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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?
Reminds me of some time ago when I got my first hard drive with "unlimited" capacity... and then accidentally filled it up with 5GB of movies in the first few days of using it.
I vowed next time to get a hard drive with at least twice unlimited capacity.
Optimist: The thumb drive is half empty! Pessimist: The thumb drive is half full...
and what if you're downloading linux distributions or other operating systems? ISO's for DVD's are consistently around 4gb. IF you download one dvd iso and one cd iso theres a good chance you will already be over the limit.
In Canada just pay .02 cents per kB. What a great deal!
If Bush wants to kill the terrorists, he should jump off a cliff.
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.
That's totally besides the point. If they say it's unlimited, then it should be unlimited. It may be a bad idea business wise for them to provide ulimited bandwidth for a fixed price, as you correctly point out, but that's their problem.
-Enfors-
Doesn't the US have somethign equivalent to the British Trades Description Act. If they tried selling 'unlimited' internet access with a limit in the UK it would be, de facto, illegal, whatever the small print.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
Yes, they will cut you off, but not because they assume you're pirating movies.
If you read the actual terms you'll see this:
Examples of prohibited uses include, without limitation, the following: (i) continuous uploading, downloading or streaming of audio or video programming or games;
Basically, they don't want you using the internet to purchase movies or music from anyone other than Verizon. It's an incredibly anti-competitive action.
Unlimited Data Plans and Features (such as NationalAccess, BroadbandAccess, Push to Talk, and certain VZEmail services) may ONLY be used with wireless devices for the following purposes: (i) Internet browsing; (ii) email; and (iii) intranet access (including access to corporate intranets, email, and individual productivity applications like customer relationship management, sales force, and field service automation). The Unlimited Data Plans and Features MAY NOT be used for any other purpose.Paragraph 1 of the Verizon terms state plainly that the Unlimited plain means unlimited bandwidth for a particular small set of uses:
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$
* - Bullshit!
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...
Someone who's IM'ing 13.5 GB/Month won't be in college long...
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its all down to the definition. A 'normal' user, reading pages, and sending/receiving email, would see 5gb as more then they would use. Someone with greater needs, such as to download large files, would see 5gb as barely adequate. Hell, even re installing a Steam account on your computer could fill that in a day.
That aside, the thing is that companies like Verizon have seen their old pricing model prove inadequate over time, and they want to distance themselves from the previous model. The interweb was such that only people downloading illegally were exceeding their previously undefined upper limit. I would imagine they got the 5gb value by doing some data mining on their customers. I'd bet that most never go near 5gb.
I imagine they know people will soon start buying movies and other large media online as a matter of course, and they want to be able to charge for 'premium' access. The best way to achieve that is show that they are taking action now against heavy downloaders, demonstrating the need for different levels of access, so they cannot be accused of suddenly instituting a new system for the sake of profit only.
I would cope with metered access, if it meant no hassle when I did transfer a lot. I do often have to transfer large amounts of data between home and my lab overnight.
The contract is fair and reasonable, but conflicts with their advertising. You can't advertise the Brooklyn Bridge for sale and then present someone with a contract for a tenement in The Bronx. People just want truthful advertising.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
You hit 120GB a month? Do you remember what the outside looks like?
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.
Paying for movies is so old-fashioned. I don't think people do it any more. If you are downloading more the 5GB then you are definitely a pirate.
But take comfort in the fact that you are helping stop global warming.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
If you think that's bad, to Vodafone UK, "unlimited" means 15Mb. Yes mega, though that's per day, not per month. It also doesn't include IM, VOIP or P2P. This is according to their new price plans that start in June, with a "£1 per day flat rate for internet usage".
Welcome to the internet in the UK, loads of ISPs advertise 'Unlimited' adsl only to actually have limits. One has been found guilty of false advertising.
In fact many ISPs claim to have unlimited use (despite all ADSL in the UK being limited) most only state in the small print that they have 'Fair Usage Policies' (FUP) which will come in when they decide you have used too much, they always imply that there are no limits (one even states "that you dont have to monitor your usage!").
This is simply illegal IMHO, you cannot state that something is unlimited when it is limited. Even if this contradiction comes in the small print, especially when you do not state how limited it is. A c
This page http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/caps.htm outlines it perfectly.
If this were really happening, what would you think?
'' 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".
Do you remember what the outside looks like?
Of course he does, he's got all these movies of it...
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.
Compare this to Papa John's, which is running a special on their website which says: Three Medium, Unlimited Toppings (Maximum Five Toppings per pizza)
To quote Inigo Montoya, "You keep using that hword. I do not think it means what you think it means."
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.
Here in the UK the same thing happens. I am always wary of those services providing unlimited *anything*. That is why I am more comfortable with Google's 3GB or 4GB or whatever space they give against say, yahoo's unlimited, because ALWAYS (show me an advertisement that does not have it) the word UNLIMITED comes with the corresponding '*' attached to it, and in the case of the broadband services they use the "Fair use" policy to trivially limit the bandwidth.
I have also read a lot of times people assuming that the people that download a lot is *pirating* stuff. But with the current rise of multimedia content (VoIP, VoD, online gaming, and the massive amount of flash crap in the web) it is very easy to go over 2GB a month...
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Read the original article again. This isn't people using their cellphones for Internet access, but Verizon's EVDO service which is designed to be a primary Internet access method for people on the road.
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.
I got this for a contract I was working on, and we regularly got dumps of "representative test data" against which we wrote our software integration tests. At least every couple of days, they would push out a 300MB file. Add to that the fact that I was building our automated software build infrastructure using a tool (maven) that downloads dependencies from central repositories (about 80MB for a full pull of all dependencies), and because I was creating the infrastructure I had to blow my system away to test cleanly several times a day.
I bought it for work, and was presumed to have just been file sharing. I had unpleasant conversations with Verizon. Didn't even have an appeal process, nor an opportunity to demonstrate my situation, nor even the right to ask for a manager. I seriously thought about lodging a small claims court claim for damages, as their cutting me off cost me $1500 in demonstrable lost receipts (i'm paid by the hour) in that week while I tried to research an alternative.
I finally went with Cingular on their unlimited data plan and they never had a problem with any limits. I also made sure we researched the policies and they said they didn't give even the slightest care how much I downloaded, or if I used it for "broadband services" like music/movie downloads, 'cause that's what Broadband usually means. Other than switching to a Mac and having a bit of irritation geting an ExpressCard device to support the service initially, I've had no problems with it.
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Sign the petition to stop UK ISPs from advertising unlimited packages when there are in fact hidden caps in their un-Fair Usage Policies
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/Unlimited-ADSL/
Even better than unlimited - this one goes to 11 !
You get the idea.
"No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the America public." - H. L. Mencken
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
The Verizon plan in question is marketed towards business professionals who are on the road a lot and need an internet connection for their laptop. Ture, the EVDO card you get with the plan uses the cell phone network to transfer your data. However it is meant to be your laptop's internet connection. Your cell phone does not use this plan at all.
I was on the road for a solid month last year and used their little EVDO card. My company is big enough that we have some exclusive deal where we really do get unlimited bandwidth. Just looking at the emails I downloaded in the first week I think I went over the 5GB. In the emails, there were 4 ppt files, 20 doc files, and 1 xls file. That xls file alone totaled just under 2GB (which is the max file size allowed by our server).
So at least in my case 5GB/month would really not work and I'm lucky to work for a big enough client that they can really get the unlimited bandwith.
The card was so good (speed was very close to my crapcast cable modem) and worked really everywhere (except in some very very very rual parts of Wyoming and Montana) that I was thinking about getting one for my personal use. Then I saw the that not only do you pay a fifty-some dollars a month but there is also a per kilobit charge on top of the monthly fee too. Now that I see there is a 5GB limit, I'm really glad I didn't get one.
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.
truthful advertising... that's a good one. it's also an oxymoron, like "political integrity" or "reality television".
sarcasm:
-noun
1. harsh or bitter derision or irony.
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
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