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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."
In a brief overview of the logs that are kept by a gateway at the local university, it shows that, on a daily basis, 32 members of my dormitory floor download at roughly 700KBps average during the day (that's total for all users). That's about 60,480,000 KB per day. Fifty NINE gigabytes per day. Divide that by 32. 1,845MB per person, per day. This is a reasonable number for college students. Let's assume that up to 75% of that is bittorrent, other peer to peer traffic, or what have you. That's STILL 461MB per person, per day, of assumed legitimate traffic. This is AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Web browsing, and other legal Internet services. 461MB * 30 days = 13,837MB or 13.5GB. I rest my case.
Reminds me of an ISP in Germany that offered unlimited broadband for cheap 7 bucks a month.
They also gave me a brand new VoIP-enabled wireless router as a welcome present and didn't even charge for the first 3 months.
After 5 months that guy calls: "I want to talk to you about your DSL plan [...] over the past months you've been downloading an average 181 GB a month [...] up to 243 GB [...] bla bla bla"
He then offered me 100 bucks if I agree to quit the plan immediately and never come back.
So:
State-of-the-art VoIP-router: 0,00$
5 months of downloading TV series: -14,00$
Getting paid to leave: : +100,00$ (priceless)
---------------
all of the above: +86,00$
Well, you might find that extremely limited (and it is) but it isn't so strange for me. In Belgium the major ISPs (Belgacom, Telenet) allow about 10Gb quota per month, with 5 euro per 5Gb for extra quota. This is expensive! Downloading a movie or even a linux distribution DVD costs you several euros on bandwidth alone.
Minor ISPs use this a nice way into the market. (For example, mine allows me 20Gb default with a 0.25 euro cents per Gb over that upto 60Gb per month).
Offcourse, all limits are openly advertised...
Limits? What limits? I remember last year when a friend came over for a while. With both our computers on the same connection, we often downloaded around 6Go a day...
I don't think it's "easier", it's "lazier".
If I were Verizon, I'd be plugging the hell out of the 5G limit. I'd call it "Data 5G" or something similar, I'd describe the kinds of things you can do with 5G. I'd use the term "Effectively unlimited".
And then after the sheer enormity of that number had sunk in, I'd create a new plan, costing $10 a month more, called "Data 20G".
Verizon isn't merely being dishonest in calling it "Unlimited", they're also being very, very, stupid.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Now think about how a company like Verizon is going to act when there's no Net Neutrality. How long you think it's going to take before you are so limited by their TOS that you can ONLY do email and web browsing, and only using their email and approved web sites?
You are welcome on my lawn.