10 megabytes of disk space per email address
7. Personal WebSpace traffic: 300 megabytes of traffic per month (for visitors viewing your pages)

Re:Time to get smart about your bandwidth...

[Kenja]

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.

Re:Read their AUP

[arth1]

I'd be really curious if some false-advertising claim could be made against the companies.

If they advertise "X-Mbps" and I don't get it 95%, 99%, (what's an appropriate SLA for the computer industry) of the time, it's broken!

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.

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*Art