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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."
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
Back when I lived in the dorms at Minnesota (Pioneer Hall), they had just upgraded to gigabit ethernet throughout campus. On the P2P network that was set up between students, I could sometimes get downloads as fast as 40 MB (yes, with a capital B) per second. There were months where I would approach 500GB just in upload bandwidth. I miss the Hub...
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 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/
Exactly. I always pay for a business class (or small office class, if available) connection. When you do that, you expect to not have to deal with any arbitrary "we're cutting you off" bullshit, port blocking, traffic shaping, etc.
Within the next two or three years, I expect to move into a territory where I won't have the option of DSL (as soon as I find the right piece of land to build upon), and I'll end up on Comcast business, confident that they understand that as a business class customer, if they pull this shit, they will get sued into oblivion for breach of contract.
Of course, in light of all these stories about how Craptastically Comcastic their service is, I'm also desperately looking for other options, up to and including tripling the Comcast rate to get Covad to bring me in a T1. Consider this a warning to Comcast: continue screwing over your residential customers and you will eventually find yourself shedding business customers who pay you a lot more money.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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..
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.
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.
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
It is interesting that these are all uploading examples. It's not bandwidth per se that't the problem, but uploading. Clearly Comcast would rather leave content distribution to the big boys (itself), and has built their asymmetrical network to fulfill that (questionable) vision.
Is the backend of their network really asymmetrical though? The cable segments obviously are, but the backend? I would assume that they have an equal amount of incoming/outgoing bandwidth at the edge.
What's more interesting is that all of these examples are cable providers. Has anybody had a DSL provider pull this? The telcos aren't in the business of content distribution so I'd tend to think they'd care less about somebody uploading last weeks episode of 24.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I live in the Philadelphia suburbs. Comcast is our only high-speed option (No DSL, no Fios).
Late last year, we got a call from Comcast's legal department. They were basically whining that we were in the "top 10%" of bandwidth users in our area, and that if we didn't reduce our bandwidth immediately we'd lose service for 12 months. I knew what it was in reference to - we'd had a massive download spree a few months earlier, then stopped.
A few MONTHS.
Thing is, if we'd continued on that same mass-downloading using our "unlimited" bandwidth, and stopped the day we got the call, we would have been terminated a month later - because the legal department calls lag several months behind the actual bandwidth logging.
Comcast is the ultimate example of a massively bloated company in which department subsection A has no idea what's going on in department subsection B - even if they're the same large department.
Up until last Friday, our internet had been down for 2 weeks straight. TWO WEEKS. It's not 1996.
We recently added Comcast's Digital voice service (not because we needed it, but because it made our overall bill cheaper).
This began an utterly bizarre sequence of modem confusion, tech support chaos, and raw seething anger (on my end) at the complete uselessness of EVERY SINGLE PERSON I talked to at Comcast. I know this has been beaten to death, but this experience was something that shocked me even with my basement-level expectations.
The first few calls went as they usually do. "TRY REBOOTING YOUR MODEM". "TRY UNPLUGGING THE COAX AND LEAVING IT OUT FOR LIKE... HALF AN HOUR."
I went along, although I already knew the modem was getting a garbage IP address and nothing on my end was going to resolve it. Eventually, the ticket got escalated to "Tier 1.5".
Then it got escalated to "Tier 2.5"
Then it got escalated to the "Engineering queue".
5 or 6 days later, I got an explanation. There was a "database duplication issue" which was causing our Cable modem not to be authenticated on Comcast's network. it was "very complicated and a known glitch". (I'm a DBA. I wasn't very impressed or confused.) All we could do was wait until they called us and told it the problem was resolved (3-5 business days), and I couldn't talk to anyone in the engineering department (No matter HOW much I yelled or escalated, BELIEVE ME). Fine.
Saturday (Day 8) Comcast calls us. The problem is fixed and our internet should be fine !
It wasn't.
Begin again. "TRY REBOOTING YOUR MODEM". "JUST WAIT AND SEE IF IT COMES BACK UP." "LET'S TRY REBUILDING YOUR TCP/IP STACK" ( I love this one, it's like using a jackhammer to get your computer case open... PASS.)
so I get another ticket. At this point, my patience is offically gone. it's day 9 of no internet.
i get escalated to "tier 1.5" and get put on hold for a long-ass time.
Tech support champion man comes back and says,
There's a "database duplication issue" which was causing our Cable modem not to be authenticated on Comcast's network. it was "very complicated and a known glitch", and has to be escalated to engineering which could take 3-5 days to fix.
ARE YOU KIDDING ME ?
At this point, I flipped out and then "calmly" explained that we had already been through this a week earlier. I tried being nice, yelling, whatever it took to get to talk to person X's supervisor until i finally got the head of regional tech support on the phone. She sounded like a 55 year old woman with no technical knowledge whatsoever, of course. At that point, i couldn't get anywhere. She actually told me there was NO ONE IN THE COUNTRY that I could be transferred to who could fix the problem, and we would just have to wait 3-5 days for it to be fixed.
Disgusted and thoroughly furious, I gave up and unplugged the modem.
Friday (Day 14) comcast calls. Your internet is fixed ! I fell for this one before. Wasn't too optimistic.
I plug everything back
When Carreiro contacted customer service about the call, they had no idea what he was talking about and suggested it was a prank phone call.
:-)
:-)
Hi, Thought I'd jump in here since the story is about me
I'm amazed that Comcast is ok with this. One department tell's you a story and another department (Abuse guys) tell you another story which they say I really should have taken seriously. Heck, I even moved to a higher tier of service (I posted the business contract on the blog last night). It was working for about 10 minutes according to the salesguy. I have to take his word on this. I have no idea if it's true since I wasn't home.
I was accused of downloading 250-300 gigs a month. After setting up a web server after switching to DSL (didn't have one with comcast, against TOS ) and normal usage for the last 30 days, I'll be posting our numbers as provided by xmission (my ISP). I think everyone will be surprised just how close to those numbers we got (again with normal usage and a family photo web server running).
Anyway, I'm hoping to bring Utopianet to my city after the bill Comcast pushed in 2004 dies (sunset provision in July 2007). For now we're not allowed to bring fiber to the home because of this dang bill. No worries, I'm preparing for a lot of activity this summer
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
Wrong. Comcast also has the 24.0.0.0/12 subnet. Try "whois NET-24-0-0-0-1" for full details.
--
*Art
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