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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
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/
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.
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