How Much Broadband Usage is Too Much?

Semprini2k asks: "I just came home from work to find a letter waiting in the old snail mail box from my Broadband ISP. It has very nice titling on it: 'Notice of Acceptable Use Policy Violations' and also has an 'Abuse Ticket Number' associated with it. Has anyone else received these from their Broadband ISPs lately? Are they being overly cautious or are they working towards throwing off any users who might possible tax their network? I am trying not to be paranoid about this, but what are other people seeing and/or doing in this situation?" The "proper" bandwidth is liable to vary by region, but it would be interesting to note usage patters of people who are getting these letters versus those who aren't.

"'Oh, no!' I think to myself, 'They think I'm a spammer!!!' But further reading sheds more light on the subject:

According to our aggregate bandwidth usage records, during December 2003 your [...ISP...] account exceeded [ISP's] bandwidth usage limitations. The activity associated with your account was more than 100 times the national median. This level of activity violates [ISP's] AUP.

"I freely admit to using a lot of bandwidth. From the day Fedora Core was released via BitTorrent I have kept an active BitTorrent session going to help others get it too. So I find this a bit of a concern.

I called their toll-free number to inquire whether I could get access to their data. No, I cannot. All I can do is try to use less bandwidth and hope I do not see any more of these letters. 2 more and my service will be terminated."

Comments

Read their AUP

[grub]

It has very nice titling on it: 'Notice of Acceptable Use Policy Violations'

Look through their AUP and see if what you are doing is indeed a violation. I had a warning via email several months back from my (cable) ISP which claimed I was using "above average" amounts of bandwidth even though they advertised "unlimited" when I signed up years back. I replied to the supplied human-read address saying basically "An average is made of of highs and lows, right?" to which I never had a reply or a warning since. That may just be coincidence but I do generate a fair amount of traffic...

Re:Read their AUP

[arkanes]

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.

Re:Read their AUP

[altstadt]

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?

Re:Read their AUP

[Exitthree]

By definition, half of their customers are using above median bandwidth. In a case with an average, one user using 10 GBs of bandwidth and nine users using 1 GB of bandwidth, the average is 1.9 GB/user. One user is above average, and the rest are below.

Re:Read their AUP

[grub]

...we could get a court ruling that invalidated those obnoxious "we can change any facet of this agreement at any time" clauses...

Those things are no more than a glorified bait & switch put to paper.

When broadband was rolling out everyone was advertising as 'always on' and 'unlimited'. Well, they signed up millions of people after which they decide to change the rules. A lot of these ISPs keep their customers by means of inertia and little else.

Re:Read their AUP

[ron_ivi]

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

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

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.

Re:Read their AUP

[arkanes]

All you really need to do is just not oversell capacity. Then your costs and allowances are fixed, you know exactly how much you need to clear to make a profit, and theres no real worries with "power users". Take it slow and upgrade capacity as you grow your customer base and you'll be able to make a steady profit without having to send out all these letters and having annoying AUPs.

Re:Read their AUP

[SQLz]

Unlimited does not mean 'Unlimited Bandwidth', it means your account is not metered by time.

The term was created when ISPs started to charge flat rate monthly prices instead of the traditional 'by the minute' model that the three big players, AOL, Compuserve, and Prodidy were using at the time.

I think hey could have chose a better term but they didn't.

Re:Read their AUP

[jusdisgi]

Ok...no problem. We won't oversell our ADSL bandwidth at all.

Now...about your bill. That 768/128 line is going to cost, oh...$300/month.

Oh, yes...and I really do work for a small ISP, and our cost for our outbound bandwidth really is $500/mbps.

Not overselling bandwidth would be the stupidest thing any ISP ever did. It would make it absolutely impossible to profit. This thing only works because at any given moment only 5% of our customers are downloading.

Re:Read their AUP

[johnmearns]

Most broadband isp's sell their home service packages as a "best effort" service, where they will try to meet that speed, but they won't guarentee it. If you want guarentees you're going to have pay alot more money, just like they do. SLA's aren't for $30 a month plans.

Re:Read their AUP

[arth1]

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

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

It's worse than you think. I'm a Cox customer, and according to their revised AUP (not that I had to sign anywhere to accept the new rules) the customers aren't even allowed to use on average 56k6 modem speed over a month! If you calculate, you'll find that you have to throttle your connection to around 3kB/s to not exceed their limits for what's "abuse". Oh, and they don't have any CIR or guaranteed minimum speed. They sell the service on the *peak* speed, which you can't use a fraction of for any length of time.
They also block various ports, sometimes even both ways (which means they'll randomly block ports needed for legitimate return traffic).

This is sold as "High Speed Internet", and costs you $50 per month ($40 if you also purchase other services from them).

It's not high speed, and it's not Internet. Some legislation is needed, because this is slipping out of control. The cable companies clearly abuse the near monopoly they have in many market areas.

--
*Art

Re:Read their AUP

[Jerf]

In fact, a typical distribution is indeed exponential, so in real life many fewer then half their customers will be above average. The cited example is very close to reality.

The fallacy of course lies in the implicit idea that if you get rid of all of the "above average" customers, you won't still have "above average" customers. ;-)

Still, eliminating or significantly reducing the bandwidth used by as few as 50 or 100 people can significantly improve the performance of the system for many, many thousands of others. (Without going into details I will claim without evidence that I've seen the numbers in a real life example to back this up.) If those thousands of others are experiencing difficulties and complaining (and subsequently terminating service), guess who's gonna get it?

It may suck if you're one of the 50 or 100 people, but if you look at it abstractly, there's nothing else an ISP can possible do. Not even increase the bandwidth, since things like Gnutella and Bittorrent can grow their bandwidth use to match the expansion. Sooner or later, the top folks need to curb their use, and for better or for worse, the ISP folks will have to be the heavies.

FWIW, they don't necessarily enjoy it, it's just the way life is.

Re:Read their AUP

[Cpt_Kirks]

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...

Re:Read their AUP

[override11]

The whole complaint isnt overselling, its the false advertising involved. If you have a bandwidth cap, or a transfer limit, speak up when I sign up so I know!

Re:Read their AUP

[ringmasta]

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.

Re:Read their AUP

[Junior J. Junior III]

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.

Re:Read their AUP

[ringmasta]

Well, I certainly can't speak for any other ISPs wandering around. I do know that at the ISP I work for, our transfer limit on ADSL circuits is clearly stated in the service contract that you must sign before the circuit is ordered. Not, of course, that it stops people from complaining about us infringing upon their god-given rights to use hundreds of dollars worth of bandwidth for fifty bucks a month.

Re:Read their AUP

[warpSpeed]

A lot of these ISPs keep their customers by means of inertia and little else.

That and being hog tied to thier email addresses. That is the one reason that I hear the most.

Re:Read their AUP

[j-turkey]

I'm a Cox customer...They also block various ports, sometimes even both ways

I just wanted to sound off on what a horribly lame policy port blocking is. Both Cox and Earthlink block outbound port 25 (Earthlink blocks for both dialup and broadband customers). While I can understand the reason for bocking these ports (preventing mail abuse) -- I find the practice both deceptive and ineffective.

It's ineffective because spammers can just run mail servers on different ports (although it may help with abuse of open relays, but many spammers are far beyond this). I have to run an instance of qmail on a weird port so my Earthlink users can connect to my mail server (long story).

I consider the practice deceptive because they advertise and sell their service as an Internet Service Provider. This suggests that they sell service to the entire Internet. I had no way of telling that the ports were blocked until after my users signed up for service. The short of it -- I'll call ISP's before telling employees that the service is supported. Maybe they should start advertising these port-blocking ISP's as pISP's, or Partial Internet Service Providers...or something.

Re:Read their AUP

[Suidae]

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.

Re:Read their AUP

[Bagheera]

Amen, jusdisgi.

Several years ago I worked for a large (who I will leave nameless) ISP who liked to advertise their "Awesome ADSL speeds! Over a 1.5Meg a second down! Guaranteed to our router!"

Why guaranteed only as far as their router? The router in question was a RedBack 1500 with 8000 users provisioned on it, all fed by a pair of OC3's running 145M/Sec.

You do the math. 8000 users expecting 1.5M/sec from 290M/sec worth of pipe?

As you so well point out, the ISP's oversell bandwidth to survive. They know that most users will only use a tiny fraction of their alocation, so most of the time they never realize how bad the situation is.

Also, as other people point out, the ISP's have an interesting way of defining "Unlimited" to mean what they want it to mean - usually something like "Full speed for 5% of the time." Worse, for us users anyway, their business model doesn't WANT users who are savvy. They want Lemmings who'll knock off some emails, do a little surfing, and not use more than a fraction of the advertised bandwidth they're sold.

It's the way the business works.

You want 1.53M/sec bi-directional 24x7 that you can actually USE? Get a T1. Want a decent pipe, at a price per month less than the lease on a BMW M3? Get cable or DSL and be willing to deal with some ISP bullshit from people who don't really want your business unless you're like the other Lemmings...

Re:Read their AUP

[racermd]

You're confusing your units. What they're advertizing is actually 3Mbps - that's 3 megabits per second. (I live in TWC territory, too, and I happen to know one of the RR head-end techs. It's 3Mbps for residential service) Translated into megabytes, that's about 384 kilobits per second. Most programs that show you download speeds (like IE's download window) will give you a reading in bytes, whether that's kilo- mega- or giga-. It's a simple formula, really:

1 byte = 8 bits
Therefore:
1 megabyte = 8 megabits
See the pattern?

A 1 Mbps connection (note, the small "b" indicates bits, not bytes) is a transfer of 1/8th megabyte per second, or 128 kilobytes per second (1024 / 8 = 128)

Extrapolation for additional speeds will be left as an exercise to the reader/previous poster.

Re:Read their AUP

[j-turkey]

Now, it may not sound like a lot to you...but when you have a couple thousand customers and a business to run, it's not a small matter. Our average ADSL customer uses less than 200MB of transfer each month.

Not to get into the middle of this flamey exchange -- but I'm not sure that I agree with your argument here. It really sounds like a case of shitty financial/price modeling and a market which no mom & pop ISP should touch with a 10 foot pole. It's not your end user's fault for using the service to it's capacity. It's your company's for improper planning

Think about it this way: When these larger companies developed their pricing models, they developed them with an assumption of a certain amount of data transferred per month. All of the big players advertised and sold unlimited use. Now, if the calculations were all based upon limited use (and their cashflow depends on limited use) -- it's the ISP's fault for not being able to provide the service they advertised.

Sounds like either the big players fucked their calculations up, or the market is evolving. I'm guessing that the latter is probably the case. My best guess is that outliers who use more bandwidth than average were initially calculated into the total cost of bandwidth. With the evolution of the Internet, more users are using more bandwidth. The outliers are now using more bandwidth than they had initially calculated, as well as the average use increasing.

Well -- instead of negotiating better bandwidth rates with their upstream providers (bandwidth's cheap these days), these Tier 3 ISP's (broadband operators) went into panic mode and are now fucking their users over to make ends meet. Not OK. I don't care who you are -- if you alienate your customers, you will lose them, especially with pretty thick competition (and ISP's going under left and right).

Fortunately (for me) TWC has not done this to me yet. I'm a relatively high-bandwidth user (mainly downstream) -- I use BitTorrent, as well as other services that may not be "average", and I do not consider my usage of these services/protocols a violation of my AUP (they don't violate anything I ever signed). The day they try to pull warning letter shit on me -- I'll take 'em to small claims court and slap an injunction on their cancellation of my account. Short of that (if I am clearly violating the AUP that they just changed under me, or if/when they start closing ports), I have no problem with explaining to them why I'm dropping their service like a bad habit. I'll also explain to them that I'll ensure that they lose other business for these practices (naming some publications that I write editorials for as well as popular blogs that I post to). Then, I'll take my dollar and pay a little more for way better service (maybe not as much speed, but definitely a company who won't fuck their customers over).

Anyway, I can't say that I don't sympathize with you. It's a tough business. But then again, why should I get screwed over because your market is shitty. Eventually, someone is going to figure out how to turn a buck and not alienate their customer base (with a reasonable price). As soon as I find that company, I'll sign up right away.

Re:Read their AUP

[EtherMonkey]

I really do work for a small ISP, and our cost for our outbound bandwidth really is $500/mbps.

Bullshit. Your cost for 1.54mpbs (T1) is $500 per month , and a 45mbps (T3) is around $8K/month. That includes the local loop and Internet access. Still, you obviously have to oversell to make a living, but the question is by how much?

This thing only works because at any given moment only 5% of our customers are downloading.

And how do you determine this? Do you actually measure utilization, or just assume? 5% = 20:1 oversell. This may have been fine for dial-up modem, but is it acceptable for always-on service?

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.

Re:Read their AUP

[jusdisgi]

No...our contract is fine, and better than anyone else is offering us.

Our bandwidth also costs us about a third of what it did 5 years ago. But, since we are in a relatively sparsely-populated area in the midwest, bandwidth does cost a *lot* more here than it does in big metro areas, or on the east or west coast.

And that's not the only thing that makes this market such a bitch for us...our LEC charges us $37.50/month for line provisioning on each 768/128 circuit. So...after we charge $54.99/month (yeah, go ahead and gasp at the outrageous expense) we get a whopping $17.49/month. Of this, we liberally figure we make an average of $1 profit.

Maybe this market is making ISP's rich someplace, but it sure as hell ain't here.

Re:Read their AUP

[ringmasta]

But then again, why should I get screwed over because your market is shitty. But, more to the point, why shouldn't you? The underlying principle of any business is to make money. If a business is marketing a product or service that is expensive for them to provide, you can and should expect that these costs be passed on to the consumer. This is a matter of basic economics. If your local gas station has to pay $1.50/gallon for gas to sell to you, they aren't going to sell it at $1.15/gallon. Or, if they do, they won't be in business for long. Why should an ISP be any different? It seems to me as if there is an underlying mentality of "I have a right to use and abuse this connection however I want and not have to pay for it." I'm not sure if it stems from an outmoded view of the internet as it existed 15 years ago, or if it's simply the naturally selfish nature of most people today.

Maybe your machine's been hacked

[Anonymous Coward]

and the hacker is using a lot of bandwidth to relay spam or something

Re:Maybe your machine's been hacked

[ihummel]

Possible, but keeping a Fedora Core bittorrent open since it came out is quite sufficient to explain the warning.

Adelphia Bandwidth Caps and Newsgroups

[Eyah....TIMMY]

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

"Traffic Consumption Allowances: Adelphia has the right to
monitor, measure and report bandwidth consumption by You. Adelphia
reserves the right to establish, modify and/or enforce consumption
allowances at any time now or in the future, with or without notice, and
apply a surcharge for excess usage."

This means they can say at anytime you are downloading too much, without even telling you how much is too much. They don't need to give you any download cap.
I haven't received a letter yet but I have friends who did... people might want to start thinking about limiting their download, especially with the very popular dvdr newsgroups. It does take 5 GIGs of download per movie. You can easily let newsbin download at 300k/s 24/7.

Download wisely...

Re:Adelphia Bandwidth Caps and Newsgroups

[Total_Wimp]

"download wisely" my ass. If they have some mysterious "limit" that they can choose at their whim without even telling you then I would tell them to go to hell.

Check this out:

1. My long distance carrier says I have to pay by the minute and I monitor my usage very carefully.

2. My local carrier says I can have unlimited time on the phone for a flat rate so I don't monitor the usage.

Your broadband carrier essentially promised you number 2 but is treating you like you've got number 1 and you're saying you're more than happy to LIMIT YOURSELF while they continue to imply to new customers that there's no limit.

You're a fool. Insist they give you a posted limit or use as much as you want. Don't limit yourself for their benefit unless they're willing to be straight with you about exactly what you're paying for.

TW

Re:Adelphia Bandwidth Caps and Newsgroups

[Tenebrious1]

2. My local carrier says I can have unlimited time on the phone for a flat rate so I don't monitor the usage. Your broadband carrier essentially promised you number 2 but is treating you like you've got number 1 and you're saying you're more than happy to LIMIT YOURSELF while they continue to imply to new customers that there's no limit.

Not quite. Hook your modem up to #2. How much data can you transfer? A max of 56kbps. You get unlimited connection time, but the amount of data is capped at 56kbps. The same logic applies to "unlimited broadband". You have unlimited connect time, but the amount of data you can send is capped, although this time not by the technical limitations of the line (although you may be capped there as well) but an arbitrary limit set by the ISP to ensure the *average* user has enough bandwidth but still make boatloads of cash.

"unlimited bandwidth"

[Anonymous Coward]

if you have unlimited bandwidth in your contract, you should fax them a copy and stick it to them.

SAVE THOSE CONTRACTS!

[TechnoVooDooDaddy]

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..

Re:SAVE THOSE CONTRACTS!

[BlueGecko]

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.

Re:SAVE THOSE CONTRACTS!

[TrippTDF]

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.

Re:SAVE THOSE CONTRACTS!

[garcia]

oh horseshit, plain and simple. They might not complain but they aren't going to allow that non-sense to work.

ISPs are companies. They have the right to refuse you service AT ANY TIME. That means that if you go over their bullshit, invisible, meaningless number of a download limit then they can shut you off.

No if, ands, or buts about it.

You can scratch this, scratch that, write this, write that, sue, complain, whine to the worthless BBB, whatever. IT DOES NOT MATTER.

They are monopolies giving us no choice but to use them and then they are allowed to refuse us service because we violated some randomly generated number.

Re:SAVE THOSE CONTRACTS!

[debrain]

These clauses may not be enforceable for a couple of reasons. First, there is no consideration to the modification of the contract on your part. Without consideration of both parties, it is not a legally enforceable promise (save a few exceptions). Second, if it fundamentally alters the contract, it can be considered a "fundamental breach", and is equally unenforceable, and you may have a case for their breach. However the remedies for these breaches may be as simple and useless as simply breaking your contract. However, they may be very complex and involve years of compensation, such as how people are now suing Canada Post for the $9.95 internet for life, expecting $23 per month in compensation for lost service.

torrent client

[Anonymous Coward]

Get a torrent client that lets you limit the speed and users, then you can still help but regulate it.

The isps are trying to cut costs.

[Megor1]

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?

Re:The isps are trying to cut costs.

[slash-tard]

This kinda makes sense until you look at the numbers more.

If you cut off the top 1% of your users and sample the remaining it will still look like you should cut off another 1% since they are now the top talkers.

For every porn maniac downloading gigs of porn you have a bunch of other users at the bottom 1% who check mail once a day and thats it.

You will always have a top 1% and a bottom 1% of users. This is just the same as dial-up and all you can eat buffets. If its advertised as unlimited it should be priced with this in mind.

Re:The isps are trying to cut costs.

[Swanktastic]

If you cut off the top 1% of your users and sample the remaining it will still look like you should cut off another 1% since they are now the top talkers.

I think the original poster is saying the ISP is correct to trim the unprofitable customers, not that you should constantly be trimming your top 1%. If you're running a software company and one of your clients is constantly tying up the free tech support line, you might think twice about continuing their contract...

It's a little funny because this turns normal marketing tactics on its head. The 80/20 rule of marketing is that 20% of your customers will require 80% of your volume. This is probably roughly accurate with cable modem service. Normally, companies kill to acquire these 20% (high value customers). However, when you're operating in a fixed fee structure, these are your worst customers and (if they cost more than their incremental revenue) they should be moved out of your franchise.

The problem with providing the carte blanche of true unlimited service is kind of infamous: Proper pricing creates a death spiral. If you raise prices to compensate for increased usage, the only folks left will be the bandwidth hogs. You'll then need to raise your prices even more, but then only the worst offenders will be left. Health Insurance works the exact same way. If prices are very high, only the sickest (most expensive customers) will remain on a plan because the price is still advantageous for them. This in turn makes cost of coverage higher. and so on...

Comcast

[mekkab]

I just got an email from comcast saying "we've upgraded your broadband connection at no extra charge! Just unplug your cablemodem, wait 60 seconds, and then reconnect!"

Has anyone else gotten one of these? Maybe its just my area got an upgrade, but it seems you and I have far different ISPs.

Re:Comcast

[slash-tard]

Yes comcast is doing this all over, I can download at 350K/sec now up from about 250.

Comcast still sends these warnings out. They are trying to get more customers, they just want customers that dont use it much. From what I understand the policy and warnings seem to happen more in certain areas though.

Re:Comcast

[foobar77]

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.

Re:Comcast

[LostCluster]

This is a national effort by Comcast to raise their rated speed from 1.5 Mbps to 3 Mbps downstreams. In communicating with my own dedicated server at a fast hosting company, I've actually had sustained transfers at 3.75 Mbps. They are really rolling out a good upgraded network.

Check the fine print

[Stonan]

When you signed up there should have been a terms of service agreement. If there's nothing stated about the bandwidth limit then you have nothing to worry about. I live in BC and had the same thing from my ISP. I asked them to show me the document that stated what the limits were. They said they didn't have anything in print so I told them they didn't have a leg to stand on. Cut me off and I'll take you to court.

Has anyone with a DSL account gotten these emails?

[sllim]

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?

Cap your BT upload?

[theRhinoceros]

How about

btdownloadcurses --max_upload_rate ($something more reasonable)?

Challenge them.

[wowbagger]

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!

Re:Challenge them.

[Tenebrious1]

Which does not mean that clause has any validity in court - I could put a clause in a contract requiring you to wear a rubber duck on your head when you sleep. However, should you challenge it in court, it would most likely be held to be unenforcable.

Yeah, but since most people can't afford the monetary risk of going to court, they'll just wear the duck and curse under their breath.

Bittorrent

[Mancide]

It's nice you are sharing legal software with others. Kudos to you. But don't expect them to beleive this is nothing illegal, and don't expect them to allow you to pay $49.95 or whatever for 100 times the average. I'm sure if you were 2 or 3 probably even 10 times the average, you'd be ok, because, after all it's an average. But when one or two people are sending that much traffic over their network, it's raising their cost, and eating into everyone's pocket, because the only way to recover would be to raise all subscribers prices.

If you have another choice for a provider, check their AUP. If not, either accept the terms of the AUP and not leave Bittorrent open for the whole month, or go back to dailup.

Remember, you don't have a right to broadband, so use it wisely.

Your Provider

[Marnhinn]

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?).

Time to get smart about your bandwidth...

[synth7]

... and set up a shaper on your ISP link that slows down your outbound BitTorrent traffic. Me, I use a SmoothWall box with a regular old Wondershaper script. Keeps my DMZ traffic in line (so it doesn't choke my isp link) and works well enough for a system that you don't have to twiddle the knobs on too much.

(Yes, I read the docs for tc, and I'd love to have an HTB shaper instead of the standard qdisc one I use, but I'm too busy to spend that much time for the small advantages a truly custom firewall box would offer.)

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

[Kenja]

Why not just tell Bittorrent to stop using as much bandwidth? There are many torrent clients out there that let you controll the amount of upload and download traffic you allow. I use BT++ myself and have had no issues at all.

My ISP

[schnits0r]

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).

Broadband

[Crazieeman]

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.

Outside of the US??

[millahtime]

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??

What services are you using?

[supabeast!]

I have a question for people who get these messages: What services are you using all of the bandwidth for? I know that I usually pass the two and three gigabyte limits many providers are enforcing with my cable modem, but mine is spread around all over the place-in other words, I'm not using P2P apps or downloading a whole lot of iso images via FTP. For those of you who are getting letters, what are you doing with the bandwidth, and how much of it are you using to download movies/software/music without paying for it?

Time Warner's Road Runner Limits

[rayzat]

It has happened a couple of times now where my cable modem has just stopped working, when I give TW a call they say it is because I have downloaded an excessive amount of data and should stop, because I was most likely downloading music, which I wasn't I was downloading massive waveforms from work. I asked what acceptable was, they responding with Road Runner is inteneded to give people constant access to email and regular webpages. streaming media and mp3's should not be downloaded with roadrunner. Go figure, broadband is for the stuff a modem can get in seconds.

Capping sucks

[Per Wigren]

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.

Cox Cable

[WTFmonkey]

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

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

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

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

As I have mentioned before...

[teamhasnoi]

due to some missed upgrade of my DSL modem, my download and upload speeds have been reversed. I u/l at 760 and d/l at 128.

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.

Your PC

[chunkwhite86]

"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?"

FYI- I've been using your PC to relay spam for about a year now. Just let me know what the acceptable use limits are and I'll cap my uploads accordingly. Thanks.

Re:Throttle, don't limit.

[ldspartan]

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

FTP servers

[Black Pete]

I used to run a FTP server on my home machine so that I'd be able to put my personal and work stuff on it, so I'd have a handy way of shuttling files back and forth between my home and work computers.

Well, one day I found in my InBox a nice little email from Shaw (main ISP for cable modems in western Canada) complaining that I was currently using more bandwidth their business users, and "to keep things fair" please consider either switching over to a business payment plan, or to turn off all P2P programs (assuming I was warezing mp3's, no doubt). They said that I'd been downloading about 37GB and uploaded about 20GB.

Needless to say, I was quite flabbergasted. I quickly checked my FTP logs, and sure enough, there was a whole bunch of mysterious IP addresses who connected to my FTP server, and had been using it as a Warez Joint over the past couple of days. I quickly shut down the FTP server and moved over to an encryption-based system instead.

So that was one example where a bitch-fest from the ISP actually help me quickly shut down a problem :P

Re:FTP servers

[GoofyBoy]

>and had been using it as a Warez Joint over the past couple of days.

The same thing happend to me.

I just created a new ftp folder "upload_pr0n_here_please" and deleted the rest.

Sympatico Canada

[addie]

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.

Comcast's AUP

[x_man]

Here are some snippets from Comcast's AUP. Say farewell to free speech:

(ii) post, store, send, transmit, or disseminate any information or material which a reasonable person could deem to be objectionable, offensive, indecent, pornographic, harassing, threatening, embarrassing, distressing, vulgar, hateful, racially or ethnically offensive, or otherwise inappropriate, regardless of whether this material or its dissemination is unlawful;

>>If we don't like you or your opinions, we can pull the plug.

You must ensure that your activity (including, but not limited to, use made by you or others of any Personal Web Features) does not improperly restrict, inhibit, or degrade any other user's use of the Service, nor represent (in the sole judgment of Comcast) an unusually large burden on the network.

>>BitTorrent? You're one of those hackerz aren't you? *Snip*

Full link is here:
http://www.comcast.net/terms/use.jsp

Re:Has anyone with a DSL account gotten these emai

[wowbagger]

Most DSL connections are charged per GB of transfer.

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.

Let me guess real hard here... Comcast Right?

[Fallen Kell]

Ok, here is the deal. Comcast has been sending these out over the last few months. There are several HUGE discussions ongoing right now at dslrating.com in these forums. (sorry, I don't have the time to find and link to them). Basically the jist has been that the people they are sending these out to are ones that do not have an alternative source for broadband (or at least a "competitive source"). This is the only real trend that people have been able to discover. The other trend is that unless you SEVERLY DECREASE your downloads (i.e. basically pull out the plug from your connection for the next 3 weeks for 24 hours a day), you will most likely be terminated and/or forced to pay an additional fee and deal with their support people (well not really the support people but their violations people). The main complaint is that they are advertizing as unlimited downloads, when in fact they mean "read your email and browse to cnn.com, and/or msnbc.com, but if you do anything else with your bandwidth you will be violating the TOS". But like I said, it seems to be targeted at areas that do not have alternatives like DSL or other cable modem broadband services (because they would definitly lose their customers in those areas).

Re:what's the median???

[mantera]

well... i think what's most interesting about it is that they use the "median"... now guys, remember your statistics... there are 3 kinds of an "average" value; the mean, the mode, and the median... the mean is essentially what is commonly understood as an average, which is the sum of values in a distribution divided by the number of values, then there comes the mode, which is the value that occurs the most in a distribution, and then there's the median, which is simply the middle value in a distribution... the median is the least useful expression of an average and is rarely used except in certain situation because, say out of a 100 values you have 98 * 5, 1 * 3 and 1 * 1, this will leave you with a median of 3!... now that'd leave you with a distribution in which 98% of values are above average!!! (average as defined by the median)...

Cable Modem bandwidth reporting

[interiot]

If you're a cable modem user, it's very likely that your cable modem supports reporting all sorts of statistics over SNMP. If you can look at these numbers, they're very likely to be the exact same numbers that your ISP is looking at. DocsDiag prints out SNMP cable modem info in a nicer format than usual. But more importantly, it includes a lot of helpful info on hooking up to the cable modem to begin with. In some cases, you may have to google or search dslreports to get the community string for your ISP, but other than that, it's all on that page.

After that, you can go further and use the raw snmp tools to write perl scripts which do pretty graphing or logging or whatever. In my case, with a InsightBB cable modem, these two commands display the total number of bytes in and out:

• snmpget 149.112.50.65 ihkstk88 interfaces.ifTable.ifEntry.ifInOctets.3
  snmpget 149.112.50.65 ihkstk88 interfaces.ifTable.ifEntry.ifOutOctets.4

(where "ihkstk88" is insightbb's community string, 149.112.50.65 is the hard-coded internal IP that my cable modem responds to)

Re:Has anyone with a DSL account gotten these emai

[Just Some Guy]

Nope. However, at one point, my ISP decided that not enough users accessed their Usenet server to bother maintaining it. I was not prepared to give up my news browsing, so I volunteered to host their newsfeed for no charge - as long as they took the appropriate steps to get their upstream feed to recognize my little server as a legitimate connection.

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.

Surely only terrorists

[myowntrueself]

would use so much bandwidth?

Normal usage at a broadband WISP

[texchanchan]

The subscribers of the wireless ISP that I work for reach the monthly limit of 5 GB for three reasons:

• Virus, worm, or trojan (malware).
• File sharing software set up with default configuration (thereby becoming a server to the world, usually without knowing it).
• Genuine heavy usage.

When we realize someone is using a ton of bandwidth, we give them a call and see if they know it. About 60% of the time, it has been an infected computer. We get them to run the Symantec cleanup tools, and suddenly their usage drops to invisibility like most other normal customers. Another ~40% have set up a music-swapping program and don't realize they are sending out files all the time. ONE customer turned out to be downloading music all the time. When he saw his usage stats, he upgraded his account to commercial level and everybody was happy.

Among normal users, even gamers and teenage kids whose usage is intermittently high don't reach the limit. Gamers run the graph up briefly, and a download of an ISO runs it up. These people know more or less what they're doing, and are not a problem. It's the clueless being used by outsiders that are the problem, in our experience.

Re:Has anyone with a DSL account gotten these emai

[Malor]

The companies that are fundamentally built around selling you something that they can't actually provide are the ones complaining. A good provider, like Speakeasy, doesn't care what you do with your connection, because they are paying for enough upstream bandwidth to handle your traffic.

Speakeasy doesn't say 'unlimited', they sell you bandwidth, and you can do whatever you want with it. Run servers, do VPN, run Bittorrent 24/7 -- it's all good. It's your bandwidth, you paid for it. As long as it's legal and isn't disruptive to other users, Speakeasy is happy to have you as a customer. (ie, you can't DOS people, spam, or scan/attack networks you don't own/manage, but pretty much anything else goes.)

They're linux-friendly, can do either DHCP or static IPs, have good latency, essentially zero packet loss, and they're happy to HELP YOU share your network connection with your neighbors.

As far as I'm concerned, Speakeasy should be considered the Gold Standard in ISPs. Obviously, they can't reach everyplace cable does, but if you can get Speakeasy and aren't, you may be doing yourself a disservice. Yes, they're probably a little more expensive than your current provider, and you probably won't be able to download as fast as you sometimes can on cable, but you will always get the bandwidth you were promised, you'll get low latency, good support (although the web-based support is pretty slow about responding.... call them if you're in a hurry), and best of all, you'll never get The Letter.

Some local providers can be great, too. Sonic.net in Northern California was excellent when I was there five years ago, and my brother says they're still great now. But national providers, by and large, suck rocks.

BTW, my relationship with Speakeasy is strictly 'I send you money, you give me bandwidth.' Other than that, I'm not affiliated with them. I'm just a very happy customer.

Re:what's the median???

[Dachannien]

Actually, the median in your example would be 5.

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/StatisticalMedian.htm l

Free Broadband...

[fmaxwell]

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.

Cable is shared...

[circusnews]

I don't think that the cable companies care as much about how much bandwidth we are useing, as they do about how other users are being effected by the bandwidth we use. We have to remember that cable (unlike DSL) is a shared resoure, and our useage effects others around us.

I have Cox high speed internet. In my neighborhood, I am one of only 6 people on the cable ring with high speed cable internet (most of my neighbors with broadband either have DSL or use the other cable provider in town, who until last week offered twice the speed as Cox. I live in apt where the other cable co does not service, and DSL is 44.5 feet away...) However, because there are so few other internet users on my ring, I can use as much bandwith as I want without my use really effect any one else on the local ring. For the last 3 months I used well over 40GB of traffic, no letters of complaint, no calls, nothing.

I have a few friends who live on the other side of town that get letters for using over 20GB/month. One of them is a comercial account that specifies they don't have a limit, but they get letters anyways. Their local ring is fairly saturated, and we know neighbors on the ring are complaining of slow speeds. It seems that after every batch of complaints that they take action. YMMV.

Re:what's the median???

[Derkec]

Thanks to all the other posters who corrected what he said about the median. Frankly, the median is one of the most useful measures of 'average' in that it disregards extreme cases on either end. If you take Joe Typical broadband customer and find out what he uses, the median is probably it. Where it isn't as useful is if you don't have a roughly normal distribution, but instead have bimodal or something. For instance if there were a bunch of high end users and a bunch of low end ones, as in:

50*100, 200*95, 50*90, 1*30, 100*15, 100*10, 100*5

In the above case, the median is 30, but that really doesn't tell you much. However, in a normalish distribution you would find the median to be close to a mean calculated without outliers. Let's face it though, without knowing what the distribution looks like, the median isn't very useful, neither is the mode or mean. If we had all three, we might be in better shape, but still fairly in the dark.

I have to imagine that broadband usage is distributed fairly normally and that the median is a quite reasonable measure. It'd be much lower than most slashdotters use, but I'd guess most slashdotters wouldn't use more than a factor of 10 more.

I tend to agree with the ISP though, that if you're using enough bandwidth to satisfy 100 of their average customers, something needs to change. You should either be on a differant plan and pay more, the other customers should pay less, or you need to bring down the usage. Now, if they write bad contracts, feel free to exploit them. Otherwise, they should let you know how much is appropriate usage and ask you to stick to that more often than not. I also feel that if you have to part ways with them, you shouldn't have to pay any "get out of the contract" fees as by leaving you are already doing them a favor.

Simple Solution

[C10H14N2]

Purchase a business-grade account.

That's what I did. They start at just over $100/month from most carriers.

Really, if you're sucking up 300kb/s upstream and downstream every single second of the day, you're transferring a terabit per month. If you think that's only worth $49.95, methinks thou doth protest too much. I mean, really, a 155Mbps OC-3 costs, what, $30k/month? That would support roughly 500 people with a sustained suck of 300kbps. That's about $60 each, meaning your ISP would lose about $5,000 for every 500 users who think they should only pay $0.03/Gb/month. Come on. THREE CENTS Gigabit? Regardless of if they say "unlimited," try to be real here.

You can get a 384kbps synchronous line with a service level agreement from Covad for like $160/month. That's 2Tb/month for $160 or roughly 12Gb/$1 or EIGHT CENTS per gigabit. Oh, the pain, the pain.

Think of how many WinMX/Gnutella/Kazaa users are out there before you think "but I'm an ubergeek, I'm the exception not the rule." Everytime you're using a WiFi hotspot and feel like you're on a 300bps analog modem because there are fifteen !#^%!ing Kazaa idiots sucking up the entire outbound line, just multiply that over your ISP. When you're done, write the stinking $160 check and get over it.

double standards are being called out

[cdn-programmer]

First off - the internet content is clearly dropping because the telecomunications uindustry has found a way to sit on the golden egg and squash it.

Second - it is quite clear that the telecommunications carrier technology is about as computerized as any other aspect of the tech revolution and hense they enjoy the same cost reductions as everyone else. The exception is that these cost reductions are generally not passed on to the customers.

If you look here: Interconnection, Peering, and Settlements You can read a very good analysis of one aspect of the industry.

The problem is that peering arrangements are "negotiated" and the flip side of this is that the organisation with the most power is able to generally impose ineterconnection fees on smaller organisations. This means that your ISP has to pay for bandwidth you use with no regard whatsoever to the cost of providing the capacity or for that matter Who is providing a service to whom

Quoting from the paper: This assertion of role reversal is perhaps most significant when the generic interconnection environment is one of a zero sum financial settlement, in which the successful assertion by a client of a change from client to peer status results in the dropping of client service revenue without any net change in the cost base of the provider's operation. The party making the successful assertion of peer interconnection sees the opposite, with an immediate drop in the cost of the ISP operation with no net revenue change. "

This means that small fish always pay big fish. It was pointed out in an Australia study that when the client of a small ISP sends an email to the client of a large ISP, that the small ISP pays the large ISP for the data transfer. When the client of the large ISP reply to the email then the small ISP pays again for the delivery. At the time this was used to evaluate a review of Australian Perring arrangments. I have not heard the results.

Now - as it applies to you - it means that even though a fiber optic line for instance can easily carry say 100 mb/sec with the use of two allied telesyn ethernet to fiber line drives which cost under $1000 bux and will drive for over 75 km... and even though the cost of 6 pair overhead fibre cable for instance is only about 25% more than copper - and costs less than $1.50 per foot - that the telecomunications company who installs it feels they should be able to charge upwards of $50,000 bux per month for the rent of each "circuit". This is what your ISP faces. Wholesale usary charges.

I calculated a while back that 100baseT is about 2/3 of a T3 (155mb/sec) and on a short haul dedicated circuit to connect our servers for instance to the local backbone - the local telco would recover their total capital outlay in less than a month. Of course - once the data from our servers is in their backbone they can ship it to their customers about as easily as if they had obtained that data from the POP's that connect into the US backbone.

The simple matter is that if we for instance choose to co-locate in the US that our local telcos will be viewed as "customers" of the larger USA carries and be expected to pay very heafty fees to connect via the POP's (Point of Presence - IE a router). On the other hand any content their customer base obtains locally from our servers results in us paying them instead of them paying the USA. So they really try to put the screws on and their "bandwidth charges" would make you choke.

What you are looking at is the consequence of a system that is totally broken and not in anyone's interests... not even the biggest carriers. The reason it is not in the biggest carriers interest is that in order to be the biggest carrier they have to overbuild and take on massive debt that they cannot in many cases handle. This is why PSINET for instance didn't make it.

So we have stupid risks to be the biggest shark and everyo

Comment from an ISP...

[dybdahl]

I know the rules for one ISP that provides "free traffic as long as it doesn't conflict with other terms". This very unprecise definition of "free traffic" should be understood like this:

- They allow some customers to use extreme amounts of traffic compared to how much they pay. The turnover for some customers is as low as $1 per 1000 GByte bandwidth (!).
- A lot of the bandwidth is free, because they are peering with other ISPs, so the customers can actually use enormous amounts of bandwidth and it doesn't cost them anything.
- They don't want to kick customers because of bandwidth usage, because it gives a bad reputation.
- Only those customers that use big amounts of bandwidth that costs them money will get warnings and eventually kicked.
- It differs a lot from market to market (country to country), how many customers an ISP can kick without getting a bad reputation. It also differs, how much bandwidth costs - for instance, bandwidth is much more expensive in Germany than in Sweden and Denmark.

I believe that many other ISPs think the same way. This means that:

- Things like BitTorrent might be more acceptable to ISPs, if more bandwidth stays within the same ISP or to geographically close ISPs which have a higher probability of peering with the user's ISP.
- Since users don't know who their ISPs do free peering with, it can be very difficult to determine, what amount of bandwidth that the ISP doesn't like.

Similar problem in a hotel

[theslashdude]

I had a similar problem in a hotel with High Speed Internet. I had left my machine downloading Red Hat ISO's and when I returned my connection no longer worked. Called tech support and was told that I had been disconnected due to violation of their AUP. It took a lot of pushing to find out that my violation was excessive bandwith usage. I this point a had them fax me their AUP and highlight the portion which I violated. The AUP I received had no mention of excessive bandwith usage. The highlighted section was something along the lines of "anything that results in decreased quality of service for other users".

Re:Bandwidth.

[cdn-programmer]

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

That's absolutely not true.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

It may suck if you're one of the 50 or 100 people, but if you look at it abstractly, there's nothing else [than kicking out a few high-bandwidth users] an ISP can possibl[y] do.

That is absolutely not true.

They can configure their equipment so that, during usage peaks, the heavy user's connection is throttled down to a "fair share" of the currnet bandwidth usage.

(Note that I'm talking about an instintaneous throttling, not a daemon that reconfigures his modem on an hourly basis.)

If the uplink can handle, say, 45 mbps and 45 users are all transferring flat-out, he should get 1 mbps throughput - as should the other 44.

And it is the ISP's job - not the customer's - to configure their equipment so that this happens - and beat on their vendor (or find another) if the equipment can't do it.

Can you throttle it?

[khasim]

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?

We NEED more power users. We must RAISE the avg...

[jellybear]

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.