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How Does Your ISP Handle Top-Usage Customers?
davidwr (791652) writes "Does your ISP cap overall usage? What happens if you go over the cap? Does it force you into a higher-priced plan, throttle you for the rest of the month, cut you off for the month, or terminate your service entirely? I don't mind paying for what I use, but I'm looking for a list of cable and DSL providers that won't leave you high and dry like Comcast does if you go over the official or unofficial limits."
The telecommunications giant Comcast has severed its services to internet hogs who use more bandwidth than others. From the article, This is quite alarming to me, considering that I am forced into using a particular ISP based on some deal my neighborhood made many years before I moved here.
And, if I may elaborate, I feel I am a hog though I have never ever been threatened with this action before. What interests me is that they have my bandwidth capped and even that cap seems to fluctuate with how much my neighborhood is using. But, I'm pretty sure that the cable modem I have is physically capped at a low level because I've read stories of people uncapping them and being pretty much black listed. If that's what these "hogs" are doing, then I have little sympathy for them. The only time I had an uncapped connection was when I was in Bailey Hall at the University of Minnesota my freshman year. They had just installed ethernet and I soon discovered that they trusted me a little more than they should have. An unproductive dumbass freshman with a bass amp/speaker combo, a computer, a modded dreamcast and an uncapped connection to mIRC/morpheus/gnutella/etc made for some interesting nights
Back to the topic, though, I have often used BitTorrent while playing World of Warcraft and using Ventrillo with no problems. Me and my roommates pay for the highest upload/download rates but, as I've said before, we never get close to those numbers.
Here's a better question, how does your ISP handle telephone calls by unsatisfied customers who complain that in the middle of the day using a third party site, their bandwidth is pinched FAR BELOW what they've been paying for? In my case, as a current customer of Cox, I can speak from first hand experience that those calls go largely unnoticed--although I've had different results from different providers at different locations.
My work here is dung.
A company so large, they don't give a damn what any individual is doing.
I wonder if I use bold in my signature, people will notice my posts.
If you were in Australia, you could use http://www.whirlpool.net.au/.
A consumer advocacy group, with an extensive ISP plan database that lets you search on all the criteria you've mentioned. Anyone know if there is an equivalent in the US?
...But be prepared to pay for it.
Speakeasy used to be such an ISP. With their recent acquisition by Best Buy, I'd no longer gamble that way. But there are other ISPs who will be just as tolerant.
You just won't get them for $30/month.
They do absolutely nothing. I'm not even sure if I am in the demographic for a "top downloader", but I do download around 10 G/d (average) for no specific reason (mostly movies and tv series). The availability of HD content is rising the figure steadily (got nice headroom here, 100 M/s connection is around 30-40 euros a month here, Helsinki Finland btw. and I notice similiar pricing in Sweden and other parts of Scandinavia). Ditto for Japan, South Korea etc.
I download like a crazy bitch and so does everyone else I know of.
I had Comcast nearly 6 years and used HUGE amounts of bandwidth, and I had never been capped or left high and dry in any way.
... ya know...
Anyone have experience with Bright House in Tampa? I just got the service a month ago...nothing bad so far, but
My blog
Cheap and cheerful ADSL - I get 15GB a month transfer included, and every gigabyte after that costs 50 cents.
No idea if there's an upper limit (but I doubt it) - but it has the benefit of clearly publicising how much you can transfer, and what happens if you exceed that. No hidden small-print or anything...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
I lived in a student community where "all utiltiies included" including interweb.
It was great! I'd get 10 meg down, 10 meg up. I could literally get linux ISOs in 20 minutes, not 5 days. And when they throttled me, I changed my mac addr and got a new IP and trashed that till they throttled me. wash, rinse repeat. Then they throttled everyone to 800k down 300k up. I soon graduated and left.
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
Can anyone elaborate on Comcast, its limits, and/or actions?
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
I live in Southern Ontario, and I'm will Bell Sympatico's high-speed DSL. My family switched from their dial-up access as soon as their DSL service came out. I've hit download speed of up to 2.5mbps, which isn't supposed to happen, and we're supposed to have some sort of 8 or 10GB limit, but our online bandwidth counter has always been frozen at 0GB. No matter how much we download, we never get charged more than our flat-rate.
;)
I'm sure this is not intended, but you could always sign up and take a gamble.
Blerg.
Is there a place in the US where this is even possible? For most of my life (East Coast) I've known only Comcast, and Comcast was/is the only option.
I now moved to New York and I now have the option of Time Warner or nothing.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
I don't know what my usage is; I'll have to check with my neighbor, and see if he got any letters from his local PD, ISP, or RIAA settlement branch office.
Is it my fault that his router is more reliable and has a stronger signal than mine from most parts of the house?
Dammit Otto, you have lupus.
Ok my experience is a little old but still useful. They advertised as unlimited internet, and trust me I tested the limit. I started hitting the limit and got banned tell I called in to see whats up. They allowed me back on after talking to them. But they could not give me a actual number I had hit, what they where doing is saying ok top 5% or 10% this month are over users, so block them. UM ok next month even if numbers go down they still hit top % range. Hit the cap to much and you where off there service. Now I have heard they have a published max Gigs per month so at least you can figure it out .
I am on Bellsouth (now AT&T) DSL and I am a doownloading fool. There have been times I have been downloading multiple gigs of data from newsgroups, listening to net audio, and playing a MMO all at the same time and have not gotten any warnings or anything. I do wonder if this will change once AT&T has better control over our area. Sometimes its nice to live in a rural area with high speed.
My ISP, videotron, has a 20Gb/month cap, and charge 7.95$CAN per Gb after that...
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
I've had Speakeasy for years. Between my roommates and me, we've used quite a bit of bandwidth and never had any complaint from them. They generally deal fairly and honestly with their customers, so I think they'd be a good bet for getting clear rules and fair treatement. They actually have fair and reasonable terms of service, good reliability, good customer service, etc., but you do pay a bit more for that.
On the other hand, they were recently acquired by Best Buy, so I'm not certain how long they will continue to be good.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
Honestly I figure that in order to get capped or warned you just have to be going over the top. I have done some serious downloading and even uploading (well what you can shove over 768k) so I cannot imagine what it takes to piss off an ISP.
So just what do you do to do this and was is authorized by your contract with your ISP to do it?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
That's what decent consumer protection laws will get you. If you want limits, you'd better be up front about it. The last company that did it lost so many customers they went with a simple speed limit too. And if they tried to terminate customers that only actually use what was advertised, they'd find themselves in a court room very quickly. I know they've created some form of throttling or prorization so the casual web surfing gets priority, but I've no problem maxing out my bandwidth 90% of the time. Then again, bandwidth is expensive here so I guess they are "priced to be used" services, but at least it's honest.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I was recently thinking about this within my world of Roadrunner service in Columbus Ohio, from a usage standpoint. I had downloaded a few Linux distros, and started getting some stuff from EA Link (patches, games etc.) Command and Conquer 3 was scheduled to be released, and I hesitated to pull the trigger.
4GB download.
I don't know why; I normally just like getting things through the internet rather than having to travel to a store and what not. But I didn't want to be flagged as a top user or give them any reason to take away the service. In hindsight, I saved some money because the Target about 2000 yards from my house had the game for 42.88 the day of the release (online price = 49.99) So I guess I'm just as interested as you are from a locality standpoint - anyone else in Columbus OH want to chime in?
Karnal
Since my last ISP (suscom) saw fit to block inbound port 25 traffic, I was forced to pay extra for their business class line. This gave me 'less bandwidth' but a much more solid connection with a static IP address and no filtering.
Suscom was bought out by comcast, and I am still a business class customer, but now with lots more bandwidth.
I haven't had a serious issue yet other than rolling outages as comcast took over (grrrr).
Anyway. Even for home use, especially if you want to run your own servers, my experience has been pay the extra for the more stable business class line and don't worry about it. You get the advantage of bypassing the level 1 support monkeys when you have problems then, too.
I've got Time Warner's road runner service and aside from doing up to 50 GB of PTP one month, I also have been running a low key web server off of it since 2000 and no one has ever said a thing to me.
Back in my student days I got a 10/10Mbit connection from Sonera, which was in _heavy_ use. I did over 150GB in several months but got no complaints from it at all. Nowadays I have 2/2Mbit connection from the same firm and have done vastly more than 50GB on several months. No limits and no problems. Guess the Finnish ISPs are doing at least something right :)
Does netcraft confirm it?
And I intend to have explicit usage caps. You will get full bandwidth until you get to about half the cap value, then you will be rate limited so you can no longer go over the cap. And this will be in the service agreement. And it would only extend to traffic going to one of the lines outside the ISP.
I would also like to run applications that allowed traffic to stay inside the ISP to help customers avoid the cap. If there are any programs that act as sort of a generic bittorrent trader so that most bittorrent traffic can be kepts inside the ISP, that would be great. Same with other filesharing programs.
It wouldn't be a matter of coming down on behavior that I thought was bad because anybody who engaged in it was obviously doing something else wrong. It would simply be a matter of preserving the quality of service for all the customers, not just the high-bandwidth users. I'm not the personal T3 connection for someone who's paying me $50/mo.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
I downloaded many G per day for months with no problems. I have slowness sometimes and never approach the advertised speeds except on the bandwidth test websites; but someone told me this is probably due to the physical connector. These need to be replaced from time to time; so I gotta call and work them over to come fix it I guess.
Best,
TimJowers
Expect Freedom.
I don't know about the US, but you want an ISP that is intelligent about bandwidth. It is finite, and providing everyone with unlimited bandwidth would bankrupt the ISP. So... you need one that ignores your usage on non-peak times, that gives you a fair chunk of allowable bandwidth, and one that is upfront about its policies.
I use plusnet (in the UK), I have really unlimited usage between midnight and 4pm, 30Gb the rest of the time. They are open about their policies and have 'been in contact' with users that have used the network at full capacity 24/7. Apparently less than 1% of users use a noticeable amount of bandwidth, for these, Plusnet say: Of course, for the vast majority of people who don't use up to the usage allowance every month, a shared design like this doesn't pose any problems at all. However, the nature of any product designed in this way is that there will always be a number of customers who end up with an unsustainable long term usage pattern. This may be deliberate in some cases, but more often than not it is because after choosing a product, a customer's usage habits subsequently change. For these customers there are effectively three choices:
1. Upgrade to a different PlusNet product that is more suited to the new usage requirements.
2. Moderate peak time usage, either by reducing the amount of large downloads, or by scheduling more downloads to overnight periods when demand for interactive traffic is lower.
3. Find another ISP which is more suited to the specific usage requirements of that customer.
Plusnet did send out warning letters to a few users (adslguide has a report on it here.
It should be noted that this was 2 years ago when everyone was on 0.5Mbps lines.
So anyway, for you - if you have a shortlist, ask them about traffic shaping and capacity management.
I personally love my TW/RR, even hearing peoples' complaints... here's why...
-) I have the "Telecommuter" business class service, which I chose for its cost effective static IP. (approx $60/mo for 6mb down/512kb up)
Being a biz class account, I was given a direct ph num to level 2 support, and any service issue/request I've has had a 1-2 day response.
Initially the service would cut out during bad weather (i suspect rain buildup or something)... call after call they'd come out and replace something (splitters, phone pole connections, cable modem)... after about the 5th call I got a Cisco cable modem/router to replace the crappy modem and haven't had a problem since.
I've heard that their support blows, but that seemed to be level1 ("please reset the cable modem, unplug the cable, try again")
I'm not sure how I'd feel if I had to deal with residential class service, but the extra $ isn't much for the benefits. (too bad they rape your wallet if you want a second IP)
Hmm, I've been on mediacom cable and Qwest DSL in the last year, pulled and pushed tons of data via bittorrent on both. (Full line speed while I was at work and sleeping, 50% throttle when I was home at night from 5PM to 10PM) I've never had a problem on either. Then again if you're "Willing to pay for what you use" go leased line, you should be getting 100% sustained speed on those (Sans overhead).
Can all fish swim?
You pretty much nailed it. Complainers like the submitter want unlimited internet at "all you can eat" prices. Comcast offers a business class service. The thing to keep in mind is that if you have that kind of traffic then a hosting plan would be better. Move the traffic away from you and further up the chain.
Shaw@Home (Canada) gives you warning phone calls at first, then disconnects your cable modem if you go over. Mind you, their basic cable package gives you 60 GB up/down combined monthly. You only hit that if you go torrent happy. Least ways, that is how I hit it.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
No, No, No... it goes...
Voldermort: That fool Dumbledore would never tell you, tell you the truth about your father.
Harry: He told me enough, he told me you killed him!
Voldermort: Then their's something I must tell you... I'm your father, I'm you father.
I use Wide Open West (Wow) for my cable tv and internet connection. I like them a lot compared to the Comcrap that I was using before I switched. Reboots of the cable modem were a multiple time a day event to reestablish a lost internet connection. After switching to Wow I never reboot the cable modem (ok, almost never, there is the occasional power outage or whatever). I was also pleasantly surprised with a phone call out of the blue telling me that they were increasing the speed of my internet connection from 4Gb/s to 6Gb/s with no change in price. I remember reading about Comcast doing a similar thing, but keeping the increase secret and only giving it to people that called up and asked for it.
In general I am very pleased with Wow's level of service and they way they seem to treat their customers. And I have never been told of any type of cap even when doing heavy bit torrenting. I have asked them about blocked ports, especially port 25, when setting up my own mail server and they told me that they do not block any ports or any type of traffic.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
I have been living in Germany for over a year an have signed up to T-com's 16Mbit/s Service, since then i have been downloading about 5-15GB a day. No nasty letters yet, but if they do come, i'll have to remind them that storing personal information such as the amount of bandwidth consumed is illegal in German: http://www.daten-speicherung.de/index.php/datenspe icherung/musterklage-ip-speicherung/
I use tons of bandwidth, torrents run constantly, I'm always vpn'ing to work from home, and to home from work.
In fact, they just came around to lower my bill, upgrade me to digital, hook me up with an HD-PVR, and free HBO.
(By a strange coincidence, verizon has started passing out FIOS flyers..)
I'm not defending Comcast or anything, just facting up some statements.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I am not about to defend the ISP practice of advertising "unlimited" downloads, then dropping customers using more than their "fair share". That's even stupider than presuming that high levels of bandwidth use is an indication of copyright infringement.
However, if you are paying $30/month for DSL or cable, you should keep in mind that that is comparable to AOL/CompuServe/Genie/Prodigy rates 15 years ago. For that you got a minimumal connections speed (at the time typically 9600 or 14400 baud) into their system and then shared access to their internet gateway (if any) and either caps on usage or extreme overage fees. You could pay for higher speed, busness-class services (higher speed modem pools, ISDN, frame-relay, etc.).
I would argue that the current, minimally-acceptable speed in the US is somewhere around a symmetric 384k based on the currently available services and typical usage patterns. At the low price points, the ISP will be focusing on meeting this minimum need across their subscriber base. Their ToS should clearly establish what your usage limits are and the termination clause, upgrade process, or price/MB for exceeding that limit.
On the other hand, if you know that the minimum plan won't meet your need, don't whine or subscribe then bitch about it. Go find a plan that will either through a competitor (if available) or via a business class service. For example, Cox Business Services division will sell cable-modem service to a residence. You just have to call a different phone number. You also get a more tech-friendly ToS agreement.
I have a 20Mbps symmetrical fiber connection through Surewest in Sacramento, CA and they don't seem to do much. Originally their ToS said you couldn't use more than 40GB per month (up or down, whichever is more) and charged you a modest amount extra per GB for that month, but they originally came up with those terms when they only offered 10Mbps and DSL. Since then, they have introduced 20Mbps and 50Mbps packages, and I have heard (yet not confirmed) that they have increased the monthly quota up to 100-200GB, depending on what speed package you have. I let a friend of mine who is on a slow DSL connection (384kbps, he is at the edge of service area) remote desktop into one of my computers and download a lot of torrents, and then later burns them on CD/DVD. On some months, between the both of us, we download a lot of stuff. I used to run pfSense, and the MRTG software built-in showed that I had transferred atleast 500GB one month. I have yet to hear anything from Surewest regarding that. I once was in contact with an employee via email who told me they don't enforce their caps unless a user is abusing the service. I guess one could say that I abuse the service, but I think they mean in terms of impacting other customers' connection speed in the neighborhood. Since they have 100Mbps to each customer, and up to 10Gbps neighborhood backbones, I don't think they'll be running low on bandwidth anytime soon.
Long-time Comcast customer. I've been telling them how to fix their network and make more money for years, but they are too incompetent to understand that they can make money killing worms. Sigh.
The thing I notice most about Comcast is that you practically never get a notification "service will be briefly interupted while we redistribute DOCSIS nodes into a more serviceable VLAN structure, be aware that you will be unable to connect to the Internet for at least five minutes starting xxx time on xxx date".
Yet, things tend to happen at highly suspicious intervals - for example, you might lose Internet for a half hour starting at midnight exactly every day for a week. Calling Comcast results in "oh, no, sir, your cable modem must be on the blink, just restart it now".... hmmm, I do that and I get a new IP that is on a totally different subnet - three days later I'm back on the subnet I started from. Seems like somebody decided the customers didn't need to know about a routine upgrade or maintenance outage.
Another thing is their highly selective port 25 blocks; Comcast allows a worm-infected customer to spew email directly at all system in the same CIDR block and does nothing to prevent this, but will not allow incoming port 25 from non-comcast systems. This optimizes the zombie creation process for criminals, obviously; doing the exact opposite would allow better customer service (hey, I can have a mailserver!) but force all inside high-bandwidth spamming and email virus propagation to go through the comcast email system (where they can identify and block malware).
I have Cox. I think they have a cap of like 30GB down/ 10GB up per month. The standard plan of $40 month. But they don't (strictly) enforce it though, because I cross it every month. But then again I don't keep my connection maxed out. Cap the upload around 30 KB/s on torrents because I share the connection. Don't download enough things to keep the down stream maxed out on any sort of regular basis.
Haven't had any problems with them. I cross the limits but probably not enough for them to care, or make it worth losing a customer.
Kilroy was here.
I work for a small ISP here in NYC. We resell Time Warner Cable and we have no limits on usage for residential customers. You can call Anthony at 212 293 2620, e-mail him at Sales@NYCT.net or visit our website. I do know certain ports are blocked so you can't host a server but to the best of my knowledge there are no other limits. If you are in NYC and need cable, give Anthony a call. He'll give you the details.
T6Broadband, around Rockford, IL, USA, has decent speeds and a fairly wide open policy on bandwidth usage.
http://www.t6broadband.com/
And Hermione is his sister?
Heh heh... I like where this is going...
i've been able to pull 350gb down and 150gb up in the same month and at least 250-300gb down many other months. i signed up with giganews recently and had a usage of 420gb that month. no extra charges or complaints from sympatico.
the service is the standard package for residential with no contract (month to month).
My area just switched to comcast from time warner. I have never hit a wall or anything. Some recent network flakiness but a reboot gets full speeds.(1 reboot so far)
Using ipcop with net-traffic addon
feb 200 gig in 55.6 out
mar 238.7 in 66 out
april 52 in 8 out
Today I've downloaded over 2G of data from FTP. I don't do it every day and it's reasonable for me to use my connection like that even if it does exceed my supposed usage cap. If my ISP even attempted to warn me I'd tell them to fuck off and to cancel my account.
The real problem is those always downloading movies, albums and entire seasons of their fav TV shows on P2P. They're fucking it up for everyone else (yes including the media companies) and they get no sympathy from me.
Bittorrent is great for distributing operating systems and other large files under liberal license, running it 27/7 to suck down illegally redistributed material 'for free' just sucks. It's only free because your ISP and their customers pick up the fucking bill.
If anybody here is a heavy P2P user I suggest you quit moaning, get a T1-T3 and pay for the bandwidth your actually using!
10/1 mbit ADSL, no limits. I have >400GB monthly traffic.
:-)
Okay it's not that cheap (49 eur per month), but I'm putting it into use, too.
Rogers claims to have no monthly caps. Their pricing is as follows.
"Extreme" ($52.95 month) = up to 6.0 Mbps down and 800 Kbps up.
"Express" ($44.95 month) = up to 5.0 Mbps down and 384 Kbps up.
"Lite" ($32.95 month) = up to 1.0 Mbps down and 128 Kbps up.
"Ultra-Lite" ($29.95 month) = up to 128 Kbps down and 128 Kbps up.
Note that all bandwidth is quoted are "up to" the maximum. Add to the above prices $3.00/month for cable modem rental.
I'm paying for TW's 10mbit "turbo" service, which runs about $75/mo with a cable plan ($90 without). I have not been capped, and I do typically suck down usenet binaries most nights for 6-8 hours at close to 10mbit, so about 25 gigs or so every other day. I feel that if I see lower rates, it should be solely because of network utilization. And if they are coming close to 70-80% utilization, I expect the provider to upgrade their capacity. I expect full 10mbit all the time. With the expectation of future services like IPTV, those providers know better than to sit on their hands regarding their capacity. It is not the concern for me that it once was. If an ISP were to categorize behavior as acceptable and unacceptable, I would like to know in advance what was what -- is it ok to download headers from all newsgroups 24/7 (I hope not)? is downloading and serving using torrents acceptable (even though all you have to do is go to the newsgroups, lamer, so what if it costs a little bit of money)? I have been very satisfied with my experience with Time Warner Austin, especially the level of attention I've received from their management. I was actually called after writing an email about concern over their lack of HD content compared to the satellite companies, with my only reservation with switching being the contract that they require. TW told me about their future plans for switched cable and higher bandwidth for TV. We'll see what happens in a year, but it looks to me like they are on the ball. However, I also leaned that with Time Warner, their local affiliates have a lot of control over their own operations. YMMV..
The problem with defining the limit is that people will realize that they are far from it and make more use of their bandwidth.
There's been talk of for-pay P2P services where you could actually earn money (or free movies) by providing the bandwidth to distribute stuff for the big movie companies. If i knew I could use 200 Gigs of comcast bandwidth each month, but i was only using 3, then i'd be able to sell 197 for something i could use.
The problem with a cap is that I'm sure i can consume 50 gigs in a busy month just by working from home - I routinely download huge files overnight. But I'm not sure they could support every user on the network moving 50GB a month and don't want to imply that it's reasonable for everyone to use that amount. In reality their network can maybe carry 5GB for every user, but they can't set the limit there because too many techies would leave and badmouth the service to their friends and neighbors (and i've set dozens of people up with internet access and/or recommendations).
Two months ago I downloaded more than 100GB of data on my standard consumer 5Mbps cable connection from Time Warner/RoadRunner.
The month after my download speed increased from 5 to 10Mbps (and my upload from 384Kbps to 1Mbps) for no apparent reason other than the fact that Time Warner apparently rocks.
I work with a small neighborhood WISP. We tell customers up-front we have a SHARED DSL line and a shared radio spectrum, and if they want to download full-out 24x7 we are not the place for that. On the other hand we charge as little as $15/month so for people who just want email and occasional downloads that works fine. If I find the gateway is totally clogged and run ntop and find out user-X is running P2P all day long uploading and downloading they get booted. You get what you pay for, and we state up front we are a cheap basic mobile service, and NOT trying to compete with wired ISP.
I recommend them to SpeakEasy or similar ISP which are quite good, if a bit pricey.
Upstate NY area. No capping.
I average probably 40GBs a month off Usenet, think that would break the threshold of any "caps" that they put in place. Although if their cap is 60GBs then I wouldn't experience it.
Whilst in the Tampa Bay area:
Time Warner Cable did not have any caps...
After Time Warner became Bright House, no caps - and this is when I started running some BF1942 / Desert Combat servers (with bots). I think the throughput was about 6 GB/month, all told. Up / Down was consistently 321 kbps/ 5 Mbps.
Now in Central Virginia:
Adelphia did not have any caps - but their download speeds were well below Bright House's, maybe 3 Mbps on a good day. Fuggetaboutit if it rained (for some reason).
Comcast bought Adelphia and still no caps so far. Speeds vary widely: I've clocked as high as 15 Mbps down early in the morning to Speakeasy's Seattle server, to as low as 5 Mbps during peak hours. Upload consistent at about 356kbps. No caps... yet.
Science never settles, never rests.
Back in the dialup days I was some ISP employee. All empoyees were granted unlimited internet access (from home). I was no 1 by both online time and downstream traffic. Once my boss gave me a huge pile of promotional cards. Each card entitled it's owner to a few hours of on-line time. He politely asked me to use those cards insted of my account at the company. All of those cards were issued by our competitor... I have no idea how he got them.
I honestly have never had a problem with any of the 3 "broadband" services I've used. First it was ISDN(Verizon i think but don't actually remebemer), which at the time was considered broadband, talking close to 10 years ago. Second was Adelphia Cable, 4Mb/s down 128KB/s up. Never had a problem with either of those two services, although Adelphia might have been more worried about other things, if you know anything about their scandal/bankruptcy. Now its Time Warner Cable, 6Mb/s down, and I've seen as high as 1Mb/s up. I've used this service with no problem, pulling in likely about 1-2TB/month of bandwidth. I myself am convinced that the incidents that get /.ed are highly localized or are usually some kind of mistake on the ISP end, of course its also possible I've just had extremely good luck.
If i had one dollar for every brain you dont have, i would have $1.
...I've changed between three different ISPs' over the last year and just been leeching the hell out of it - with zero problems. The chart below only shows the latest two (switched in february) but the stats are pretty close to the whole of '06.
ac@slackware:~$ vnstat -m
eth1
month rx | tx | total
Dec '06 34,591 MB | 58,381 MB | 92,972 MB
Jan '07 52,749 MB | 58,603 MB | 111,353 MB
Feb '07 79,203 MB | 112,828 MB | 192,031 MB
Mar '07 45,799 MB | 68,092 MB | 113,891 MB
Apr '07 8,731 MB | 8,750 MB | 17,482 MB
Maybe I'm bragging a bit since I honstly think the bandwidth available here in sweden is insane, but compared to the US...wtf? 5GB a month?!
Really, I feel sorry for those of you who live in countries that use bandwidth caps etc.
In Finland there is, as far as I know, not a single ISP that limits consumers bandwidth usage. A few years ago Sonera(one of the largest ISP's in Finland) flashed the idea of implementing such caps, but the outrage and lost subscriptions pretty much made then backpedal and drop the whole idea.
How did these traffic caps get started?
But, if you actually use what you have you get a phonecall complaining about it.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
My brother-in-law's connection has adopted an interesting strategy for heavy use: it slowly degrades as you hog bandwidth and you have to then stay off for a few days to get back to fast. It doesn't really stop working, it just becomes impractical to use after a while. The contract says something like, "100% high-speed at all times not guarenteed", so the company has a legal escape. It think this is better than a sudden cutoff. It is a fairly cheap plan, so it seems you get what you pay for.
Table-ized A.I.
I know this is a Mostly Useless posting, but in my case I've got to ask: what cap?
(Disclaimer: I live in Sweden, so this post is pretty much worthless for all you USanians)
Bandwidth capping do exist here among some dodgier ISP's, but overall I find that I will immediately sever my relations with a company who has bandwidth restrictions. Especially quickly will I sever my ties to them if they have secret restrictions where they themselves arbitrarily decide on some number and cut people off without telling them how, why or when.
This is mostly my own philosophical standpoint, but the whole concept of having broadband is that there shouldn't be restrictions on use. If ISP's have problem with bandwidth-hogging on their high-capacity lines then maybe they should rethink their strategy and offer "slower" pipes with less limits on traffic? I also feel that customers are way to quick to accept this policy from ISP's, rather than protest it. This is mostly because people (and with people I really don't mean us Slashdotians, but Joe Schmoe and his wife Donna Who) are clueless as to the concepts. Most people are happy with the "always on and won't interrupt you phone!"-crap that a lot of cutrate ISP's still push as the main reason to switch to the new shiny broadband. After awhile they get upset because the ISP is limiting their fair use. This is also true for people who fall for the DSL bait-and-switch of having 24 mbits downstream and less than 512 kbits upstream. It's essentially a scam, in my opinion.
Sweden is rather spoiled with options compared to the US. At the risk of sounding like I'm bragging, but I've got a 100/10 mbit/s (100 down, 10 up) LAN-connection in my apartment. I've never noticed any capping on this hookup; there's no official word on it from the ISP's homepage and when I've called them up a few times and asked they've chuckled in response. I run my own servers hosting legal independent music downloads for a friend, and get at least 4-5 gigabytes of traffic per day. Then add another gigabyte or so per day in traffic for my homepage, my brothers huge gallery of photos from his travels around south america, europe, africa and the swedish mountainsm, as well as the 4-5 other domains I host for some friends. Not once have I heard a grumble or annoyance from my ISP. In fact their motto is "Our customers are used to things going fast!" (translated, of course)
As a fellow nerd I really feel for you guys over there having to put up with crappy ISP's who scale their operations the wrong way around. Rather than building a service that people can recommend and enjoy they prefer to keep things small and put arbitrary limits on their users fair use of the service. I especially hate ISP's who automatically assume that someone is a pirate just because a lot of things pass through to that one customer. There's a lot of perfectly legit ways to use up bandwidth as well.
I enjoy large posteriors and I cannot prevaricate.
Actually, I know Bell DOES charge some people for extra bandwidth -- I've seen such bills first hand. Some of their plans were unlimited, but they've introduced 30GB caps for new customers (just check their website). Currently, Bell has *NO* unlimited plan, at any price! Not to mention, their 5Mbit plan is kinda slow (tops I've seen using it is 350KB/s off a very fast server) -- very deceiving IMO. Not to mention their combined modem/shitty router (with ghetto firmware no less) equipment sucks hard. Their availability is kinda low too. Possibly the worst Canadian ISP I can think of!
For the ones around Halifax, Eastlink has very good speeds, and decent prices, but they enforce the 30GB cap bad (you're stuck at speeds 10Kb/s or less after you hit it, for the rest of the month... it sucks!)
In Quebec, the best choice is Videotron. Their 10Mbit plan ("extreme high speed") is super fast (I do get downloads at 1250KB/s!), and it's TOTALLY unlimited. My downloads hit a 3 digit number (in GB) every month, no slowdowns, no extra charges, no caps (in contract or otherwise), etc.
Cablevision's Optimum Online service is great until you accidentally upload more than you should. The numbers I've heard for "more than you should" range from a few hundred megabytes to a few gigabytes, sustained over a few hours. There are no official answers to exactly how much you can upload or for how long.
I've been capped four times now, since 1997. They keep a lifetime record of this. It's not like moving violations, where they drop off your record in a few years. If I fuck up again, at all, for the rest of my life, they will immediately disconnect my cable service and won't ever do business with me again.
Apparently the free market hasn't made its way to the northeastern united states yet.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
DSL is provisioned differently than cable systems, they tend to have somewhat slower maximum speeds than cable, but their speed limit is a physical limitation. The result is that DSL providers don't typically have to setup (or track) any other rate limit for DSL circuits.
I run a mid-sized ISP in Seattle, and we don't do any bandwidth throttling on DSL customers. ISOMEDIA.COM
As far as I'm concerned, having a limit is bad for business in the long run. It's very easy to upgrade networks, and the cost isn't prohibitive. If you were to buy a DSL-connection in Sweden it wouldn't be capped, unless you choose a connection that something like 128Kbit and inherently slow.. But not capped... Capped just wouldn't fly.
I use a local ISP that is located in the greater sacramento/roseville area in California. their speeds are not the best (3down/1up) but I usually download ~300gb and upload ~200gb each month and have had no problems.
Althought I run two small websites that don't get a high volume of traffic, Earthlink will alert me if my bandwidth is approaching max, and allow me to decide whether to block it or pay for more bandwidth.
Bell won't cap your usage, so long as you sign up on one of those telemarketing sprees, and remember to ask them about the usage cap, they'll be sure to say 'none'.
Though, I don't know if you really want your DSL with Bell.
Being in Southern Ontario, I'd highly recommend you check out any local ISP. The two that come to mind are http://www.sentex.net/ and http://www.execulink.com/. I've had nothing but golden experience with the former, and have no experience with the latter. Why not Bell? Largely due to upstream connections. It's a Sympatico policy to do no private peering whatsoever, so your latency is more dictated by their upstream providers than by anything else. Though Sentex is relatively small, they're a pretty active member of http://www.torix.net/, and you can really notice a difference -- especially when it comes to something like streaming CBC. The other great part? Sentex doesn't just bow to DMCA takedown notices. Ignoring the fact that they're Canadian, and the DMCA is an American law, they do the Right Thing^tm: they respond to the takedown notice, requesting verification and validation. And, as we all know, nobody ever responds to the DMCA response, so there's never any real action as a result of it.
it's not in pinellas.
any way the closest place ot the map to tampa is trinity,Pascos barely in the tampa bay area anyway
maybee in 08 or 09 ?
im in the upstate new york area. i do a huge amount of torrenting, i have the cheapest plan they have here (10/2 Mbps) and i can easily get over 12 gigs uploaded in 24 hours, and have done so many days, sometimes consecutive... who knows how much i've managed to download within a week/month... but i've never hit any caps or received any warnings.
I live in Canada, and connect through an Ontario-based provider : myCybernet. Yeah, crappy name, but great ISP. 5 Megs plan for C$42 (approx US$36). C$5/month for a static IP.
You're not drooling yet ? Allows servers (upload speed is only 800Kbps though). Superb tech support. Geek-friendly. No caps. Really. I hit something like 5 to 50G a month, they never complained.
One more reason to cross the border, folks.
...is using some type of traffic shaping device. I have to turn on encryption with my BT client and hope the other client has encryption on as well. Other than that, it is 3-5 KB/sec :(
If you're going to ban someone, ban the idiots who refuse to learn. Start to finish - rent, electricity, hardware, 1800 time, payroll, etc - phone calls work out to about $3/minute. That means the 12th time you spend 20 minutes w/ Mrs Egghead trying to explain how to type in an URL, you spent $60 on that 1 customer - add in the other 11 times & you have spent more money on her than you will make.
Even at $7/gig, they would be better cutting off the top users of tech support than the top users of bandwidth.
Azureus rates my ISP #1 in the way it treats it's :-P
e _bad_for_BT
customers
http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/ISPs_that_ar
I will be switching as soon as possible...
No caps, though I do see some kinds of traffic shaping based on what protocol I'm using. For instance, BT is said to be throttled using Sandvine, and their Usenet server will only allow a maximum download speed of 2 mbits. Central Illinois area.
Is the question "what happens when you go over the limit" or "what happens when the filesharing script kiddie down the road goes over the limit". You need the same answer for both questions.
We upsell them to IP TV which has no bandwidth limit on the adsl. It's a glitch but a nice one.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
I live in British Columbia, Canada, and subscribe to Shaw Cable's X-tream1 package. 100GB/month combined bandwidth at 10MBPS speeds for ~$50 a month. I've gone over bandwidth (usually only by 20-60GB) several times now and haven't been contacted, limited or cut off, so I'd give them a top rating.
It's also worth noting that they have a higher-end package that gives 25MBPS speeds and a bandwidth limit of 150GB.
Anyone know a good and reliable ISP in Poland, Bydgoszcz? I know we've got our 'beloved' TPSA but they suck more and more.
...Heeey, see what I've googled:
I'm willing to share the internet connection with other people living in the same building, so I need a fast one (with a permissive agreement).
AFAIK Chello (cable) does well, but you get a dynamic IP (however, no transfer limits).
===
http://www.internet-radiowy.pl/
A list of polish ISPs. Seems to be complete.
I get 5000/800, UNLIMITED. There are no secret caps or bullshit, I've used over 100GB in a month many times with them and never heard a peep. The best part?
It is $30 a month.
I think the base package where I am here in NY is 11Mbit/sec down, pretty nice. They offer you the option to double it for $15/mo extra (reduced to $10/mo if you get their VoIP package too).
I'm using Cogeco cable in Southern Ontario, and I have a cap of 60GB (up and down combined) per month, I've gone over it several times, the first time they sent me a notice to let me know that I have gone over, but with out charges. Every other time past that I haven't gotten even an email let alone a charge. Also the service is quite good.
Witchcraft incest porn?
All I can say is that I'm bailing if "hot grits" appears anywhere in book 7!
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I currently use Telus, I have a theoretical cap of 60 GB/month but having hit over 150 GB I haven't received a letter or anything. I believe Telus may look into enforcing caps at some point, but they haven't yet. With Shaw after hitting around the 50 GB mark (at the time they had a cap of 30 GB/month, i believe it's 60 GB now) I was called and told to stop downloading or i'd be cut off.
what is with these "unofficial" caps anyway? If it's not in the contract, they have no legal grounds to limit your usage, and they damn well have to be upfront about any limitations.
My ISP has had a 2 gig cap per month down, 1 gig up per month policy for the past 3+ years... seeing as i download about that in 1 day and my prices have never changed and im never throttled.. i say they handle it quite well!
SpeakEasy terminated me after 6 months -- only after harassing me for 3 months and saying I can't exceed 100G/mo. They were total assholes about it, violating my contract with them and telling me that they would charge me the $300 early termination fee (THEY were the ones who terminated!) if I blogged about it. You are lucky. SpeakEasy is NOT honorable. This happened a year ago. I even pre-sale chatted to make sure it was okay; that was a lie: http://www.flickr.com/photos/clintjcl/76331380/in/ photostream/
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
I have Comcast and find that whenever I consistently use a lot of bandwidth my connection mysteriously begins acting flakey. I start dropping a lot of packets or lose my connection entirely for several minutes at a time. Comcast always says there is nothing wrong. I've tried replacing the cable modem and it makes no difference. It's all fresh wiring. The only pattern is that it happens when I use a lot of bandwidth in a month. My theory is that they have some kind of a cap on total data transferred, when you hit it they start fucking with your connection. I've eliminated every piece of hardware under my control as the culprit and Comcast denies that they are responsible. If they didn't have a monopoly I would switch immediately.
How in the heck is my parent post 'off-topic'? That makes no sense whatsoever unless someone has it in for anybody who suggests that bandwidth caps are in the least a good idea.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
SpeakEasy terminated me after six months -- only after harassing me for 3 months and saying I can't exceed 100G/mo. They were total assholes about it, violating my contract with them and telling me that they would charge me the $300 early termination fee (THEY were the ones who terminated!) if I blogged about it. You are very lucky. SpeakEasy is NOT honorable. This happened a year ago. I even pre-sale chatted to make sure it was okay; that was a lie: http://www.flickr.com/photos/clintjcl/76331380/in/ photostream/
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
only if they have to compete with someone.
In my neighborhood, there's Comcast and Verizon FIOS. After Verizon started offering their free installation and teaser rates, Comcast bumped up my 3Mbps for $50 package up to 12Mbps.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
I've got a fiber line that terminates in my basement, giving me 15 Mbits/s symmetric. I pay $39.95/mo for 50 GB of data transfer, and the fine print in the contract stated that if I went over I'd be charged at "current market rate" for the excess bandwidth. The funny thing is, I know I've gone over a couple of times and they don't seem to care (it didn't show up on my bill).
For the curious, I'm on the iProvo network in Provo, Utah. The city owns and maintains the fiber infrastructure and leases bandwidth to the ISP. I've got my choice of 2 different service providers who compete for price and customer service. The same fiber line can also provide phone and TV as well (also offered from the ISPs).
The iProvo project got started because Qwest and Comcast refused to lay wire to the entire community, so the city decided to do it without the pigopolists' help. Since then another project called Utopia started up at the state level to do the same thing. It's a matter of time before fiber to the home (and business!) is available throught the state (even rural communities). The hope is that having cheap, fast, reliable bandwidth available everywhere in the state will attract new high-tech businesses.
IMHO, this is the way it ought to be done. The line maintenance should be a city utility, just like power and water. ISPs compete on an equal footing, without the luxury of a monopoly on the service due to owning the lines. I'm going to have a hard time leaving this town because I'm addicted to bandwidth and I can't imagine it getting better than this anywhere else I go.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
If you're a customer, you have a prior business relationship with that company, and you had to have signed a contract at some point. Force them to give you a copy of it. Read the thing very, very carefully, paying attention to anything that remotely refers to bandwidth in any way. A lot of the high-speed providers will state something along the lines of "failure to abide by the bandwidth guidelines set forth in ". If they do, ask for a copy of that document. Keep on going until you see physical numbers that state your limits. If no limits are in there, and they threaten to shut you off for violation of your contract, well, IANAL but it seems to me that you have a nice little batch of short hair to hold them by. And if all else fails, have the press sensationalize a story for you for those slow news weeks. The press is out to make money, and controversy of any kind makes money, so put them journalists and reporters to work.
I have had Road Runner, usually 1 step above the normal package for several years in Austin, TX and Beaumont, TX. My bandwidth usage is insane.. utorrent on RSS feeds, emule running, etc etc. I have yet to see them do anything about bandwidth to anyone.. I also used what was SBC DSL down here, i assume its now AT&T, at any rate same story on it, no problems.
Service i had was always between $50 and $90 a month i think.
s/©//g
My ISP, xs4all has no caps at all on its DSL lines, no fair use policy either.
;)
I pay 70 EURO for 20 Mbit down and 1 Mbit up (I'd rather have a different ratio).
Of course you have live in Holland
X.
I did study abroad at Monash University in Australia, a school that claims to be one of the top CS programs, and is even listed as such in some rankings.
You get 1 GB in the computer labs. Per year I'm assuming.
If you're living in the halls, it's unlimited use provided you don't mind paying $17/GB. That's not a typo. I was getting around 150kb/s to the US.
Don't get me started on the proxy that blocks pretty much EVERYTHING, that they justify as a requirement for metering how much you use, as apparently they've no idea how to track MAC addresses or logins.
My Aussie student friends seem to suggest that this is normal for many schools down under, and University of Western Australia seems to be even worse.
So look on the bright side, $30/month is wonderful even if it's only "unlimited".
boldly going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse
I have personal experience in this. I've maintained a blog detailing my experience with the company. I was willing to work it out and even upgraded to a business account. I posted the contract last night in case anyone was interested along with a few other interesting bits.
:-)
If you are a Comcast customer, get VoiP. I mean it. If you get "The Call" and are disconnected, VoiP is what will get you back online. I've chatted with people in 15 states and found only one person who had their HSI turned back on again.
The lady lives in Orange County California and called the PUC. She said Comcast terminated our 911 service and had a sick daughter. She says her HSI was turned back on within the hour
Apparently Comcast VoiP was her ONLY phone service to the house. I don't know if this story is true but it sounds good. Personally I'm saving money going DSL and Dish Network ($30 a month). Better service and my TFC/Counter Strike Source game has improved. No complaints. Heck, my ISP even tells me what I purchased when I signed up. 100 Gigs a month with 25 Gigs consumption a week.
I took screen shots of my usage over the last 30 days. Even setup a web server for family photos to push it and see what my usage REALLY is (Comcast claims I used 250 - 300 Gigs a month). We'll see if this is true or not. Check it out.
http://comcastissue.blogspot.com/
Oh, and support Verizon FioS and Utopianet projects. This is what we need to get the US back to #1 in the tech world. We also need Net Neutrality. Common Carrier providers should not be allowed to control what goes over the lines. If they do they should loose their common carreir status.
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
comcast has never done this to me.
i once lost an 80 gig hard drive full of data (which shall remain unidentified).
i maxed my connection with bit torrent and refilled it in a week or two, did not incur any penalties or notifications, and continued seeding for the remainder of the month without so much as a hiccup from them.
i'm in the less populus southeast (compared to say, new england where people will commute 4 hours into NYC bc of the demand for housing), so i'm wondering if they have different standards by division, and lower caps in denser areas
where they refuse to upgrade the infrastructure to handle the loads.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
DSLreports.com is also a good place for information about this particular subject. I used be CIO for a regional broadband company and the sad thing is that less than 10% of the user base uses 90% of the bandwidth on the average network. Getting rid of those people is much cheaper than putting in WDM or other expensive technology to increase bandwidth. More troublesome to me are companies that have something like a Packeteer shaping the traffic and they don't let their consumers know (we did this).
Anyway, Integra gets a big thumbs up from me so far.
I've used the services of both the local telephone company and the local cable company here over the past few years, and neither seems to pay any attention to what bandwidth usage happens on their SOHO lines with static ips. These services cost approximate 100CDN per month, but I specifically tried to get the cable company to call me one month by continuously torrenting as much as I could for 30 days, and they didn't call or change my line at all. I downloaded over 400G that month and kept a pretty good ratio. I gave up after that and just don't think about it anymore, though the reality is that I don't use that much bandwidth compared to that... maybe 20-30G on an average month.
I need the static ips for the systems I host, and my work picks up some of the costs, but if you're serious about abusing your ISP, buying a more expensive product definitely has its privileges.
Been with Telewest -> NTL/Telewest -> Virgin Media for donkey's years now, with not a single problem.
:(
Recently, though (in just my area, bah), they've started to throttle download speeds during 'peak times', granted only as a test basis, but still. If you download something at full speed for a given period (very short period), download speeds goes from 1.1MB/sec to ~400kB/sec. Not ALL bad, but when you have an 8gig game to download (CnC3), it gets a little annoying.
When is this 'peak time' you may ask? That would be from 4pm to 12am. In other words, most of the time I spend on the goddamn internet.
We don't even track bandwidth. I couldn't tell you who used the most bandwidth this month, and I have access to the databases that could store that info. We do keep track of connection history via PPPoE... I could tell you how long your DSL was connected to us.
But so far, bandwidth hasn't been an issue. Our DS3 isn't even 1/2 utilized at peak, so there's no need. Of course, we have under a thousand DSL customers so far... ahh, the joys of being a tiny, failing ISP trying to switch from dialup to broadband while competing with telcos.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
I live in South Africa and use the monopoly Telkom's ADSL service. Apparently South Africa is almost the only country in the world where you pay a seperate price for the so-called "line rental" of the ADSL - which doesn't really exist because it uses your phone line. This is one of the countless money-making schemes of the billion dollar monopoly.
We have to pay the normal fee for phone line rental (about $11/month), the phantom ADSL "line rental" of about $38 for a 384Kbps connection, and then you choose your ISP which determines the bandwidth limit (thankfully, here Telkom isn't the only choice - but they do still have a monopoly on Africa's only undersea cable, which means that ISPs that want to sell cheap bandwidth have to use ridiculously unreliable satellite connections). In the latter category we are charged about $34 for 3GB of usage. That means we are paying $72 for a 384kbps connection with a 3GB usage limit.
Fortunately, Telkom uses a threshold system. They only start cutting of "high-end" users when the sum of all the customers' usage equals the sum of all the customers' limits. As a result, we are usually cut off at 5 or 6GB in busy months, and at about 9GB in less-busy months like during the summer holiday. Once we are cut off (this happens basically every month) we have to switch over to a prepaid account priced at about $10 per GB.
All in all, I think Americans should think twice before complaining!
Their customer service might be crappy when you have a problem (I've had bad experiences with their support folks), but their ToS basically read like "we lease you a pipe; what you do with it is your business, so long as you're not disrupting others or breaking the law".
That's why I signed up with them, and why I've been a customer for nearly 6 years now. I may not get Cable speeds, but Comcast's ToS suck by comparison, and I'd rather have the lower speed of ADSL and the greater flexibility in hosting my own services without stupid restrictions.
Doesn't anyone live where there are local providers?
Have you have looked at http://www.dslreports.com/ ?
I got one thru them , a local in Portland, that provides a bare DSL connection, to Qwests line.
One fixed IP and always on bridge connection.
It doesn't have to be a billion dollar corp to provide you with good DSL service.
...we have any number of ISPs to choose from, some have specific limits set, most say 'unlimited' but cap at 30Gb/month. Plus.net have a cap of 30Gb/month but they only count your downloads between the hours of 4pm and midnight. Outside of these hours you can download as much as you like. I consistently download about 150Gb/month and have heard nothing from them, until I start to get close to the 30Gb cap during the peak times.
I live in Jacksonville Florida, and I'm not sure what the cap is, but it must be pretty darn high! I hosted http/email/ftp for myself for two years with them and my average weekly upload/downloads was in upwards of 20GB/week for both on average, with download rates of anywhere from 400KB/s to 1200KB/s from Microsoft and any other server willing to send me data that fast. And I'm not talking burst speeds. I'm talking new files for 10minutes plus. I've never been capped by comcast by useage or speed. Not to mention the same IP a year at a time. All on the standard 6MB connection.
i've been able to pull 350gb down and 150gb up in the same month and at least 250-300gb down many other months. i signed up with giganews recently and had a usage of 420gb that month. no extra charges or complaints from sympatico.
Thanks for drawing fire, brave sir. To you and all their customers like you: please,please do keep up the good work!
Ater reading your comment I now know that, similar to driving a little slower than the upper 10% of drivers and not having to worry about flashing red lights in my rear-view mirror, I will no longer worry about waking up one morning not seeing a different red light (the DSL LED on my modem), since I'm at much lower triple digits than you are.
Here is the logic the cable companies use when they are the only cable company available:
x = Bandwidth required for "regular" cable services (basic, extended, digital, on-demand... everything but internet traffic)
y = Number of subscribers on the segment
z = Total bandwidth for the segment
i = Bandwidth for internet
if x * y z then [No new segment required]
i = z - (x * y)
If i = 0 then [Do nothing]
We don't care (i guess, as the admin I should say I don't care) about the traffic an individual does. We offer unlimited service, so there ya go.
Our basic service packages look like this right now:
Up/Down Service Cost
8/1 FTTH $26/month (1 yr, 45 after)
5/512 Cable/DSL $35/month (1 yr, 45 after)
1.5/384 Legacy DSL $35/month (1 yr, 45 after) (sadly phasing this out isnt as easy or as cheap as we would like)
Is the pricing difference jacked up? yes. Can you get nice service north of San Antonio if you pay attention? heckya
I've been using Verizon DSL for years now maxing it out 24/7 and had no problems so far...
SpeakEasy.Net [DSL] IPs: hell:66.92.160.137 magic:66.92.160.138 storm:66.92.160.139 fire:66.92.160.49 mist:66.92.160.103 router:66.92.160.132
SpeakEasy.Net [DSL] email:clint@speakeasy.net username:clint password:...
SpeakEasy.Net [DSL] ACCT#292773 ORDER#:6604118 order date:Jun 21 SPKREF:164
SpeakEasy.Net [DSL] customer support: 1-800-556-5829 Ext 7713 Todd Voelker 800-556-5829 Ext 2248
SpeakEasy.Net [DSL] rebates:www.speakeasy.net/rebates offer#5744-A started_with:web-rebates.com/Sprebates/5744/step1. asp
SpeakEasy.Net [DSL] hardware:Broadxent 8012-V P/N:245-08012-00-00 S/N:C1BF0051510001659A MAC:00E0EB-767AD4
SpeakEasy.Net [DSL] The Speakeasy Activation Crew 1-800-556-5829 Fax:206-728-1500 Email: support@speakeasy.net
SpeakEasy.Net [DSL] dialup: username:clint@speakeasy.net password:12345
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
I've been a customer for about 1.5 years and I'm downloading about 2GB per day, minimum. (Newsbin says I've downloaded over a terabyte in less than a year from newsgroups alone)
No complaints or throttling yet.
I'm an internet only customer (no cable tv) and 99% of my family's video & music consumption comes from the net.
Considering that this is probably what most people will be doing in the not to distant future, I really can't see ISPs continuing to penalize or cut customers off for what may be considered excessive usage at this moment in time.
If you're borking other people's shit, you're out of here.
Other than that, do as you will.
I have hit ~500GB/month for several consecutive months in the recent past.
;))
.avi Xvids at 720x480 or so :D.
Bad a.b.hdtv habit for a while (didn't post AC for nuthin'
Got a steady 500KB/sec (that's KiloBytes, about the limit of my 4Mbps connection) most of the time while dl'ing 24/7.
Never heard a peep from WOW (wideOpenWest) nor evidence of throttling.
I now average ~120Gb/month- phooey on the HD, horray for
At least in Saskatchewan, we have basically Sasktel (Phone) and Shaw cable. Sasktel does not cap, whether they say they do or not, I have never seen them do it, none of my friends have had it capped, and I have several friends now that work for them and even one in that department and they do not cap. Heck they even allow me to run servers, off my basic home DSL, I actually asked and they said it was no problem. I believe the basic home is 1M down / 256 up, and you can go up to 5 down 1 up for an extra 10-15 dollars and then there is another level after that for another 20-25 dollars, but I don't remember what it was. Oh and neither makes you sign a contract, you sign up and cancel when you want, heck I bought out the hardware for both and jump back and forth between companies as I need different services (Shaw is faster for cheaper, but has a few other limitations), takes a day to shift and if you talk nice to the representatives they will even refund parts of the month you didn't use if you get them to shut it off right away. Shaw cable caps me at about 75 GB total used up and down, but will attempt to contact you and ask you to be respectful of the bandwidth first. If they fail to contact you, they will cut you off, but a simple call back will get you hooked up. They don't actually cut you off completely if they get a hold of you, but usually if they have called me, I watch my use for the rest of the month. There is Telus in other provinces, but it is an evil corporation.
I have never been notified and I use Comcast. I average 150 gigs a month in downloads. I've gone beyond 200 gigs as well. Maybe I've just been lucky who knows I guess im screwed now that I made this comment though...guess its good that im moving to another state next month! My main concern is right now I live in a house, and when i move it will be to an apartment which means the number of people they are handling in the area with be alot bigger which might also mean strict enforcement of bandwidth use. When I move in they will clearly see a spike so I guess ill be waiting for my letter/phone call at the start of June.
Waitrose are open about their limits: 5Gb included, and £2 per Gb over that. I don't mind the over charges too much, as the profits go to charity anyway.
I'm scared of numbers that can't be written as a fraction. It's an irrational fear.
They have a contract with Brighthouse, so they won't let Verizon put in the fiber. They guise it under the banner of saying VZ tears up utilities while doing it, but I was working at BHN when they moved to the Carillon center, which was art of the deal with the county.
I live in Sweden, there's basically no ISP which has any usage caps. There's no hidden or extra fees, and we get 8-100Mbps for 30-60$ / month. Yeah, you can say it, it rocks to be us.
My local telephone company is a reseller of Spirit Telecom DSL service and I've been generally very satisfied with them. I download untold ammounts of data per month (probably in the 10-15GB range on average, and much more during some months), and I've never been capped or had my connection slowed.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Vancouver, Canada here. Shaw cable has four plans for cable internet.
There's a "Lite" version that's a bit better than dialup. 256Kbps SL/128Kbps UL with a 10GB/mo limit
A "High Speed" version, for $40/mo. 5Mbps DL/0.5Mbps upload, with a 60GB/mo limit
An "Extreme" version, for $50/mo. 10Mbps DL/1Mbps upload, with a 100GB/mo limit
And a new "Nitro" version, for $100/mo. 25Mbps DL/1MBps upload, with a 150GB/mo limit
All of these limits are "soft" limits. If you push them too hard, they email you a nasty message and start monitoring your usage. I'm pretty sure I've gone over these once or thrice, but have yet to receive an email about it, though my friends have.
I've had the High Speed version for... yikes, 9 years now (was originally 3Mbps DL with a 1GB limit that was never enforced). It's been pretty good for me, though in some neighbourhoods people saw slowdowns and outages from time to time.
Shaw is a decent company that isn't run by jerks. And no I don't work for them. (And their digital phone service is too expensive!)
It is in Pinellas. I have a 20/5 service. They're starting at the top of the county and working south.
Here in SoCal ever since they have laid the cable I have always downloaded massive amounts of media and hundreds of Gigs of stuff from Newsgroups.
For 8 months straight I downloaded something like 120GB+/month and sometimes uploaded 30+GB/month.
Just recently they upgraded our speeds here so I now get 10/1 and my uploads usually consist in a day of 2GB within a couple hours unless I limit the upload speed; no warnings and the internet has almost never been down or slow for the millions in Souther California.
Roadrunner never caps any users unlike a lot of other services and if you really want to get into this topic, we have all been talking about this topic forever on places like dslreports.com and recently people are skeptical on the Verizon FIOS section of whether they will limit DL/UL with fiber.
I recently moved from Seattle, WA to Columbus OH. When I got here, there were like, 3 or 4 cable providers in the local directory to choose from. Having been locked into monopoly land (WA state) for my whole life, I had no idea anything this wonderful existed. I chose one at random, (road runner I think, time warner? dunno) and signed up. Since that time, I have had obsurdly fast connections (I actually SEE 700KB/s, bytes, not bits, not just advertised) and can call and have things fixed when they go wrong. Anyway, yes, markets with multiple sources of cable exist, and it sends you into a strange nirvana like state of being, where everything just works better. Ok, it isn't that cool, but it is nice. BTW: I downloaded SuSE, Slackware, Solaris (I was curious), scientific linux, Quantian, debian, and this is getting obsurd. anyway, about 200GB of crap, over about a weeks worth the time, much of it over bittorrent (I know, legal stuff over bit torrent, my appologies) and they never even flinched. I routinely pull 2 and 4 GB of log files off of servers I am running elsewhere, push installs across my VPN, and do other wacky stuff, all on a $35/month connection. Obviously, one data point doesn't mean much, but my datapoint definitely likes competition. Its almost as if monopolies aren't good for service or something.
Hah the joy of the UK, everything service provider has to state what the download usage is, you can go up to this amount at any rate you see fit, so if you have a 50gb download allowance then you can spread it out over the month or download 50gb in a day.
Also there is no limit on uploads from most providers, I have a 8meg line with Zen Internet, 50GB download and unlimited upload limit. If I need to go over my download limit it only cost me £1 per gig.
Distracted by HillBilly's reply, I misread your question and replied about a more general consumer advocacy group than you were probably asking about. But it appears that CR has covered ISPs.
I have Primus DSL lite here in Ontario, I download about 400 Gb via Bittorrent everymonth and haven't had so much as an email from them... http://www.primus.ca/
I have a 100/100 mbit connection from a quite small ISP here in Stockholm, Sweden, called Ownit. When I signed on I explicitly asked if they had a limit and they said no which I have been enjoying for the last two years. Usually transfer about ~15gb down and ~50gb up per day so probably amounts to quite a lot of traffic for a year. Can easily max out at 12mb/s when downloading from multiple sources which is great.
Ownit also has a healthy attitude of not giving a rats ass of how you use or what you use their service for, they just see themselves as a service provider similar to the Post Office.
Haven't heard of any of the other ISPs here having a transfer limit either.
But then again, this is Sweden - _everybody_ under 50 downloads and shares online
I had speakeasy for a year. Their customer service is 100% amazing. Live person answers everytime. Dude knows what he is talking about and can handle anything you can throw at him technically. 1 person start-to-finish resolution. They even call you back if needed!!! best part, absolutely no restrictions on what you use your connection for. No port filtering, no bandwidth caps, no packet shaping. The downside: 6m/768k was $105/month. Cox 15m/5m $56. And, I was not even close enough to get the top connection they had. if Speakeasy could offer service through Verizon fiber, I would sign back up, even at double the price.
In both respects. I had Speakeasy for years, and they were good to me, no objections about all the servers. However since BB bought them, I decided not to wait for the inevitable screwup and just today canceled my service.
The trick, for the most part, is get a business class line. Then companies generally don't object to the usage. If you get a good one, you'll get a real, signed SLA and they can't as it is a real contract.
On my service (6mbps/$29.95 month) I have a 6GB/month cap (which I feel is far too low nowadays) and additional blocks of 10GB are $10 each. The counting is done by calendar month, so I can call and add additional blocks at any time during the month if I realize I've already gone over midway through the month. The blocks are added as a monthly service so I have to call to have them stop billing me for them the next month if I don't want to continue them indefinitely. If I don't buy extra bandwidth usage proactively I'm charged $2.00 per GB for going over limit. But you have to go over a ways to actually get charged, as I've been over by a couple gigs before and not seen a fee added to my next bill.
As far as BitTorrent goes, I think they do throttle eventually due to heavy usage, but they don't block it. I was doing a large download running over a few days and had been getting 160-200kbps when I first started, then a couple days later was trying to download some other, smaller things and I was only able to get about 30-35kbps, even with plenty of seeders and peers. A week or two later with no heavy downloading, BitTorrent downloads were back up to the high 100's.
Used to have a cap of 10GB/month, if you went above it you would pay something like 1 euro/GB above the limit. But the competition got tough, and now they have an unlimited plan, no holds barred. Mine is 8Mbps/512kbps unlimited and I pay 25 euros/month (something like 30 dollars). They have a 10Mbps and a 25Mbps plan too, the latter I think is kinda 45 euros. Thanks to the competition, I'm expecting them to lay fiber this year, and provide the triple play over cable (digital TV, unlimited 25 Mbps line and telephone) by something like 60 euros/month. Gotta love competition. We're still not France or Sweden, but that's enough by now.
Here you can get VDSL 10/10 mbit, unlimited for 58 ($77), or even cheaper via FTTH 10/10 mbit for 33 ($41). ISP's have no limits afaik..
Honestly, even a low-usage customer would be fine.
my 26400 BPS dialup connection that gets dropped after 4 hours, and paying $10 per month for, on top of the $26.81 each month for the phone line that i never use, save for the dialup and calling 911.
There must be a lawsuit for geographical discrimination for people who can't get DSL - i'm 8 miles from a city.
They have some interesting policies. Their bandwidth caps are soft, and well-publicized, but what they don't tell you is that they measure months based on 30 days, not based on the calendar. I tend to do more downloading at the end of the month (oh, look, I have 30GB left *clicks furiously*), but I've had to space it out since I got a call complaining that I had used 120GB in a 30 day period. According to their records that I could see, I'd used around 60GB at the end of one month, and another 60GB at the beginning of the next. They put those together on a per-day basis and used that to ding me.
Fortunately, their caps are high enough that I don't often run into trouble.
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
Northwest Nexus in Seattle has monthly limits (3G for home, 5G for power and 7G for business), and charges 1 cent (correctly stated as .01 dollar) for each meg over the limit.
I do the level two tech support for road runner ('national help desk'). I can say that I've never, in the few years I've been doing this job, had to tell anyone they've been cut off for using too much bandwidth, and we (the outsourced call center i work in) have never been informed of any sort of limits for any of the divisions we handle (Hawaii to New York). So chances are, no matter where in the US you live, you're not going to get cut off for using too much bandwidth if you have Road Runner. It's quite possible I'm wrong, because we see accounts shut off for 'abuse' quite often, but AFAIK that is due to virus infections and things of that nature.
In the UK, Tiscali, who charge around £22 for a 2meg `unlimited` connection do get unlimited bandwidth, except between 6pm and 11pm. During that `peak period` there's no specified limit, but if you download much more than a thumbnail via P2P software you'll get warnings, and if you ignore them they sort of punish you by apparently putting you in with all the other high bandwidth users in that period, forever. This wouldn't be so bad, except that the way they do it means that you can't use GoogleTalk, as you keep getting disconnected. It also makes https sites appear slow and they may not let you log in. It's very tedious.
I've had a lot of luck with Verizon's DSL. 180-200 KB/s down, ~30 KB/s up, no cap that I've ever seen, although the max I've probably ever dled in a month was no more than ~10-15 GB. However, I'm not sure that the service we bought is supposed to be 180 KB/s, but I'm not complaining. Tech support has been reasonably incompetent, but luckily the line has only really had problems once and apparently the problem was with the wires on the street.
As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century,free flow of information is the only safeguard against...
I have Comcast. It pisses me off to no end, because whenever my brother's home, my service goes to shit because he's ALWAYS torrenting something. But yea, we've never been cut off or throttled down. I've heard stories, but ours is downloading solid 24/7 for some months and I've never had a problem.
i downloaded several iso's last year and the year before via ftp (3-5gb at a sitting) and no complaints, life went on. cableone's biggest concern seems to be maintaining a network that everyone can use, but in a libertarian fashion, so no one gets kicked unless they do something stupid (which i haven't seen).
I think the cox limits are very much YMMV, for about 3 years in SoCal I was a Cox customer paying for whatever the fastest package available was, and I'd routinely transfer more then a couple hundred gigs a month. The only time I would ever hear anything is when HBO or whomever sent Cox a cease and desist order for the sharing of whatever...
;-) )
However, as far as speed complaints go, I'll second the above poster. I was getting so-so speeds for about a week, called and complained. And the tech came to my house, mucked with the wiring, and gave me a little bell shaped amplifier for the modem. Installed the amplifier and vola` I was getting 85%+ of my rated speeds. And note this is as a *very* heavy user. Not a 1TB/month user, but a pretty heavy one. After moving countries I'm now in the UK and am switching to my second DSL provider as the first one had a problem with me transfering 533GB last month. So, trying provider #2, who swears they don't care. Just for a few more quid a month (with conversion rate, I'll be paying $130/month for just broadband. I miss the US in some ways
...my isp say that they dont care what i do with it as long as i pay every month. (bredbandsbolaget-sweden)
I use the "normal" (not lite, not extreme) package for ADSL from Telus (only available in parts of canada, BC, ALTA, maybe ON i think)
:P
The "cap" is 30 gigs per month, however I have greatly exceeded it many times and never have I recieved any emails about my usage, nor has there been any indication that I will be monitored. Infact, on the customer service page, there is a bar that shows your usagg per payperiod, and it stretches to I believe 120% or so.. and I have topped even THAT off
They are a very decent ISP. My understanding from people who have used their allocated limits in great excess (I am talking 100++ gigs in a month) have recieved an email saying somthing along the lines of "It appears you may be better served with our extreme plan. Blah Blah Blah. Would you like to upgrade for X deal? If not, please be advised your current plan is for Y gigs per month and you used Z."
The DO block default WWW and FTP ports however on the normal account. Understandable. They DO NOT throttle any type of traffic (ie torrent traffic).
Back in that blitz of emails going out to customers from ISPs when we were caught downloading torrents of copyrighted content, my email was along the lines of "Such and Such company wants us to give you up, but we don't do that unless we are forced in every way of the law, btw.. it was for file "somthing".. you might want to get rid of it eh?"
I didnt try to dig up the story, but at some point some canadian companies were trying to get personal info from some canadian ISPs and Telus (and some other ISP) said no to several levels of court until they finally won the right to keep the personal info personal.
Telus takes a lot of flack from people who probably just don't understand how good they got it. I think it's a great ISP and I recommend it to anyone who can get it.
insight through the mind
I run a WISP. We don't have unlimited accounts. It's 15GB for $30. After 15GB we throttle down to modem speed until the next payment. It's pay as you go, so there isn't any set length or late fees. Works good for us. We used to have unlimited internet, but stopped due to P2P killing our network. Half the people that had p2p running didn't even know it was on their systems. Our T1's were at full usage day and night while 1000's of connections coming in sharing music, software, and whatever else. It was getting so bad that DHCP couldn't even assign IP addresses.
The above is not worth reading.
They're bitches about uncapping (google it), but in terms of being able to use a metric fuckload of bandwidth they're great. My roommates and I download an average of 200GB/week on our 10mbit connection, and aside from the typical intermittent short downtimes (totaling 2 hours in the last 8 months) we haven't had a single problem. We often pull enough traffic through the Buckeye connection and our 10mbit Ethernet link to the University of Toledo that we had to build a pfSense router because even modded Linksys WRTs couldn't hold up.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
other than the transfer speeds i have no limits that i've hit yet, and no ports blocked, and it just works. and verizon wonders why i wont switch to their del for $10 less and twice the speed.
Their Tech Support denies it. But how else do you describe content specific drops in connectivity. Also, it wasn't like this before. Tech Support's suggested fix? Buy a new cable modem cuz at 5 years they are garbage. I kid you not...that was his reply. Although, to counter my own argument, I don't think this is necessarily for hogging. It's more for length of usage, etc. With Limewire, you can start dozens of downloads and walk away. My overall downstream is only about 300k, so I don't think it's peak usage that causes it. I have the Mid-Tier internet package which is supposed to be about 7Meg down and 512k up.
Arguably all P2P services incentivize you to use your bandwidth in return for something else. Is it somehow worse to get free real movie downloads from a movie studio because you play a large part in sharing them with other people?
Part of my business requires that I upload large files to clients, i've never really considered that I was reselling my internet access to them.
I'd be quite happy if ISPs went with the utility model. Charge a small monthly connection fee and then a few cents per gigabyte.
I upgraded by broadband from 24mbit down and 1mbit up to 20mbit down and 3mbit up about 5 months ago and I have uploaded around 5TB in that time. I guess my monthly consumtion is more than 1TB/month since i download alot too. Never got any threats my ISP nor have I got cut off.
And banjos play in the background...
Seems simple, fair and workable to me. There's other reasons I like them - my block of fixed public IP addresses at no extra charge, and the continuous ping-testing of my line so that they SMS me if it goes down.
This doesn't seem to be much of a problem over here in Norway. A major ISP over here (Telenor) tried the capping game some years ago, with a limit of 5GB/mo or some such, arguing bandwidth hogs made broadband more expensive for average Joe.. After a lot of criticism, bad media coverage, disgruntled customers and major competitors using it to their own advantage in ad campaigns they opted to go back to unlimited only. No other ISP in Norway that i know of have tried capping monthly usage ever since, at least not any major ones. It would be bad mojo.
Thinking a bit about it, I use about 5GB on a pretty average day, and that is only 2-3% of the bandwidth they sold to me..
But I have pulled about 2TB over two lines (with 2/3 of that over one of them) within the last 6 months, and I haven't gotten a single complaint from them. My usage stays mostly during the night now, and it's tapered off as my arrays begin to fill, but peaking a download at 30 megabits, at home, it nothing short of fun.
Sorry about the AC, on a work computer
DSL2 connection to the CO, fiber from there to the internet exchange. Right now my sync rate is 8 megabits down, 1 megabit up, though they're supposed to double them both sometime in August. Totally unfiltered ports; outgoing port 25 is supposed to be filtered, but I forgot the "relay = smtp.bellnet.ca" line in my main.cf and it still worked. Static IP, and truly unlimited bandwidth. No caps, no limits, nothing. $114CAD with a one year contract. Free installation. I'm a pretty happy customer.
Hell is other people
So far this is the second service I have tried and without a doubt I think it's one of the best there is to offer. I have not read the fine print to see if they cap you after a certian amount of dl but I havent been stopped at all in the 5 months I have had it. I have the 20 down 5 up package for $40 a month I think its a steal. The upload is a little below 5 but I cant complain I hardly max it out anyway but it does come in handy. I hit download speeds of upto 2.5 meg a sec compared to there dsl service they had us on before this which I wouldnt get past 60kb sec. I never really knew how bad comcast really was till I read all these complaints! I will try to avoid them if I ever move and verizon is not availible. I cant even think about what I would do if I was capped!
I work for a large cable internet provider. I bet you can all guess which one without me saying so.
The top 10% of our internet users use 99% of our bandwidth. We have to draw the line somewhere, since it's those users who can swamp a node so that everyone else connected to that node is trashed. We don't have set bandwidth limits because bandwidth varies between nodes. However, we have so much bandwidth available, any node that goes over 50% capacity is reviewed to see if someone is sucking it or if we need to upgrade the hardware.
Our office may suspend internet, sales may ask them if they want to upgrade to a higher level service, or the business office will call if someone is in the top 10%. You'd have to be in the top 10% or exceed the 50% capacity for a while for anyone to notice, by the way. If you don't want to upgrade then we ask you to cut down so that they're no longer affecting everyone else on the node. These are typically people running servers and/or up/downloading a huge amount (as a side note I talked to a customer last year who told me his server was slashdotted and we gave him a call the same day). If they refuse, and continue to suck all the bandwidth, we shut them off. We'd rather keep the other customers connected to that node happy than alienate one jerkoff who is inconveniencing the customers around him.
My comments here are my own; I do not speak for my employer.
But if he dies, how can he "drive off into the sunset in hi scar" on the last page?
DSLExtreme resells lines from both Verizon and ATT/SBC. They are relatively small, but do offer 24/7 TS and most importantly, have no bandwidth caps. I'm actually hosting a web server and SSH/SFTP from my home DSLExtreme account right now... and from a dynamic IP no less (they give you long leases). No throttling, no threats, and so far, no layer-7 filtering either.
Working in a DevOps shop is like playing in a band made up entirely of keytarists.
Independent ISPs tend not to care about usage. My ISP Rapid Systems in Tampa bay Florida lets you use all of your bandwidth all of the time. They have multiple connections to the internet.
I like to build things and wire stuff together.
Im in calgary on shaw too, using the high speed one with the 60gb limit, and when I got usenet a while back I was doing 300gb a month on the good ones, and at least 100gb a month for a 6 month period, I got a phone call about bandwidth usage when I was fairly intoxicated one day and just mhmm and uhmmed them and hung up. Havnt heard a word since (probably a year ago) and I know that I have passed the limit almost every month. So I guess if you want a resonable broadband provider you need to be in canada eh!
Please. Harry Potter takes place in Britain. God Save the Queen should play in the background.
Great ISP, throttle you if you go over your limit, but allow you to upgrade (for that month only) to a higher limit with no extra fees apart from the difference in price.
:)
Along with (as far as I have been with them) perfect uptime, I couldn't recommend them more. They peer with most of the tier 1 ISPs, they have the only premium Usenet server in the country... oh wait, you probably wanted US ISPs right?
Still, the best of the Australian lot
...
Your question is not so much "How does your ISP handle top-usage customers?" as much as it is, "How do I pick an ISP that doesn't suck?"
I work with and sometimes for the major local DSL provider in my area. I enjoy giving people tips on how to find and maintain good broadband service because I remember what it was like not having any clue how DSL, cable, or even ISPs in general worked. So, assuming that you're living in the US, here are some things you'll need to know.
1) Do not order cable Internet access unless there is absolutely no other alternative.
2) Flip through the phone book, talk to people, and go online to get a list of all of the providers who can deliver broadband Internet to your door. But when you talk to people, don't make the mistake of discarding a provider just because a few people had a bad experience. There are a lot of people who bad-mouth my ISP but they've always been awesome to me. Their support people are always happy to help and have even more of a clue than I do sometimes. (Plus, for almost one year solid I was paying for 768kbps down and actually getting 5mbps.)
3) Cross out all the cable providers and telephone monopolies.
4) Call up the sales department of each ISP and ask them all of the questions that are important to you. Such as their policy on top-usage customers, whether they give you a real Internet IP address or force you in behind a NAT, whether they use PPPoE, what their response time is when a link goes down, if they block any ports in or out, and so on.
5) Hang up on sales once you've gotten your answers and dial into their support queue. When someone picks up, ask them the same questions as above. No, really. The support folks are the ones that literally keep the ISP running and they'll definitely give you a more honest answer than the person whose job it is to sell you something. Besides, most of them are happy to have an "easy" phone call and will gladly drag it on for as long as you like rather than have to answer another "Halp! My Internets are borken!" call.
6) Pick your ISP. BTW, any provider worth their own weight won't make you sign a one or two-year contract and won't stick you with cancellation fees. That way you aren't stuck with them if it turns out that they suck.
7) If you found a good ISP, please let other people know, especially those who are looking for broadband. It's extremely difficult for a local provider to compete with cable and incumbent telcos who literally spend millions per month getting their brand name burned into the public consciousness. On top of that, the local providers usually have to go through the incumbent telcos to have your DSL hooked up and lets just say that the telcos seem to experience a high degree of human error when connecting up phone lines for their competitors.
But darnit-- it's not free anymore.
Back in 1995 or 1996 or so, 3web, now a part of Cybersurf, started offering free (ad-supported) internet access for the cost of a CD. I still have the CD, marked "Free, Unlimited Internet For Life!" It brings a tear to my eye. Anyway, obviously it's not free anymore.
However, it's still cheaper than most of the competition (by about $15 for comparable speeds to my current plan, and twice as fast as the nearest price). They don't cap downloads. Upload speed might be a little slow sometimes--but that seems to be normal. Reading the service contract (which was several pages long) I did notice that they reserved the right to impose bandwidth limits. In several years I have not once gone over this unspecified hypothetical limit. (And believe me, I've pushed it.)
A long time ago, I noticed that the default BitTorrent port was slow, but that was easy to get around. I've never missed an email, and the few times I've had problems the customer service was quick and easy (getting back to me and solving the problem within hours). If your DSL acts up, they conveniently include free dialup access with it-- which is great, because the best way to fix a DSL problem seems to be to google for the solution. (Or order a new modem, email customer service, etc.)
The one thing they lack is included webspace. That's not a big deal--I'd rather not pay that if I wasn't going to use it. Anyway, 3web has been great to me for years. Cybersurf is only just starting to expand into the United States, and apparently only offer dialup so far. They offer both DSL and cable in Canada.
I have read most of the comments here and the hot new intartubes idea is movies.
They consume lots of bits.
So now it looks like many providers will cap your movie watching and/or charge you for those bits.
So I will be paying for the movie and the bits that gets them to me or be cancelled for said bits?
Sounds like a no win situation here.
qz
We get a bunch of 24mbit/1mbit plans with a fixed download quota. Go over that quota and they throttle your download speed to 64kbits.
I have only had problems with my ISP (Shaw Cable) once. That was a month when I went on a downloading spree and downloaded over 90GB of stuff and uploaded nearly 40 GB via Bit Torrent. My speed is capped at 650kb/s, and I pay $30 CAD somewhat dollars for this service. It seems as if unless someone in my neighborhood complains, or they notice extreme amounts of uploading being done on a line, then they send in their people to crack down on you. Looking at my graph of usage over the years, I average about 30~45 GB of downloads every month - never complaints or worries over that.
Otherwise, compared to Telus, Shaw's only rival around here in sunny and fair Vancouver, they treat us pretty good. Though I've heard stories that disagree with my personal opinion. The funny thing, is that Shaw's TOS doesn't specify a download limit per month (last I checked).
Have had them for a couple of years after Charter kept uping the price. I now have 6 meg down, 3 meg up through DSL, and have never been capped. I will get in news groups, and easily download between 4.7 and 5.5 meg a second. There have been months where I have easily pulled half a terabyte, they have never said a thing to me. And at $27.99 a month, its about the best speed you can get for the price, unless maybe you have FIOS.
"Yeah, that's a nice thought. But they don't want you on all the time, either. I could understand this sort of logic when they were using phone lines; they only have so many modems in their pool."
Electricity isn't "unlimited" and hence your broadband connection isn't "unlimited".
How apt - my current biggest problem is addressed on /.
I rang my ISP ( Homecall - http://www.homecall.co.uk/ ) to ask why I was having problems accessing my web-host to do Uni work - I knew my host was fine, as someone was testing my software and connecting to the db just fine. Also, my MSN was randomly cutting out, and randomly dropping messages (No "Message couldn't be delivered, simply got 'lost' on the network - VERY annoying). Turns out I'd broken the Fair Use policy, which had recently been decreased to 1 gig a MONTH during peak-time. The contract states they didn't need to notify users of a change, either. Real kick in the teeth, especially as I have 4 courseworks to do, and 1 part-time job web-devving, in the next 2 weeks - I've been put on the shit server for - yep, 2 weeks.
How should I get my coursework done, now that I've been blacklisted? The Customer Rep suggested a local library - this is with me paying £30 a month for a phone / net package.
I was pissed - very pissed. It would cost me £120 to break contract now, so I'm pretty much shafted from all angles.
You don't have to go with AT&T (or whatever company owns the copper) for DSL. Another provider can be your go-to guy for all ISP services and do pass-thru billing to AT&T for use of the line.
Such is the case with Sonic.net. I can't say enough good things about these guys. None of this "high usage" BS, amazing customer service, and an outstanding feature set, including static IP, SSH to your account, a binary Usenet feed that tops out at your line speed, etc, etc, etc.
But yes, you will pay for it; upwards of 50 rather than 30 bucks.
What you want is irrelevant; what you've chosen is at hand! - Spock, ST VI
What's the deal with comcast charging $60 a month for such lousy support? I seem to recall broadband not costing nearly that much in the past... also, what happened to the good alternative isp's like speakeasy? Have regulations changed and they are gone again or something?
Well, i am the network administrator for a small wireless isp where i live and we dedicate a minimum of 128 up and down and leave the maximum unmanaged. for many this works well, but when someone starts raping our bandwidth we cap them to whatever maximum they are paying for. some of our customers keep their rape to a minimum durring non-peak hours and get 6meg up and down.
In South Africa users are given 3GB of shaped bandwidth a month, when they exceed that amount they are hard capped.
Remind me not to ever hire you as a DBA. I can only imagine how your employer must feel when you're unable to navigate your way through the bureaucracy of tech support with Oracle, IBM or Microsoft to fix a problem while their database server is down for two weeks.
I don't know what Philadelphia suburb you live in... I live in Malvern in Chester County. I have DSL, Cable, Satellite and FIOS options. I chose to go with Verizon FIOS. The 5 downstream, 2 upstream package at $34.95 works great and coupled with Vonage's $14.95 limited package it's a much better deal thatn Comcast's offerings. But, when I had Comcast I had absolutely no trouble with them whatsoever.
But then, I know that Comcast's original netblock was the class-A 24.x.x.x and I also know how to reset the IP address on a cable modem manually, and I also know several external DNS server IP addresses that can be used in a pinch like this.
That was a perfectly valid and acceptable and truthful post!
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
This is a mid-sized ISP in Salt Lake City, UT with great upstream connections, a solid IT staff, and promiscuous use of FOSS (mostly debian) on their systems. They encourage the use of linux, servers, and hosting. The prices are great, and the base level bandwidth (GB/mo) is plenty for most people. If you should want to turn into a hog, that's fine, they just charge you more for it (GB/mo). The best is that they do not count any bandwidth used at night or weekends, so if you wanna be a hog and not pay for it, you just limit your download times and yer all set. oh, and *everyone* gets a static IP. I pay 2bucks/mo for their secondary DNS service.
I pay a bit more for my DSL service than I would with qwest's ISP (who do they use now anyway?), and am HAPPY to do so, even if the price went up.
I'm just north of Tampa in Spring Hill and I have Bright House (RoadRunner) both at home and at work. In my opinion, they're excellent. My connection almost never goes down (it's happened maybe a handful of times since I moved here almost 4 years ago, once because of a hurricane), they never hassle me about bandwidth issues or BitTorrent downloads, my third-party (non-Bright House) VoIP service works just fine, and they keep increasing my downstream bandwidth without charging more for it (I think I'm at 8 megabits down, 512 kilobits up). I used to run a personal SMTP server, too, for which they never hassled me. The very few times I've ever had to call tech support (available 24/7), they've been very helpful. For $50 a month, I'm very happy.
At the office we have roughly the same bandwidth, but we also have a block of static IP's and 24/7 business-grade support, which is absolutely top-notch. Not only do the corporate support guys know what they're doing, but the hold times are usually close to zero and they even call us when they notice our connection unexpectedly drop for any length of time. They call us well in advance for planned outages, too. All this costs us less than $100 a month, I believe.
I'm in the no-man's land of South Jersey, where broadband is dicey at best. Before I decided to upgrade, I had a POTS line pinned (with another bonded channel optional), truely unlimited use (well, other than the limits imposed by ~50kb-100kb/s) for $15 a month.
So here, there's no DSL, no cable... dicey. Last year, I hooked up to Verizon EvDO. In theory, I was paying $80 a month (ouch) for unlimited service. Well, except for the "unlimited" and "service" parts. At best, my EvDO Rev 0 connection would hit 500-800kb/s down, 60-80kb/s up. That happend twice, for about a week each. More usually, I'd get 100-150kb/s down, 10-30kb/s up (yeah, slower than dialup)... and this even with the addition of a 3W amp/LNA and a roof antenna. They were playing games here.
Even with unlimited EvDO, you get into weird and broken definitions of "unlimited". Essentially, Verizon knows it's a limited resource, but wants to compete with other hookups, so they call it unlimited. And it is -- no extra charges for usage... only, once you pass a magic double-secret download level, they toss you off.
Now I'm on HughesNet satellite.. for $100 a month I get 1.5Mb/s down and 250-500kb/s up. And while all networks are subject to aggregate load, at least in my area it's pretty dependable. This is definitely no unlimited, but they have very specific rules about "fairness", and if you exceed them, you're throttled back until you drop below a threshold (based on your service agreement recovery time). But it's totally OK to hit that limit, it's just enforcing fairness (and I gather, it's only implemented when there's actual contention for bandwidth), not a warning or anything.
While I'd much prefer FIOS (friends in West Chester, PA, now have Comcast cable and Verizon FIOS competing... competition does exist), I'm also happy to know the actual service agreement, not some double-secret (and thus, floating on arbitary whims) level you're not going to be told about up-front.
-Dave
-Dave Haynie