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."

Comments

Comcast Weans Hogs Off Their Packet Teat

[eldavojohn]

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.

Well, since it's highly unlikely my similar story I submitted this morning will be accepted after this is the on the front page, I'll just submit it to Slashdot as a comment.

The telecommunications giant Comcast has severed its services to internet hogs who use more bandwidth than others. From the article,

Carreiro said he received a message from a Comcast Security Assurance representative in December, who warned him that he was hogging too much of the company's bandwidth and needed to cut down. 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. Unconvinced, Carreiro contacted Comcast several more times, but was again told there was no problem. A month later, he woke up to a dead Internet connection. Customer service directed him to the Security Assurance division, which Carreiro said informed him he would now be without service for one year.

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 ... rest assured that rooms adjacent to N410 knew the 8 bit emulated glory of contra theme song as I destroyed Red Falcon night after night.

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.

Re:Comcast Weans Hogs Off Their Packet Teat

[JaffaKREE]

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

No idea.

[winnabago]

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?

Re:Shopping for cable?

[Anonymous Coward]

I now moved to New York and I now have the option of Time Warner or nothing.

That's the kind of freedom available in advanced countries like US and North Korea.

T-com, Germany

[Raven737]

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/

Re:T-com, Germany

[dogmatixpsych]

storing personal information such as the amount of bandwidth consumed is illegal in German

Then they'll just store the info in English. ;)