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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."
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.
...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.
Worm devlopers are smart enough not to flood thier connections. It's much better to have 5 bots at 20% cap who never get detected than one at 100% that gets shut down.
They didn't used to be this smart, but then it became big enough business that they got into customer service.
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!)
Previous 'grunts at the company' have stated many different figures, where does the 60GB come from? I scoured through the Comcast TOS (which consists, separately, of the Comcast Service Agreement, Acceptable Use Policy, and Abuse Policy, and does not appear to be available from comcast.com), no mention of 50GB anywhere, or any hard numbers, anywhere.
From the Service Agreement, though: Facilities Allocation. Comcast reserves the right to determine, in its discretion, and on an ongoing basis, the nature and extent of its facilities allocated to support HSI, including, but not limited to, the amount of bandwidth to be utilized and delivered in conjunction with HSI.
Basically, like people have been complaining about for years, it can easily be a moving target, and they can terminate your account without having to tell you either what the hard limits are, OR what generally acceptable numbers are.
Back when I had Comcast, they started sending me nasty letters after I was just using 10GB/month (mind, in a college city, too!), and trust me, there are lots of ways to fill up a *lot* of bandwidth besides BT, particularly with faster, larger, higher capacity games, online video, music, nevermind what percentage of HTTP bandwidth comes back down to advertising.
Comcast doesn't seem like a very good company to begin with, though. In my first-hand experience, they're rotten. I'd been acquired through their buying out AT&T Broadband Internet cable service, it hadn't been so much of a hassle, except that they had given everyone else new cable modems out of it, and even though I was still renting mine, they refused to do anything about mine, which had given consistently low speeds and generated a ton of heat. This wasn't even the biggest problem. When it came time to move, I had tried a half-dozen or more times to cancel the service before moving, but they refused, because I had really been a customer of ATTBI, and so, they told me they had no obligation to allow me to simply discontinue service, since, apparently, I wasn't even really in the system. Despite numerous attempts both over the phone and in-person, they would just not let me discontinue service. I still had to move. Of course, even when I tried to return the modem, they started going on about how that wasn't Comcast equipment, so they couldn't accept a return, a month later, they charge me for several months of supposedly unpaid service (when I had only moved a month before), and the modem, when they refused to handle anything in a remotely sane manner.
So, it doesn't really surprise me in the slightest when people consistently have problems and fears over Comcast discontinuing their service, since they never announce even so much as a safety margin on how much you can use. Though, other people have stated figures quite different from 60gb numerous times, too.
"A Goddess rarely smiles for she is forced by others to be an island unto herself." - Zephiris