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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 $30/month.
Cheap and cheerful ADSL - I get 15GB a month transfer included, and every gigabyte after that costs 50 cents.
No idea if there's an upper limit (but I doubt it) - but it has the benefit of clearly publicising how much you can transfer, and what happens if you exceed that. No hidden small-print or anything...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Is there a place in the US where this is even possible? For most of my life (East Coast) I've known only Comcast, and Comcast was/is the only option.
I now moved to New York and I now have the option of Time Warner or nothing.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
I don't know what my usage is; I'll have to check with my neighbor, and see if he got any letters from his local PD, ISP, or RIAA settlement branch office.
Is it my fault that his router is more reliable and has a stronger signal than mine from most parts of the house?
Dammit Otto, you have lupus.
My ISP, videotron, has a 20Gb/month cap, and charge 7.95$CAN per Gb after that...
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
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 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/
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.
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.
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