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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,
if you have unlimited bandwidth in your contract, you should fax them a copy and stick it to them.
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 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"
(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.)
Possible, but keeping a Fedora Core bittorrent open since it came out is quite sufficient to explain the warning.
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?
This kinda makes sense until you look at the numbers more.
If you cut off the top 1% of your users and sample the remaining it will still look like you should cut off another 1% since they are now the top talkers.
For every porn maniac downloading gigs of porn you have a bunch of other users at the bottom 1% who check mail once a day and thats it.
You will always have a top 1% and a bottom 1% of users. This is just the same as dial-up and all you can eat buffets. If its advertised as unlimited it should be priced with this in mind.
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
"download wisely" my ass. If they have some mysterious "limit" that they can choose at their whim without even telling you then I would tell them to go to hell.
Check this out:
1. My long distance carrier says I have to pay by the minute and I monitor my usage very carefully.
2. My local carrier says I can have unlimited time on the phone for a flat rate so I don't monitor the usage.
Your broadband carrier essentially promised you number 2 but is treating you like you've got number 1 and you're saying you're more than happy to LIMIT YOURSELF while they continue to imply to new customers that there's no limit.
You're a fool. Insist they give you a posted limit or use as much as you want. Don't limit yourself for their benefit unless they're willing to be straight with you about exactly what you're paying for.
TW
2. My local carrier says I can have unlimited time on the phone for a flat rate so I don't monitor the usage. Your broadband carrier essentially promised you number 2 but is treating you like you've got number 1 and you're saying you're more than happy to LIMIT YOURSELF while they continue to imply to new customers that there's no limit.
Not quite. Hook your modem up to #2. How much data can you transfer? A max of 56kbps. You get unlimited connection time, but the amount of data is capped at 56kbps. The same logic applies to "unlimited broadband". You have unlimited connect time, but the amount of data you can send is capped, although this time not by the technical limitations of the line (although you may be capped there as well) but an arbitrary limit set by the ISP to ensure the *average* user has enough bandwidth but still make boatloads of cash.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
If you cut off the top 1% of your users and sample the remaining it will still look like you should cut off another 1% since they are now the top talkers.
I think the original poster is saying the ISP is correct to trim the unprofitable customers, not that you should constantly be trimming your top 1%. If you're running a software company and one of your clients is constantly tying up the free tech support line, you might think twice about continuing their contract...
It's a little funny because this turns normal marketing tactics on its head. The 80/20 rule of marketing is that 20% of your customers will require 80% of your volume. This is probably roughly accurate with cable modem service. Normally, companies kill to acquire these 20% (high value customers). However, when you're operating in a fixed fee structure, these are your worst customers and (if they cost more than their incremental revenue) they should be moved out of your franchise.
The problem with providing the carte blanche of true unlimited service is kind of infamous: Proper pricing creates a death spiral. If you raise prices to compensate for increased usage, the only folks left will be the bandwidth hogs. You'll then need to raise your prices even more, but then only the worst offenders will be left. Health Insurance works the exact same way. If prices are very high, only the sickest (most expensive customers) will remain on a plan because the price is still advantageous for them. This in turn makes cost of coverage higher. and so on...
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.
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.
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.
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