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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'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
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?
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 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
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).
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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.
I agree! I had an issue with my provider a while ago regarding running my own web server behind a router and was threatened with unacceptable use. That was until I dug up the orginal contract that said I could do that!
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.
Most of those contracts include a clause such that they are allowed to modify the contract without notifying you beforehand. I scratch out this clause on any contract, xerox it for my records, and send it in, and they normally don't complain (and, when they do, they normally are amenable to the change anyway once I explain my position). That's an effective way to get around the problem. However, if you did not modify the contract, you probably have no recourse this time around.
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?
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.
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.
Raise noise about this if you need to. If it gets noisy enough then consumer protection legislation can get called upon, and then maybe we'll have some sort of baseline for what a reasonable contract with a local monopoly is - in fact, it'd be really spiffy if we could get a court ruling that invalidated those obnoxious "we can change any facet of this agreement at any time" clauses in general.
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.
Although I haven't read the law and have no actual information, I believe part of the "safe harbor" qualifications for ISPs to not be liable under the DMCA for what their customers do requires them to _not_ inspect the traffic flowing over their network. I know that my college has a policy of not monitoring network traffic in order to avoid being prosecuted by the RIAA under the DMCA.
Of course, I could've totally missed something.
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lds
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..
I don't know about "scare tactics". If they want to terminate hi service, they can. If you want to travel down a road of costly litigation, then maybe you could have your service re-instated. But why bother, as most people do have access to several providers these days. Just go with another one.
I'm sure that eventually there will be a regulation on this sort of thing, as more and more people slowly start to use more bandwidth on a regular basis (Us geeks will always be in the forefront, though). Right now it's not a major issue for most people. There is a mean about of usage, and ISPs go by those figures. As the about of bandwidth required rises, so will that mean.
By definition, half of all their customers are using "above average" bandwidth. Is their goal to drive all their customers to pay for zero bandwith usage?
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.
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
I got one of these a few weeks ago, and did what they said. I have noticed absolutely NO difference in my aggregate upload/download times or speeds.
I do however host a small website that has some sound clips on it. According to my Webalizer, I had 6,230,098 KB (thats about 6GB!) of upstream data, so I thought at some point that might become odd and bring some attention. (August of 2003 was a whopping 20GB.) I haven't gotten anything (yet), but I was hoping my upstream speed may go up, but it doesn't look like it. I want to throttle my upstream speed on Apache, but I haven't found a mod for Apache 2.0 that works well.
The higher, the fewer.
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!
With the web site the company I'm at is hosting hosting, between WorldCom and Akamai, we're buying 50Mbps (95th percentile). If they tell us "oops you used 50Mbps for too many seconds", that's just wrong.
If a ISP wants to charge per Gigabyte, I'm all for it. But if their advertising Mbps, they should deliver.
Personally, I'd be all for some companies offering charge-per-Gigabyte plans, because I think there's a lot of time that I don't use that many gigabytes.
Yeah, they said they were going to do that mid-December but it didn't actually happen until after the new year in my area(Southern New Jersey). It jumped quite a bit too, according to a couple of those online speed test things, my rate was around 1.1 Mbps now it's about 2.2 Mbps. But at the same time they capped our upload speeds to 128Kbps.
I haven't received an official Comcast notice, but recently noticed that my IP address changed. I know they do this when they need to rebalance the load. I had read that Comcast is increasing their bandwidth to help resist the downward pressure on price. Anyway, I decided to recheck my bandwidth. Back last Sept I had 316kbps on download and 223 kbps on upload. As of mid-December I had 1.7 Mbps download and still around 247 kbps upload. A nice improvement, and it does take away some motivation to shop for better prices.
Agreed - I work for a web hosting company that offers "unlimited bandwidth" but our AUP/fair usage policys states that we reserve the right to terminate accounts consuming of 10Gb/month. We've had customers using around 30-60Gb/month and just asked them polietly to try and reduce the bandwidth usage for the sake of other customers. But if they start consuming 100Gb/month, then we'll seriously think about pulling the plug.
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
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?
Hrmmm, that may be the case. They should be going by the average to establish a rate, not what most of the people use.
Reguardless, I think the same thinking of driving down the interstate would apply here. They won't pull you over for speeding if you are in a group that is all going about the same speed. But if you are clearly blowing past the majority of people, they are coming for you. Yea, you could use your pipe 24/7 uploading and downloading Bittorents, but that's not what they intend for residential usage. They either want him to 1) curtail his high usage or 2) pay for a commercial plan.
Unlimited usage is a very misleading term, but I think it was a relic from the dial-up age, where Unlimited mean hours of usage, not bandwidth. The AUP probably defines what "unlimited" means for his contract, and probably also includes the "this AUP can change at anytime we see fit" clause. So, he's basically going to have to go by the AUP, or find another provider with a more friendly AUP.
No where in the constitution does it decree we all get unlimited unmetered high bandwidth connections to the Internet. Sorry, he's got a few choices, they may not be the choices he wants, but he needs to make one.
1) Abide by AUP
2) Find another provider with better AUP
3) Purchase commercial plan which probably has more favorable AUP.
"This amp is special, see all the knobs go up to 11, that means it is one louder than other amps"
Or cut some slack!
/.ers seem to like Free / Open Source Software and the like is because of the spirit of cooperation it engenders. Why can't we do the same with our ISPs?
I'm reminded of those "eat as much as you like for [enter amount here]" eateries. Great for both customers (who know up front what its going to cost) and the restaurant (simplifies running the place). Admittedly, some will eat more, but this will be balanced by those who eat less. The problem occurs when the 40 stone gourmand comes in an decides to stuff him/herself a la Mr creosote! A act that may fit in with the letter of the "agreement", but not the spirit.
Same with broadband. We (the punters) want fast connections, and the ISPs want to make a profit. Some will use more bandwith than others, but as long as no-one abuses the system, all is fine.
Due to service deterioation, my ISP (virgin.net) has recently asked its users to limit themselves to 1 GB download per day, to a maximum of 5 per week. It seems that many (if not all) are heeding the request. And rightly so!
I would rather this informal cooperation between supplier and customer, rather than resorting to legat action and court cases. All this will lead to is greater restrictions, detailed EULAs, and more rigidity (at customer expense). Heavens, one of the reasons
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough. - Blake
The median would be 5, not 3.
....
1 3 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5
pick the middle number
I'd imagine the distribution of bandwidth usage is similar to the following:
1 1 2 2 2 3 3 3 3 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 5 5 5 6 6 7 7 8 9 10 12 15 20 25 40 50 100
Most people use not much bandwidth and there are a few who use a ton. In that distribution above the median is 4.5 but the average is 11.23. The median is much lower than the average, so telling someone "you use 50x the average" is not as scary as "you use 100x the median".
"the median is the least useful expression of an average and is rarely used" is nonsense.
<high-level position here>
<name of stupid small company here>
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.
Unlimited does not mean 'Unlimited Bandwidth
They also advertise Xmbps, that means I can use thier Xmbps for an unlimited amount of time, if for some reason I'm getting more than Xmbps then MABY, just maby they can say I'm not allowed to do that, but going over the advertised speed isn't a common sight, the ad basically says you can use Xmbps for unlimited amount of time.
P.S. not that this even counts but for (most)broadband but IIRC some dial-ups have a rule in the TOS against using the connection 24/7 then they have a claim, but my Provider has no such line in the TOS
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.
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
How is this in any way "unlimited bandwidth?" I am not sure exactly what that would be either, you obviously have an specific connection to the internet that doesn't allow for "unlimited bandwidth."
I think about 95% of my downloads are from the local USENET servers. This traffic does not hit the backbone AT ALL (other than server refreshes, which happen anyway). Since most of my traffic is from their local servers, I'm only causing the neighborhood loop to slow down. I kick off my news harvester at bedtime (11:30PM), so this should cause the neighbors no grief.
Bandwidth limitations should only apply to backbone use, not local server use.
But Dog only knows, that is to complicated for TW...
Are you sure that your Usenet traffic isn't backbone? I can't speak for your ISP, but I do know that many ISPs have outsourced their Usenet servers to national companies.
There's (at least) three ways to look at caps:
TIME - you can connect for x minutes per day. Broadband advertises that they are "always on" and thus not capped in this way. Dialups don't cap you in this way, either, but may well charge you for minutes above and beyond a certain amount, though most allow unlimited time connectivity per billing period for a flat rate.
BANDWIDTH - Bandwidth really means "range of frequencies" that you're allowed to transmit/receive on, which is either dictated by the FCC or the RFC for the technology you're using, or both. But I'll ignore that, for now, and talk about "bandwidth" as it is commonly used, which is to define the speed of the connection in bits per unit of time. You have physical limits inherent to the hardware, here, and also many broadband providers cap the hardware at a certain limit. Cable modems can pull down something like 33 Mb/s but are normally capped around 3Mb/s.
THROUGHPUT - Many ISPs ToS agreements include a clause stating how many bytes you can move up or down per month. Typically, with such agreements, this limit is much lower than the amount of data that you could theoretically push over your connection if you saturated it 24/7.
Note well that if you calculate the throughput cap as a speed and compare it with the "bandwidth" cap, the "bandwidth" cap will always be higher. They're saying, in effect, that you can drive 80mph but that you have to rest 10 hrs. out of every 24.
I'll guarantee that the limit that the ISP is complaining about in this case is the "throughput" type. If you saturate your connection, it costs the ISP more because they pay *their* connectivity bills according to throughput. It also throws a lot of suspicion that you are violating copyright, or spamming, or launching DoS attacks, or reselling your connection against their ToS, even if this is not necessarily true. A high level of activity = "you're up to something".
The argument about whether the usage level for a particular user is "above average" or not is not really the issue if the ToS includes a specific amount of throughput per month provided. "Above average" is a spurious argument, as many have already pointed out. The real issue is what does the ToS say, and are you abiding by that.
Most ISPs won't terminate you for exceeding this, but will bill you for bytes moving over your connection above and beyond this limit. And you'll pay through the nose for exceeding your limit, too. Step up to the next level and buy a business-grade service if you need that much throughput.
The reason for having a "bandwidth" (read: speed) cap that's higher than the "throughput" cap is to enable you to move a high amount of data quickly.
Say your ToS says you can pull 40GB/month down according to your agreement. But you don't want to wait an ENTIRE MONTH to pull that 40GB down. Your cable modem is capped at 3Mb/s, so you don't have to. Maybe you want to pull 30GB worth of ISOs in a few days time, and spend the rest of the month pulling the remaining 10GB allocated to you for email, gaming, browsing, or whatever.
The ToS agreement is desgined to allow you to do this, but if you go over 40GB that month, you're going to be paying extra or find yourself shut off.
If, on the other hand, the ToS doesn't have a clause about throughput caps, then the ISP has no leg to stand on, and if they say "unlimited usage" then they have to abide by it, and will probably go out of business doing so.
Where the marketing claim of "unlimited" and the fine print agreement to limits contradict each other, you can litigate with a false advertisement claim if you want, but you're still not going to get unlimited service. At best you'll get them to retract or modify the marketing claim, which itself would be something of a victory. But not the one you want.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
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 $....???
Hah! Same thing happened where I work (I'd been there for all of 2 weeks when we discovered the problem). Someone had put an IIS box set to all defaults on the live end of the wire, and somewhat to my amazement, the ONLY thing that happened to it was that a bunch of s'kiddies donated a rather large collection of music and movies to the tech staff here after we noticed that a certain computer was moving a lot of data and chugging the rest of the network. =]
Needless to say, the incident led to a somewhat more robust security model...
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
All Cox are not the same.
Cox where I live kicks ass. I'm a tech-head with a terminal-DIY attitude, so normally I never call tech support for anything because it takes longer to explain to them what the problem is and find a solution than it would to fix it myself. No so with these guys, of the half dozen or so times I've called with problems every time they are fast, knowledgable and actually sound like they know the product they are supporting (rather than reading me a trouble-tree over the phone).
In a year and a half its never gone out, and it always tests out right at 3Mbps.
YMMV, and maybe they'll suck in the future, but this is one company I'm quite happy to pay for service.
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.
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
People using Windows and wanting to throttle upload/download limits should look at NetLimiter.
You may need to build a time division reflectometer and shoot the line. There is a chance that you are in the death zone on the line. Note: 1) TDR's are totally safe. You drive them with a single AA battery and 2) they can be built for under $20 bux and 3) you do need a dual channel osilloscope.
There is a death zone in the design of pots lines (Plain old telephone service). Most well managed telcos run the twisted pairs from the CO out to a demarcation point. They drop a connection from this continous twisted pair to the houses along the route. Conceptually they "TEE IN".
CentralOffice==========T===========DemarcationPo in t
So a short peice of twisted pair pair is just clipped onto the main twisted pair running along the big bundle of perhaps 100's if pairs in the main feed line.
The advantage of this design is that if a subscriber changes the phone service - it is a simple matter to disconnect and reconnect at the TEE. The disadvantage is that sometimes those old connections are disconnected near the house or run into old warehouses and so forth. When this happens you have an opportunity for the xDSL signals to split.
What happens is the happy little electrons get pushed out the back door of your DSL modem and the run up the wire leading to the TEE. When they get there they have no idea which way they should go so 1/2 of them head off to the CO while the other 1/2 head off to the demarkation point.
The ones that reach the demarkation point typically find they went the wrong way. They find this out when they hit the infinite impedance change at the end of the wire. So they bounce off this and head back towards the CO.
Along the way they hit the TEE again - and again don't know which way to go so 1/2 them (1/4 of the original signal) heads towards your modem while the other 1/2 heads towards the CO. This approximately 1/4 of the original signal is in the form of an echo delayed a certain number of microseconds depending on the distance - which you can read and compute from your TDR.
The ones that hit your DSL modem get bled off. This is easily done - via what is called a terminating resistor. A Terminating Resistor can be had for less than a couple cents and you can pick them up at your local Radio Shack - you need about 90-100 ohms and you simply clip it across the ends of the twisted pairs over at the demarkation point. That is one way to improve your lines - and your telephone company probably does not know this. Telus didn't. We had to tell them after we re-engineered their xDSL circuits then paid them $1400 bux for an hour's work... then they asked us for free consulting. No kidding.
Well - there is a much better way to deal with the problem other than a terminating resistor at the CO. You can go up to the TEE at the back of your house and use a pair of snips to chop off the wires that head over to the demarkation point.
This is perfectly safe and reversible - it would take oh about an extra minuet for the telco service tech to reattach if they need to.
By doing this - you stop that split and this means that the signal heading to the CO is actually 2x as strong.
There is a secondary effect - the one that screws you up royally.
The speed of the signal propagation down the twisted pair is about 0.6x the speed of light. From this you can easily see where your splits are on the line - IE - how many feet from your TDR.
Note: in the days of voice communications - the reflection was great. It came back in time shifted - but the amount of shift was so little that the wave forms up to about 3,000 HZ generally overlaid the original waveform. So you have an echo - but it was close by.
With high speed digital communications - that echo is deadly and can come in several bits behind. It really smears the communications channel.
The short of it is that if you are at the very end of the cable - the end of the wire may be close enuf to your xDSL modem so that the e
But none of that has anything to do with the topic. ISP's believe it is acceptable to advertise always-on service that's 10x, 15x, 20x, even 100x faster than dialup, but also believe its acceptable to penalize paying subscribers for using their service as advertised.
--- A man with a briefcase can steal more money, than any man with a gun. [Don Henley]
Fine, but if you're not really offering 768/128 on a 24x7 basis, you should make that clear. Offer a monthly transfer cap that works out to that 5% average, then charge (appropriately) for overages.
I certainly don't mind paying for the bandwidth I use, but I need to know what those "reasonable" limits are.
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?
If the customer demands that the gas, if it is to be sold at all, MUST be sold at 1.15 and no one provides it then they usually end up finding alternative products to gasoline or using legislation to alter the basic rules of the game. Gasoline in the US is a prime example, we buy it at a tremendously lower price than a lot of the world simply because we demand that it be so and our government is willing to fill our bread & circus quota with wars in Iraq and F15s for Saudi Arabia to get it. I'm not suggesting that the government should be pondering legislation on this, just that even diamonds that are hideously overpriced and rigidly controlled have spawned alternatives. We've got something like that going on with the "limited high speed internet" commercials I've been seeing I suppose, but how long will it take before business and individuals start looking for the government to step in to weigh in on the issue?
1. No servers of any kind - Yikes...I run Apache, email..etc.
2. Not NAT's...well, there goes my wireless network at home..and they want a sur-charge for you to have one?
Are the agreements and enforcement like that with Cox in your area? What area might I ask?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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?
Your gas station analogy is only relevant if there is ONE gas company in town.
I max out my cable connection all the time, and I'm pretty sure there isn't anyone else who is a "power user" on my local loop, since I can max it out at any time. I'll gladly pay for additional bandwidth, but as other have pointed out the cable company doesn't care for savvy consumers.
Too bad for them. They are a utility, like the phone and power companies, and with the privileges of being a utility (right of way, subsidies, tax breaks, etc.) come responsibilities. It isn't a matter of being selfish, it is a matter of getting the service we are entitled to.
They own the phone lines too?
Cable is a monopoly, but if you can get DSL, you can get multiple ISPs to vie for you as a customer. Well maybe not fight over you, but at least you will have a choice of evils. If you can't get DSL yet, start asking for it. The squeaky wheel and all that.
Now I am stuck in the sticks with an ancient baby-bell who happens to own an ISP. My sDSL is reasonable, "unlimited", and reliable. It may be unlimited because I am on as a business customer; but honestly, they never mentioned usage, and I neverhad reason to ask.
My line is limited to 768 because of the distance from the DSLAM. But I get an honest 768 both ways, and a static IP. My neighbor has the telco vault right across the street from his house, and he is running nominal 768 but claims he peaks out at higher. Neither of us have AUP issues, no problems with bandwidth. I am constantly downloading ISOs of some *nix distro, I grabbed Solaris9 twice, since I was half asleep and DLed the 5 sparc CDs. After they were down, I read sparc in the filename, so I slurped the intel version. That was 6gb in one morning!
Not sure how my ISP treats the average user closer to civilization. I know their infrastructure is different for home users in town, they use PPOE and a multi ISP service called ConnectTime to manage their users. Total different subnets than us Country bumpkins. About three different ISPs offer DSL in town, all have different pricing, and all use ConnectTime to serve the network.
So do some research, and be an informed consumer, be a loud, cranky consumer. It is your money, make them earn it.
Telstra, the national ISP, charges less/not at all (can't remember) for bandwidth that is used WITHIN the country and not to the rest of the world.
So somehow, they are doing it.
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 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 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.