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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
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.
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.
--
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.
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.
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!
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?