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To Verizon, "Unlimited" Means 5 GB
Jason writes "For years there have been stories about people getting their unlimited Verizon EVDO Wireless accounts terminated because of excessive data usage, but Verizon never explicitly said that there is a limit. Now if you dive into the terms of the Unlimited Data Service plan they have put a section in that specifically states that anything over 5GB of data usage in a one month period is considered prima facie evidence that you must be downloading movies, and you will be cut off."
And what if you paid for those movies?
Companies are slowing evolving into lawyer-based companies, where they will soon have a whole codebook to define what each word in the dictionary really means. This is all for the money, no doubt.
Sure, "unlimited" is misleading, but the fact that the cost per month is fixed should clue everyone in that the amount of bandwidth is also fixed. Could you really expect to stream down the maximum amount of traffic possible 24/7 and pay the same as checking email once per day? If the price reflected a 24/7 maximum throughput data usage, it would probably cost 2-3 times as much, and then even more if everyone was saturating their connection simultaneously 24/7.
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If I decide to buy several dozen full-quality albums (.wavs) from Magnatune, and go over the 5GB limit, I'll be cut off because they assume that I'm pirating movies?
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
What case? You just posted a bunch of numbers, you didn't say what we're supposed to conclude from that.
Your assumption is where you made your mistake. You pulled 75% out of the air with no basis for doing so. What if bittorrent was 99.9% of the bandwidth used? Your case resting would be completely incorrect.
Someone who's IM'ing 13.5 GB/Month won't be in college long...
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I think it's a pretty bold assumption to suggest that only 75% of that traffic is illegal P2P traffic. Speaking from my own experiences at university i'm sure that figure is more like 90% giving 1,845 x 0.1 x 30 = 5535MB... oh wait... yeah Verizon are crooks.
If you're downloading games and patches, you should probably use your home Internet connection, and not Verizon's outdoor-wireless service. I don't think you really need to download America's Army at the beach.
5 (gigabytes / month) = 15.9494775 kbps. That's a quarter of the dialup speed. You can reach 5 GB/month using your good old 56 kbps dialip connection 6 hours a day on its max capacity. Enough said.
In other news, I pay 25 euros/month for a 8 Mbps down/512 Kbps up unlimited cable line, and I consider it expensive, and plan to change to the competitor that offers a 4M/512K by under 20 euros. God bless Europe.
This isn't limited to mobile phone access. They actually market this as a feasible alternative to DSL and cable. If you go to their product site, you'll find that they advertise that the speeds are comparable to DSL, and they offer a PC card so that you can connect without using your phone. And while they offer the plan cheaper with a 2-year phone contract ($59.99), you'll notice that you can purchase this service for a little more without any voice plan at all ($79.99).
So on the one hand, they're advertising this as an easy and convenient alternative to DSL, while at the same time rewriting the terms of service to make it abundantly clear that it's not intended to compete with DSL. If you're going to be actually using the bandwidth you're paying for ($79.99 is about twice as expensive as a regular DSL line in my area), they want you to get a real DSL setup that can actually handle the advertised bandwidth.
Except that they have corporate lawyers on staff that deal with "annoying" lawsuits like this without really costing them anything. It will cost you 50K - 100K to start unless you are lucky enough to find a very good lawyer (and they will need to be good to go up against Verizon) that is willing to do it on spec. You KNOW the FTC and other government agencies are not going to come to your aid, right???
Of course, the best way to avoid any of this is to avoid advertising "unlimited". Unfortunately, laymen currently define "unlimited" as "at least a little more than I would ever use", and relatively few are ever going to complain about Verizon's and others' like policies.
Lots of consultants and sales people in the company where I work have laptops. These people travel a lot and some (like me) work from a home office. Rather than each of us using an external disk drive to do backups, our laptops have software installed that backs up data from the laptop to a website that is run by a third-party company.
.exe files) from my laptop took about 5 GB. Future backups are incremental, but the initial backup would have put me over the Verizon "unlimited" limit without any movies or MP3 files being involved. It's a good thing I'm with a different ISP.
The initial backup of data (not
In other words, pirate a whole bunch of shit. That's pretty much what everyone assumes when you're downloading 4+GBs a day. It's not surprising that those who steal (excuse me, "infringe copyright") the most are the ones who complain the loudest about how their $39.95 a month should entitle them to a private T3 line with no bandwidth caps.
First: (obligatory IANAL) downloading movies is perfectly legal - uploading them is illegal.
Now for the 5GB limit. Get real. 1 DVD ISO for a linux distro is 4GB alone. I could easily reach this limit in about 20 minutes without even trying, just setting up a new machine. Heck, I'd be willing to bet that just 2 weeks ago, I probably downloaded over 15GB of data in about a 3 hour time frame, and there wasn't a single song, movie, or illegal download involved. And that was only part of 1 day. I'd hate to see what my monthly download was. And let's not forget that all good linux distro downloaders user bittorrent with a share ratio of 1 or greater, so that's also a minimum of 4GB upload.
Heck, is there an upload limit? I upload 8MB pictures for printing at my favorite printing place. I'm sure a 1 day upload of roughly 1GB might raise eyebrows as well?
5GB might have been a realistic threshold in 2000, when everything was a lot smaller. It's ridiculously small today for anyone that actually does anything.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
'' I agree that they should not be allowed to market it as 'unlimited' if it's not, but saying that 5GB is too little is just insane. ''
5 GB is too little when you sell it as "unlimited".
Nobody would complain if they advertised and sold it as "limited to 5 GB per month".
There are many ways to use more that 5GB a month....
Well this makes the typical South African's complaints about a very low 3GB cap seem invalid... (I know users thats able to use more that 50GB / month on local only accounts....)
Sure, right now it's only 'Pirates' hitting these limitations. However next week/month/year it'll be 'Average Joe User' with his . For example, how much bandwidth does the average Vonage user munch? What happens when IPTV starts to hit mainstream?
Whether or not it's "too little" really isn't the issue as far as I'm concerned...
What's too little for one person would be more than enough for another.
The real issue is how they're marketing it; If there is a 5GB limit, then that is a limit... period - hence it is not "unlimited."
I'm sure that it is easier for them to sell it as "unlimited," just like it would make my life a hell of a lot easier if I tell the IRS that I didn't make any money last year and refuse to let them commence their annual financial colonoscopy.
They need to find another name - calling it unlimited is, basically a straight up lie.
If his phone service works anything like my phone, he is probably not downloading /to/ his phone, he's probably downloading /through/ his phone. Windows (and presumably other OSes) sees a phone as an internet connection. My phone can act as a 802.11b access point, or do the same through phone based internet service. I haven't read the license agreement for this fellow's service, but I would assume that to be fair access. Nevertheless, this isn't even the point.
The point is that they advertise the service as unlimited. If it's not unlimited, then that is simply false advertising. We need to hold companies accountable to what they say. And they don't need any help twisting their words to mean the complete opposite of what they say. That have armies of lawyers to do that for them. It is not unreasonable to demand accountability and honesty in the marketplace. Don't let them convince you that it is.
First of all, Vonage hardly uses any bandwidth. It's something like 128kbps, so roughly 16KBps. NO ONE is going to talk 24/7, and even if they did, it's not going to rack up as much bandwidth as say, having several Bittorrents going at once.
Again, with IPTV, there's a realistic limit on how much you're going to watch in a given month. In other words, there is a clear definition of what "unlimited" means in that context. And there's also no way in hell that someone can possibly watch TV 24/7 for an entire month, so that alone is evidence enough to justify that someone is abusing their connection. And let's not forget that the cable company can easily throttle back your general Internet bandwidth in the case that you're using excessive IPTV bandwidth.
Now as far as the people in the article, they are CLEARLY using their cellphones as a general Internet connection for their computers. This is FORBIDDEN by the cellphone TOS unless you sign up for a different plan. I just flat out don't believe that someone used 5GB of bandwidth in a month by checking email and surfing web pages using ONLY their cellphone.
You are dumber than toast. Downloading a movie makes a copy of it. If you're not authorised to make that copy, you're infringing the owner's rights. Just because the MPAA are only choosing to sue uploaders doesn't make downloading legal.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
That is a great thought. Too bad it IS my home internet since I can't get cable or dsl at my house (despite a cable line that was run down my street 6 months ago) and dial-up never got me more than 18kbs. Even EVDO was a stretch and I had to get an external antenna to make it work.
If you can't be good, be good at it!
So many people on this thread are talking about downloading movies, calculating what the average bandwidth of college students is, etc....
What they are not addressing is that most people would be using wired bandwidth for these tasks. Wired bandwidth is relatively plentiful, even with the bottlenecks in the local loop. The capacity in the backbones is mostly restricted by the amount of routing, not the capacity of the fibers, which isn't anywhere near full (hear about all that "dark fiber"? New multiplexers? Hmm?)
On the other hand, if you use wireless bandwidth, you're consuming it from a relatively small pool allocated to a cell. There's only so much you can squeeze out of radio bandwidth, which is why it's such a big deal to the cellular networks when the government auction off another slice of spectrum.
Yes, this is false advertising by Verizon. But the real issue is a minority of idiots spoiling the party for everyone else ; you just can't support those usage patterns over current wireless technologies, not for everyone in the cell. They are quite reasonably ticked off with a minority of the customers degrading their service and making them look bad to the rest.
If you want industrial quantities of bandwidth, you should be using a landline, and paying for it.
In an ideal world, marketing would make it very clear what service you were getting, and people would be more respectful of limited common resources, like radio spectrum.
Actually, this is intended for a laptop as well. It is intended for PDAs and the wireless broadband laptop cards. The TOS also states that it is not intended to be used as a home (broadband) connection replacement. The plan for PDAs is $45 a month and if you have a voice plan with Verizon, the Access card is $60 per month. If you only have the Access card, and no voice plan with them, it is $80 per month. They say that corporate intranet access is acceptable, but if I connected Citrix at work for much more than 45 minutes or so a day, I would be over very quickly.(I also choke my connection) It works well as remote solution for occasional needs, but I could not survive on 5GB per month. For my normal internet access I would need about 10-15 GB per month. Most of this goes to the occasional remote log in for work. I would need much more if I were to want to do fun things like watch gooTube, stream music, or download ... things.
The law is quite muddy in that they want it to be illegal to have it, but there are several exceptions (e.g., medicinal, naval). You are aware that the US Navy is the largest legal hemp grower and consumer in the US?
The reason I say it's muddy is that the federal and state governments are testing how far the federal government's power goes in regulating products that appear to be regulated for political reasons only (the medicinal use vs 0 tolerance).
Personally, I like the Netherlands take on it. Imagine what would happen if it became legal, widely available, and cheap. An entire class of criminal would almost instantly disappear overnight. School children would no longer be approached to get them hooked early. Paper products could be made cheaply from quickly renewable resources. The list goes on, but apparently the "War on Drugs" to profit both the law enforcement and prison industries directly and chemical and timber companies indirectly sells better than economic common sense.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Yes, we do. It's called "Truth in Advertising," and it's part of the Federal Trade Commission's job to enforce that business don't lie about their services. We also have the Better Business Buerue as a watch group to identify unfair and unethical business practices.
Anyone who's had their service dropped by verizon for the 5GB limit, and isn't hosting a pirating service, should be suing verizon under truth in advertising. When you use the word "Unlimited" in big bold letters on the cover of the plan, you can't lie about it in the fine print.
It doesn't matter if it doesn't affect 99.99% of their customers. It's still not unlimited, which is what they're advertising. It is a Big Deal for that 0.001% (higher really) of people who DO go over the value. One of my friends just got kicked off Verizon's service a couple weeks ago. He's a software developer, works at home a lot, and livs in an RV. This service SHOULD have been good for him, but after downloading a few TV shows from iTunes (NOT P2P, notice) and a couple Linux ISOs or whatever, he suddenly got booted. They didn't even give him an option to pay more and stay on the service.
That's no "unlimited" in any real sense of the word. I don't think anyone would reasonably fault Verizon for putting a 5GB limit on their plan. To call it unlimited though is disingenuous, no matter what the fine print says, and to not offer any other more expensive options for those who do go over the limit is just stupid.
www.clarke.ca
However, if someone's advertising campaign gives me a free widget and then later tries to bill me for said widget, we're suddenly in very different legal waters than if my "free" widget came with an expensive service plan that I agreed to (or whatever the hook is). I don't care how jaded you are - there are limits to what companies and their advertisers can do or claim. Its not hard to find examples that comes right up to the edge of that line. But there is still a limit.
The history of marketing is full of examples where marketing was too clever for its own good. The parent brought put forward a rather dubious example of "all you can eat." No individual is going to eat a literal ton of food. But there have been examples where individuals with appetites have surprised marketers. Red Lobster's all-you-can-eat crab promotion resulted in a $3 million dollar hit on their 2003 3rd quarter earnings.
How can e-mail be that valuable? If anything important is received, it should be copied to a file. After all, e-mail is not a filing system. There a major gaps between correspondence even between project members. The advent of large hard drives just makes it easy to not delete anything from the mailbox.
just simply get a nice mail system running on a home computer that gets email via POP from Verizon/whoever and has its own webmail interface (e.g. getting an MTA running on a home computer with Apache and PHP running Squirrelmail or the like and having a dynamic DNS service)
/.er maybe, the average Joe Six-gig computer user, no way.
How is this simpler than "www.gmail.com?"
Dynamic DNS, fer Pete's sake. The average
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
Heh, a friend of mine was using the term "shaped". I assumed it was some very regal pronunciation of the word "capped".
Yeah... it sucks. When I said 14kbps, I didn't actually look it up (sorry if I sounded more authorative than I am... someone above said it's actually 64kbps). All I know is that it really isn't usable. Just doing basic web browsing is a major pain. I have to wait for text to gradually appear on the screen.
I can't remember if this is better or worse than what dialup used to be. But I certainly don't remember dialup being this crappy.