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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
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
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?
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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!
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.
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]
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?
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.