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Broadband Providers' Hidden Bandwidth Limits
An anonymous reader sends us to the Boston Globe for a story that will come as a surprise to few here: broadband suppliers will cut you off if you download too many bits. It tells the stories of several Comcast users who were warned — without specifics — that they were using "too much" bandwidth, then had their accounts summarily cancelled. Looking into the future: "...even if only a tiny fraction of customers are downloading enough to trigger the policy, that will probably change as more entertainment moves to the Internet."
I hear this from Shaw and Cox users all the time, they're getting shitograms from the ISP over their heavy bandwidth usage. Well, Verizon's never bitched at me and I have full uplink running almost 24/7. This was true even when I had a residential line.
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
Well, we got it in writing from them when we signed up a 2 year agreement. We made sure that they didnt care if we used every last BYTE we paid for in our connection.
;-) we kept up a 60% up/down on average. Nobody cared.
Not to mention the telcos are common carrier, and immune to the real Mand in the Middle lawsuit attacks.
Like I said before (FP
Not to mention the telcos are common carrier, and immune to the real Mand in the Middle lawsuit attacks.
Not on your DSL line they aren't. They specifically petitioned the FCC to have DSL declared a data service instead of a communications service because the costs of maintaining the common carrier standards on the DSL lines were making it too hard to compete with the cable companies.
The CSB (CocksuckingBastards) at TWC(TimeWarnerCable) with Roadrunner "Quarantined" our modem because of bandwidth usage. Needless to say I was outraged and am still strongly considering a switch to ADSL. Oh, and they've still ignored my request for a copy of their TOS EULA and Fair Use policies. Their service sucks, it goes down randomly, and I've had more intelligent conversations with a rock than with their support centers.
In the end, the only thing that matters is how much fun you had.
Dude, expect more than a letter from you ISP talking about upload caps...
You have almost 3000 comments, and your number is lower than mine, so I know you're not new around here. That letter from your ISP is a precursor to being sued by the RIAA/MPAA. It means they've subpoenaed your ISP for your name and address based on your IP address. Your ISP is doing you a solid by letting you know they've give up your name. (I don't believe they're legally required to do so.) Expect more unfriendly mail in the near future. Best of luck to you.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
I'm glad to see this finally on Slashdot. I've been pushing for Comcast to provide full disclosure since I was terminated. I didn't have DSL in my area until last Monday so now I'm not dealing with 28.8 speeds. While this may be legal, I'm hoping Comcast will come clean. I really appreciate Carolyn from the Boston Globe for publishing the story. There are many other articles coming from various consumer advocate groups in the next couple months so stay tuned.
Since Comcast disconnected me in january, I've found dozens of people who have been disconnected across the country. What's amusing is Comcast is untilling to disclose what "Acceptable Use" is. They only point to their AUP/TOS on their web site and tell you to read it and follow it. Cox Communications and other reputable providers will tell you what Acceptable is in real numbers (50 Gigs a month, 80 Gigs and so on). Comcast will ONLY tell you an example of what Abuse is.
They say an abuser downloads 256,000 photos or 30,000 sounds or 13 million (that's right, million) emails a month. So on my blog I posted what Comcast is saying in english. Abusers of their system are downloasing around 200-250 Gigs a month which is 100 times more than their "average" user. So the average user is only downloading about 1 - 2 Gigs a month. Hardly using the service in my book. Not really streaming video, purchasing movies from Amazon.com Unbox or anything. If you purchase 2 HD-DVD videos from Amazon and download them then you are already violating AUP/TOS with Comcast. Tonight I've updated my blog to include stories of other's who are providing videos for download online.
I've posted my story on the web at my blog. I'm hoping to get the word out and have people look at fiber networks such as Utopia. Their fiber infrastructure provides choices. If a company (such as Comcast) is abusing customers, they can choose another. Of course having a 1 gig pipe to the house is also faster than anything Cable can provide. Must be why Verizon is rolling out FiOS.
Anyway, Major Kudos to Carolyn at the Boston Globe!
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
Plans start at 300 meg / month (yes meg a month) with a charge of $150 per MEG if you go over. That's one of the REALLY stupid ones from Telstra.
Then we have various 1, 5, 10, 20, maybe 50 GB plans, each of which will be "shaped" back to 64kb, and because you aren't actually charged for what you can suck out of 64 k, they have the cheek to call "unlimited".
Some people have access to ADSL2, but most of us are limited to 1500/256, or if we're REALLY lucky, 8000/512!
AFAIK, there is no such thing as a truly unlimited plan, and the few that go close have a caveat that if you're in the top 3% of downloaders, you'll be shaped.
Cable, where available, has similar limits, BTW.
Will those of you who think that you know what you are doing, get out of the way of those of us who know what we are doi
No. 11500000 * .01% = 11500000 * .0001 = 1150 ;)
Do you work for Verizon?
[insert witty comment here]
You are missing a very slight difference:
While Shaw has higher limits in their advertising, they enforce them as soon as you go over: I had phone calls, disconnections, etc.
Meanwhile Telus advertises a limit of 30 GB on regular high speed, and i have download well over 150 without incident.
Shaw employee i'd guess? Because if you've used both, you'd realize who has the higher enforced limit
Those ISOs are relatively light-weight in terms of xfer overhead. You can pull them down all day and not get any attention, but if you start anything that even barely reeks of streaming or multi-media, you'll trigger a flag that puts you in line for being throttled back.
I call shenanigans. I've worked for an ISP on more than one occasion and the method you speak of consists of analyzing every single byte of every single user in real time and that's simply not going to happen.
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
I used to run an ISP, back in the day. When I became aware that some hosting services providers were capping bandwidth and charging per unit of served data, I started to do a few calculations.
.1831 GBps, or 10.986 GB/min, or 659.16 GB/hr, or 15819.84 GB/day, or 474,595.2 GB/mo.
.0003 USD per megabyte of data, no? Three hundreths of a cent for a megabyte. When I realized these figures, it just didn't seem...honorable...to charge users for the piddling little amounts of traffic generated by their servers.
.01% of their subscriber base. The estimates tell us that the abuser consumes 200 GB/mo, the average user 2 GB/mo. So, of their stated 11.5 million customers, about (and I'm not actually a statistician, so forgive me, here) 1150 are consuming a total of 230,000 GB/mo, while only paying for a bit less than half of that, or 99665.9 GB/mo. Meanwhile, Comcast is collecting 26 USD/mo from the other 11,498,850 customers, who are paying for a grand total of 996,559,334.1 GB/mo.
/bin/sh load of money, which of course is actually the case. According to what I see on Yahoo! Finance, in the trailing twelve months, Comcast, as a company, made a profit of 2.24 billion USD on revenue of 24.97 billion USD. Are they honestly claiming that they can't make their network perform? Boo fscking hoo. Not all of Comcast is an ISP, but they soon will be. Better string that fiber a bit faster, boys...
Hmm, let's see. A typical T1 line delivers data at the rate of 1536 Kbps (don't bother about the extra 8Kbps, OK?). So, that's 1536000 / 8 / 1024 ^ -2, or a whopping
That's over 474 Tera-frickin-bytes with a capital B every month. On a single T1.
Now, back in the day (mid 90's), a top-tier provider T1 Internet access port cost, what--say, 1500 USD/mo including the local loop? For the math-inclined but time-challenged, that's about
I think the cost structures of a company like Comcast might offer them some economies of scale, but hey, let's be generous here and give them the benefit of the doubt. Let's say Comcast has to get all of it's backbone bandwidth from T1's, and they have to pay another provider for it. Let's say that the average Comcast Internet customer pays about 52 USD/mo for the dubious privilege (which is about what they actually charge here in New Jersey, the last time I looked). We'll take that 52 bucks and give up half in administrative overhead. So, our 26 USD/mo buys us 86.666 GB of data each and every month.
Now, Comcast would have us believe that their average user consumes according to the estimates here, about 1% of the data that so-called abusers consume. Comcast admits that these abusers make up approximately
So, Comcast's revenues from all of this total 299,000,000 USD/mo when, if those "abusers" were paying for their rightful share, Comcast would be making (and here, let's make the abusers pay triple to cover it all) 299,059,800 USD/mo. Is Comcast really going to whine over a loss of revenue of 59,800 USD/mo over a 300 million dollar a month revenue stream? It would appear so!
Now, what was I saying about the cost of backbone bandwidth? Ah, yes...Comcast, having to provide a total of 996,789,334.1 GB of bandwidth a month, needs to install 2100 T1 lines to cover it all. Let's go nuts here and suggest that Comcast actually needs double that to really cover it. So, Comcast pays out 4200*1500, or 6,300,000 USD/mo to cover their backbone (though, of course, not all the traffic actually leaves Comcast's network).
Ergo, in our hypothetical situation here, Comcast is making 292,700,000 USD/mo from their Internet services, while their users are leaving the backbone network at 50% utilization.
And they're complaining about 1150 users losing them 60 grand a month?
Anyone who knows even the slightest little bit about how the Internet works and is paid for can see how patently ridiculous all of this is. Yes, the numbers I'm using here are widly skewed, but mostly in favor of Comcast. Even if you double the costs and halved the revenue here, Comcast would still be making an fscking
Those limits are directly in the pricing, Comcast does not mention them and I believe is using the boilerplate we can cancel you at any time for any reason clause in there terms of service. Hopefully the DPUC's (state level monopoly regulatory comities) will pick up on this in the next round of lets keep the monopoly.
As to pricing from the US, there are three modes, pay for peek megabit delivered on 95 percentile basis, megabyte delivered or statement free. 95th is the most common as it's generally a better deal than megs delivered and statement free requires a lot of footprint in the US and a lot of traffic in each direction. This is the same for US companies except for the tier one providers (tier one meaning statement free and other guy pays peering only) but since there are so many tier one ISP's that can do flat rate pricing it's next to impossible to sell byte limited plans since those same tier one ISP's are also your local DSL provider. It works back to the phone system where the US is one of the few countries where we do not pay extra for local calls even to mobiles with local numbers and that has translated into our ISP's. Really for the teir one players a DSL or cable customer is the small cost of the local connection and then the general cost of running there network and constantly expanding it though thats generally one time charges for cap x to get new faster line cards and / or more channels of DWDM on the fiber they already own or lease.
No sir I dont like it.
Not in this part of the world (also known as Sweden), if you buy a connection without quota (such connections does exist but they are very rare) you won't be limited.
Of course, a lot of users might saturate the backbone link but that's another story.
Like the company Bredband2/Labs2 that offered 1Gbps-connections (not sure they do that anymore) to home users in a
few cities. No realistic user would expect to be able to fully burst that connection all the time.
No, not really, most of it is dark fiber. It is corporate greed. This becomes far more apparent if you travel to Asia (Just a couple of hours flight time away) Without wanting to sound like I'm dissing my own country, Australians are drip fed technology by a small number of corporate players.
GSM is a good example - SS7 being a rather essential component, SMS happens to be part of the payload running over that beast. Given the cost of phone calls and monthly rental charges, the rate to send 1 text is a very tiny fraction of a cent. How much do they charge? When I left Australia it was somewhere around 25 cents per message. No idea what it is now. Here in Asia for about $5AUD I can send an unlimited number of messages per month.
I sometimes wonder if it is simply because the masses have no idea how the technology really works, or they are *ahem* to apathetic to care.
The fiber running between
well I work at an ISP atm (tho a small one and in a country most of you don't know exists). there is a lot of hardware out there that shapes traffic. currently we're using Allot Netinforcers. They are funny in the way that they can input rules like 1. max 20 P2P session per IP. 2. high priority download from speedtesters around the world. (so the customer always thinks he has uber speed) 3. have different rules for ip ranges. (buisnesses that pay more get more) 4. down throttle P2P upload. (what ISP really has any wishes that other people can download "mostly illegal stuff" from their net) 5. high prio on HTTP Streaming. and it all works in real time.
However, the ISP is _really_ screwed by their upstream. If they want to sell generic ISP service to anyone in the UK, then they pretty much have only one choice - pay BT for a 'central pipe' - this is a virtual pipe that goes from the linecard at your local exchange, to the ISPs NOC.
For this 622mbit/s pipe, the ISP is charged the very scary number of 150K pounds per quarter.
This is about 70 megabytes/second, once all the layers (ATM, IP encapsulation, maximum pipe loading) is taken into account.
Per month, this comes out to almost exactly 200000 gigabytes.
That is - assuming traffic patterns were ideal, it costs well over 50p per gigabyte to get that traffic back to the ISP. Letting users max out 8mbit lines will cost you over 3000 pounds per month in bandwidth bills alone _PER USER_.
Assuming half revenue they get goes to bandwidth providers, half on staff, and half in 'profit' - that's around 3000/6 - 500 'regular users' paying the bills for one heavy user, before you start seeing _any_ possible profit.
Of course, most users will not do this.
But, even 30 gigabytes per month means that the ISP is certainly subsidising you, unless you're paying well above the normal market rates, or are in an area dense enough that it pays the ISP to install equipment in each exchange.
In the UK, SMS messages used to be free. Then they started to realise just how popular they were, and started charging - I seem to remember this being around the time they enabled cross-network texting.