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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."
perhaps this should be a marketing point for DSL providers. "DSL: the bandwidth you pay for is really yours."
Comcast says that only .01 percent of its 11.5 million residential high-speed Internet customers fall into this category.
ONLY 1,150 customers are at risk of being cut off?
Comcast has an interesting definition of "common carrier". I wonder if the courts will agree with it...
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Ok. You buy a 1 year subscription to a 3Mbps-down/256Kbps-up line. You are told, along with adverts claiming it is an unlimited line.
They disconnect you for unspeakable limits. That is called FRAUD. No ifs ands or buts.
If they cant maintain profitability on selling those lines for whatever they do, too bad. Not my problem. if they can only sell 512Kbps sync and keep it truthful and honest, all the better.
If the telcos DSL circuits can do it, why not the "Pig"?
I got my Internet access cut off by a local DSL provider a little while back because of a sudden bandwidth spike. They had noticed that my account had suddenly gone to the top of their bandwidth-usage chart and stayed there. They informed me that the account had been suspended because of a "probable virus infection". At first I thought that they were just having problems with (legitimate) torrent use, but I did have a Win2K box up at that point to run some software my wife needed for work. Lo and behold, despite patches and security, the box had been owned. I told them I had taken the 2K box off-line (booted it back into Linux and the other box was a Mac) and they immediately reactivated the account.
I find it ironic reading stories like these where an unlimited account is told his account is in fact limited. My own broadband account is supposedly limited to 30GB a month, at which point I'd effectively be capped to 56k speeds. At the time I started the account broadband had only just been introduced and uptake was slow, the ISP said the limit most likely wouldn't be enforced for a few months. It's now over 3 years later and I've not once been capped, despite going over the 30GB limit numerous times, quite possbly 11 months per year (to give you an idea, I've downloaded nearly 2GB today). This includes P2P, various media streams, and everything else from HTTP and FTP to games etc.
/. who work for ISPs, any chance of a confirmation/denial on my theory?
The thing is, I do 90% of this downloading between 11pm and 7am, using timed download managers and just starting P2P software before I go to bed. It seems logical (to me at least) that the ISP is internally using come kind of tariff system to downplay the effect of my broadband usage at off-peak times when I'm basically not affecting contention ratios or anything else. If such a system were being used in this case it could also explain why the ISP is unable/unwilling to provide a hard limit on bandwidth. There must be dozens of people on
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
You work for time warner? Cause I have had issue with them and both times I've been told it was listed on the CD that came with the internet, I had to click yes to install the software. I should have read it.
I then replied that I didn't install the software because I don't want your stuff on my computer. And the other time, I simply reply, your installer loaded the software and clicked on everything. Did he agree to something On your behalf?
both times, the issues were taken care of with the asumption that I knew better now. But you sound a lot like the guy who asumed I clicked on something.
Now verizon, they specificly told me one thing to take their service out and then told me another afterwards. I specificly asked them on the service's uptime because I was going to run a server on it. I specificly asked them if there was a problem with that and they said no and asured me they had good uptime. I also have this on recording. Now when I got my pachage to install the service, there was a letter with my DSL contract in it. It says in the contract that I'm not allowed to run any server of any kind on the conection. I called and asked about it, They said it was the standard agreement and wouldn't do anything about the server because we had spoken directly about it. Of course i recorded this too.
So, I am waiting for someone to say something this time and I will just take them to taks for it. Although, My service with verizon has been better then with Time Warner and the uptime has been better (for my area). No complsints so far (from me or them).
If it's any consolation to anyone, I have a 100Mb fiber optic link (full duplex) at my house.
Never been hit for any extra charges, probablly do a couple hundred Gigs of data transfer a month on average up and down.
No torrents here.. way to slow.
Way back when suprnova was up, I grabbed a torrent of some new game to try out. I left it running overnight for the download only to find that, after I got home from work the next day, I had transfered over 1Tb in the space of about 10 hours. (I have to order all my games via amazon so for me, testing before waiting a week or so to receive something I might not ever play again is worth the risk).
Anyways, bandwidth isn't a problem here in Japan...
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"