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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 $30/month.
Cheap and cheerful ADSL - I get 15GB a month transfer included, and every gigabyte after that costs 50 cents.
No idea if there's an upper limit (but I doubt it) - but it has the benefit of clearly publicising how much you can transfer, and what happens if you exceed that. No hidden small-print or anything...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
I live in Southern Ontario, and I'm will Bell Sympatico's high-speed DSL. My family switched from their dial-up access as soon as their DSL service came out. I've hit download speed of up to 2.5mbps, which isn't supposed to happen, and we're supposed to have some sort of 8 or 10GB limit, but our online bandwidth counter has always been frozen at 0GB. No matter how much we download, we never get charged more than our flat-rate.
;)
I'm sure this is not intended, but you could always sign up and take a gamble.
Blerg.
Is there a place in the US where this is even possible? For most of my life (East Coast) I've known only Comcast, and Comcast was/is the only option.
I now moved to New York and I now have the option of Time Warner or nothing.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
I don't know what my usage is; I'll have to check with my neighbor, and see if he got any letters from his local PD, ISP, or RIAA settlement branch office.
Is it my fault that his router is more reliable and has a stronger signal than mine from most parts of the house?
Dammit Otto, you have lupus.
My ISP, videotron, has a 20Gb/month cap, and charge 7.95$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
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.
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 :)
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'd start here
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/
Road Runner doesn't care. Downloading a few patches and ISOs isn't going to get you noticed and neither will using large amounts of bandwidth for P2P.
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).
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.
As a low-level grunt for the company, I will confirm that Comcast does indeed cap bandwidth. The stated limited (and yes, it is in the TOS agreement which nobody reads - available on the Comcast.com website) is 60 GB/month. Yes many people exceed that and don't get cut off (which is the penalty), but be warned that the company can legally do so if they feel you are degrading the service for other customers.
:(
Luckily I don't even live in an area where I can GET Comcast, so it's a non-issue for me! I just have to deal with Rogers' packet-shaping, BitTorrent ruining behaviours
Godless heathen.
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?"
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
They also told me "you are not allowed to run bots, and bittorrent is a bot".
When I asked if I was negatively affecting the network performance, they said no. Which is the only valid reason in terms of service for disconnecting me based on usage. No, I wasn't hurting the network. They just didn't like that I was using the bandwidth they gave me.
What other kinds of "proof" do you need to see? Here's the only data I still have in phone-numbers.txt (which I have on my thumbdrive here). It's not proof of what happened, though. It's more like.. "Why would Clint have all these phone numbers if he was making all this up?" 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 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
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.
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!)
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.
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
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