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Ask Slashdot: AT&T's Data Usage Definition Proprietary?
stox writes "As many of you know, AT&T has implemented caps on DSL usage. When this was implemented, I started getting emails letting me know my usage as likely to exceed the cap. After consulting their Internet Usage web page, I felt the numbers just weren't right. With the help of Tomato on my router, I started measuring my usage, and ended up with numbers substantially below what AT&T was reporting on a day-to-day basis. Typically around 20-30% less. By the way, this usage is the sum of inbound and outbound. At this point, I decided to contact AT&T support to determine what exactly they were defining as usage, as their web pages never really define it. Boy, did I get a surprise. After several calls, they finally told me they consider the methodology by which they calculate bandwidth usage to be proprietary. Yes, you read that right; it's a secret. They left me with the option to contact their executive offices via snail mail. Email was not an option. So, I bring my questions to you, all-knowing Slashdotters: are there any laws that require AT&T to divulge how they are calculating data usage? Should I contact my state's commerce commission or the FCC to attempt to get an answer to this?"
Most likely you don't calculate TCP headers while AT&T rightfully does. That's why you get less bandwidth use.
every request sent is probably counted in 1k blocks. its always going to be out.
Granted, contacting them may not actually help you in the short term, but bringing attention to this kind of nonsense is the best way there is to try and put a stop to it. Better yet, find someplace to publish a fully fledged and documented story with relevant emails and the like and THEN start getting some attention to it. This is something there certainly should be standards for, and the government needs a kick in the pants to realize that.
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
Try the Consumer Protection Bureau. An aimless, foundering government office might get their attention.
I'd sick the FTC and the FCC on them... If they try and bill you for it, I'd take them to small claims court. The judge isn't going to like their answer, I bet. You need to account for all bytes in and ouf, in all packets. Or, you could tell them you are going to dump them for comcast, or sonic or who ever can complete against them.
They are billing you, they must disclose the exact nature of what you are being billed for. I seem to remember some other telco trying this and a court told them off for it.
Welcome to AT&T. Let me see if I can help you get to the right place.
Just say what you are looking for.
Terms of Service
Did you say Enforce Archaic Rules? I thought so. Now tell me how I can help.
Privacy
I'm not sure if I heard that right, did you say Please Let the Government Have Access to All My Data?
Bandwidth Usage
I'm sorry, you are over the limit. Goodbye!
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
...this would most likely not be legal. What if the gasoline pumps had a "proprietary" method for billing you? How can their method be anything more than the aggregate of packets sent and received? Are they listening in on what you're doing, ie if you set on web page for too long they count it as "data usage"? Or are they counting things like VoIP as double data. 1 MB of talk time equals 2 MB of web browsing. I just do not get this.
If you can prove that you have used substantially less than they claim and cut you off.
As a side note: why the hell would anyone go with a plan with data caps?
A 100 mbit fiber connection with no caps at all is around $100 a month here, if i drop to 60 mbit it costs $50. I think there are about 10 providers in this area competing with DSL, cable and fiber.
DSL is based on ATM technology.
And ATM uses 53 Byte cells to transfer data. 48 Byte for the actual data and 5 Byte overhead to indicate things such as the destination.
Now when you want to transfer 50 Bytes of data, you need two atm-cells (vs 1 ethernet packet). This takes 106 Bytes of data on-the-wire.
When one end is measuring the Ethernet side (50 Bytes + ethernet overhead) and the other is measuring the ATM side you will end up with very different numbers.
A web user once found himself in a fix;
His ISP cried "too many bits!"
For while a yottabyte has a septillion,
An ATTbyte, only six.
Change to another provider.
just pay it. they apparently could use the money more than you.
My solution was to leave AT&T for Clear.
This was primarily due to my DSL speed dropping way, way below the
1.5 MBits (which I NEVER got near) I was paying for.
I was also concerned by the, at the time, looming usage limits.
Where is Judge Green when we need him?
Dr. Frank J. Nagy Fermilab Computing Division Authentication and Directory Services Group
This idea will spread if corporations can profit it from it. Expect to see "proprietary" metering coming to electricity, gas, water, fuel and anything else that can be metered.
And of course they would treat customers like that. The primary constituency that a corporation is focused on is the shareholders and they are deemed far more important than customers, who come further down the priority list. Customers are still more important than the corporation's rank and file staff though, if that offers any solace.
Government inspectors ensure that gas pumps are properly calibrated. A gallon is a gallon.
The grocer's scale has to meet government standards. A pound is a pound.
A byte should be a byte.
AT&T saying their standard is proprietary is like the butcher arguing that he should be able to put his thumb on the scale when he is weighing your hamburger.
If you think ATT is the only arrogant company that tends to abuse its position as a service provider in a protected market then just try moving north to Canada and you will see what the telcos are really capable of when they essentially run the body which governs them!
The data rates south of the border are 30-40% more competitive and the monthly data plan allotments up here border upon the ridiculous.
There is an investigation currently going on up here into alleged collusion between Bell, Telus and Rogers. It will go no where because we they essentially are in a position to put the thumbscrews on the regulators through their friends in the Conservative party in Ottawa. It was a small news item last month that has very quickly dried up and I seriously doubt the cartel will be held to task for what they are doing.
I am going to take a stab in the dark... based on my experiences with ATT... and say the person who told you this is a liar. This sounds like a class action suit in the making.
it sounds very telstra like IMHO
whats that, class action you say?
I am no laywer and I am assuming the cap is part of your contract with them, I cannot see how they can keep their definition of bandwidth usage a secret. They are now basically claiming that you are restricted in your usage upto the cap but they refuse to tell you what the cap actually *means*. Without clear understanding of how usage is measured, the number of the cap is meaningless.
So you are subject to provions in a contract that you are not allowed to know. It would surprise me very much if they could hold that up in court...
I had the same problem...once they started charging for exceeding the bandwidth caps I wrote a program to log usage.
I have an old Fedora box with two ethernet cards doing the router work (everything to and from the house goes through this box) and use Etherape to track the usage. A cronjob once a minute makes sure Etherape is always running, and a kill -10 every minute gets it to dump the usage data in XML which I process into a CSV for analysis and charting.
Surprisingly, their monthly usage figures have matched my full month calculations within 1%.
What irritates me is that their monthly totals are not available on their WWW site for a full week after the end of the month, and their current month totals are also delayed a couple of days sometimes wildly inaccurate since they are missing days. Example is the November totals for my account seem to be currently missing 2-5 November, and they haven't posted 12,13 November yet. Hence they show lower usage than what I really used. If this were the end of the month, I might think I can squeeze that extra download in before the end of the month, but I am sure they would figure it out and charge for it.
I hit this issue once when I breached the 150Gb cap with 6 hours remaining. They claim to sell you another 50Gb for $10, but of course that doesn't roll into the next month. That is where I would complain....if they are going to charge by the Gb, they need to accurately report usage during the month.
AT&T just sent me a letter that they are switching me to U-verse with a 250Gb cap. They claim it will be the same price as DSL for the next year, but after that who knows....only other game in town is Comcast which cost even more.
Could be like the Wireless accounting where they count packets they send not the ones you receive. If you have crappy connection you pay for the re-trys. This should also apply to your packets in the other direction but downlink traffic is smaller than the other direction.
Depending on how you measured your bandwidth locally, you might have measured the data sent, not the packets sent. The TCP achieves reliability by sending acknowledgement packets and resending packets when they are lost (which happens quite frequently on the Internet--that's how routers control congestion). So a single packet might easily be resent multiple times, causing AT&T to measure the bytes that went across their network (since that's what costs them) and not the effective amount of communication that you received.
Of course, the cost and quality of bandwidth in the USA is ridiculous compared to other countries, and you're being robbed blind no matter what.
There might all sorts of traffic related to your router that you're not seeing. AT&T is likely metering your connection on their end, both in and out, and consequentially finding more overhead than you do related to signaling, headers, error correction, and so forth. They might additionally be metering ATM traffic or such instead of IP traffic -- aka even more network data.
Methinks the support guy saying it is "proprietary" is a candid way of saying he has no clue of what is being measured - let alone how. Also, it seems conceivable that AT&T might be using different techs depending on the location, and this may very well result in different connections being metered differently or at different levels. This is not to say that they shouldn't be transparent on how they meter you and what they meter exactly. I just doubt your contract entitles you to a full disclosure of how they run their network -- which is indeed proprietary and subject to change without notice.
If you aren't going over the limit, don't sweat it. If you are going over the limit and have access to an ISP that offers a business or telecommuter plan with no limits, go ahead and make the switch.
AT&T lost me as a 15+ year ISP customer inherited from Bellsouth because their overage charges at 6 Mbps put my monthly bill within $20 of a Comcast business plan at 22 Mbps and no cap.
We are the 198 proof..
I just want to be sure that people realise that this doesn't actually mean they consider the methodology by which they calculate bandwidth usage to be proprietary. It's just a lie because the person being asked doesn't know the answer, doesn't know how to find out and feels that it's the sort of thing that will shut the submitter up.
Just a warning to those who might actually believe them.
What an absolutely strange site. The site claims more than 100,000,000 signatures. So I figure I'll see what kinds of petitions attract this kind of attention. Select "browse petitions", then select "popular", finally select "all time".
- Top of the list: "Pay UN Interns a Fair Wage" with 2439 signatures.
- Second in the list: "Remove 2014 Ice Hockey...from Belarus" with 1334 signatures.
- Not far down the list, number 6 has only 33 signatures.
Something, somewhere does not compute...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
That's in your contract. Get lawyer to make a form.
Get millions of people to sue simultaneously.
Switch providers, do it again.
You might also contact the FTC which deals in false advertising.
I believe there is a court case involving AVIS where they had to refund a lot of money because they could not prove that their odometers were always correct and they could not show that they had made an effort to make sure they were correct. I worked for a value added network in the 80s and they went through a lot of trouble to make sure that they could document and justify their usage based billing. AT&T is out on a limb here. Of course it would take lawyers and time to saw the limb off. At the end, you will have a more accurate bill.
If AT&T is dispensing a measured quantity of anything, and you feel you are being cheated, make a complaint to the state bureau that deals with this. Look on a gas station pump and you will be able to find them.
I expect they may not be doing this now, but a written complaint and their desire to build their empire may well cause the heavy hand of officialdom to descend on AT&T.
There are studies to do, standards to settle and matters to enforce and little stickers to put on all measuring points. AT&T will quake in their boots, run and hide?
ATM cells in your DSL line have ~10% overhead
each TCP/IP packet has ~2.5% overhead in best case
TCP/IP handhakes(and resets) might add another 2-3%
So 20% overhead in data transfered vs useful data is actually realistic over DSL line
...just stop downloading so much pr0n.
In livestock, you can base the rate "on the hoof," or before slaughtering losses. You buy the steer on the hoof at the measured weight. The only difference is that it is clear, and most people buying livestock for slaughter are aware that a 40%+ loss between hoof and market is common. Still, when you sell to a consumer, what they receive in hand is the actual product weight.
Another analogy would be lumber, which is sold in "nominal" sizes, but for which the actual size is smaller by (most often) 1/2" for framing sizes 2" and over, and 1/4" for thickness of hard or decorative woods and sizes under 2". An addition, some hardwood vendors will charge a 10% surcharge for straightening loss. If you buy a 2x6, you get a 1.5x5.5 board. Even if you wanted to buy a board foot of lumber (thickness (in) x width (ft) x length (ft)), you'll get a "nominal" board foot - the previously mentioned 2x6, 1 foot log, is a BF of lumber, though it's clearly less than 144 cu in of material. The sizes are based on sawmill losses (cutting and planing to size) from a piece of standing timber. Even a "full" or "rough sawn" piece of lumber is less than nominal by the thickness of the sawmill blade (kerf).
The difference here is that it's secret. Which would follow the car insurance company model for what is required to drop you from their policy. You see, they will tell you that you have been dropped, but are not required to tell you what criteria they use to drop you. That's proprietary information / secret, and they won't tell you, though it's theoretically part of the contract you signed for the insurance. I suspect the same is true of US health insurance. Your ranking and whether you qualify for renewal is based on your condition and how much you cost, but I'd be willing to bet that data is never made public.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
If you are measuring your usage based on byte counters on interfaces, this *should* accurately reflect how they measure it, assuming they measure your byte usage at their BNGs, thus shouldn't include PPP encapsulation, Ethernet (or ATM cells), etc. It could, however, be possible they are being cheeky and measuring ATM cells, which will bite (or should that be byte?) you. ATM cells are 64bytes. So if your IP packet is 40 bytes (eg, an ACK), you are "wasting" 24 bytes, and potentially being charged for. That said, it's unusual to sell/charge DSL on ATM circuit usage.
More likely I suspect is the following: Your PPP session is terminated (and accounted) at a BNG. The link between you and that BNG is not infinite in capacity, and is very likely to be smaller than the BNG to the rest of the world. So if you have, say, 20Mbps of packets flying at you via the net, the BNG will count them as they fly through it, and down the Backhaul, eventually reaching your nice 15Mbps DSL link. There is literally nowhere for the extra 5Mbps to go, so it gets dropped.
Regular TCP handles this nicely and has back off algorithms in place, so your link is saturated, but not totally. It's not perfect, but it mostly works, and servers dont send you much more than the narrowest part of the pipe.
Torrenting, being UDP based, blows that out of the water. It's congestion control is marginal at best.
So, want to see if that's what's going on. Idle your link for 24hours, and during that time transfer files via http only, and try NOT to download files from fast sites.
Now take your measurement of your bytes used, and compare theirs. If you are roughly the same, then that explains it.
Interestingly.., even if it is that, the question remains, can the ISP bill you for data it *attempts* to send you, rather than data that actually makes it down the pipe? And that leads to unwanted data. If you get DoS'd, you didn't ask for that data, should you be billed for it?
[Agent]Hard to go to court if you've already contractually agreed to binding arbitration. [/Agent]
If ATT isn't limiting the actual bytes but rather "excessive usage" as a general, non-numeric term, then they don't have to show you anything. They tell you when you've consumed too much, and you reduce or they drop you. It's very one sided. But then, so are nearly all contracts where there is little or no effective competition.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Pay half the bill and tell them you have a proprietary methodology by which you count money.
If you live in the US (the posting implies that you do) and you can't resolve the issue with AT&T, then I would file a FCC Complaint.
You can even file the complaint online.
That said, 20%, is not a huge difference - is it worth fighting over?
Remember when people used to be concerned that when buying a 10 Gig hard drive, it wasn't really 10 Gigabytes?
(I hope you weren't expecting me to make your decision for you.)
This sounds like how credit agencies come up with our credit score. The way they come with a credit score is a secrete. This is why your score can be different between the credit agencies. Good luck trying to figure out how they determine your credit score.
How about dropped packets because of firewall rules?
This is a difficult problem. I think only acknowledged packets should be counted, but that
leaves some protocols uncounted. This is equivalent to the electric company charging you
for transformer loss; they don't - which is why the meter is on your home, not at their office.
This going to be a problem in the future. Comcast has their limits "disabled" for now, and
I'm sure it's because of technical issues like this.
But, in the end, usage caps really are a Load of Nonsense.
CAPTCHA = arboreal
We got ourselves away from AT&T after we took a careful look at the actual speeds we were receiving. Bandwidth to AT&T's internal network is great, but getting anything from the world beyond is very, very slow. Further, there were inexplicable thirty second to ten minute downtimes frequently throughout the day. It's not surprising they're ranked #22 among US broadband ISPs.
The response from AT&T staff has been puzzling. When made aware of the problem, they shrugged it away. It was nearly impossible to get someone coherent (not a question of accent, but of ability to form language; intoxication was suspected in one case) on the phone. This and several other factors convinced us that AT&T intends to exit this market, and anyone who signs up for their service in the meantime is doomed.
I'm a long time AT&T customer. I'm going to explain to the OP what his situation really is. He can either accept the reality of it or go on his Don Quixote quest to be a one man army against AT&T.
AT&T no longer wants to support their DSL service. So they do things to make it unpleasant for customers who can now get Uverse but have chosen not to do so. The DSL service drops constantly and I believe this is deliberately done to make people angry enough to abandon it. If you switch to Uverse, you will find that your completely unreliable DSL connection has been replaced magically with a completely reliable Uverse connection. Uverse also has much higher download limits. I've never even come close to using all of mine. The Uverse service is so much better and more reliable than their DSL offering that I would suggest you consider switching if you can. They are going to continue to make it painful for DSL customers who could switch but choose not to.
from the shops and you get half a pound of flour, then that's just because it's their shop. You can't even cry monopoly, there's competition.
Except that would be illegal. Short measures and false advertising are ILLEGAL for a commercial entity selling to customers.
AT&T offer (for example) a 20GB a month cap. If they cap at 14GB, they have broken the law.
If AT&T want to cap at 14GB a month of data, then they can just ADVERTISE a 14GB cap. But they can't advertise a 20GB cap and cap below that. It is false advertising and illegal.
Telco billing platforms are well-known to be shoddy and inaccurate, both because this is a hard problem to get right and because the engineering quality is low. I have personally worked on several that I know gave wildly inaccurate bills to some customerrs (high or low - I referred to this as our "double or quits" feature).
So I am confident that part or all of AT&T's reticence is because they do not want it to be known how low the accuracy and quality of their billing platform is.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"
Your State's public service commission, FCC, and the FTC. Also, one's county may also have an office to complain to, but if they're like mine, they just refer you to the state.
When I used AT&T DSL (admittedly a few years ago now), they used PPPoE. From a quick google it looks like that may still be the case. However, even with the multiple layers of overhead (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point-to-point_protocol_over_Ethernet#Protocol_overhead), and considering the GB vs GiB difference (it's always a multiplier of 1000 in telecomms), I'm still struggling to see how it's a 30% difference, unless a lot of your bandwidth is in the form of small packets -- e.g. web requests, IMs, games, rather than the typical TCP uploads/downloads.
My guess is that phone personnel you speak with are just instructed to tell you that something is "proprietary" whenever they don't know the answer, don't want to look it up, or don't want to bother someone who does know.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
*cackle*
Yeah, right.
If they can't tell you how they are measuring something or what the limits are and how you can track it, then go to the gas pump and go pay for gas without looking at the meters.
No business can get away with that type of behavior for long. AT&T is an arrogant company, but even they will not be able to get away with this for long. AT&T exists under the law which says "we grant you the right of way for your equipment and our protection if anyone else would seek to interfere with your equipment. But in exchange for this, you must play by our rules."
So yes, the correct answer is to take this up with the government. The PROBLEM is that we just missed an election cycle. It may be the next election cycle before you get any resolution on the matter.
15 years ago AT&T told me their long distance billing rates were, effectively, secret and subject to change without notice, I would be notified on each bill what they had decided to charge and my paying of the bill indicated acceptance of the current terms of contract as most recently amended and posted on their website.
I declined to pay, they sent me to collections over a $40 bill, all quite amusing in the end, but what kind of corporate mentality thinks they are building a business by alienating customers with such utter B.S.?
In part, AT&T's perennial asshattery (and dismal service) has kept me, and my entire family, iPhone free all these years.
Thank you, AT&T.
You have the right to know based on the fact that you are paying for an accurate account of usage, you expect x data and find y usage, they must explain how they calculate to you. BTW, to see how far this will get: All gas pumps in the US (dispensing diesel and gas) can not tell the difference between fumes and liquid fuel, you are paying for fumes and the gas companies know this, I know this because of several challenges in a couple of states and speaking with employees who manage these numbers directly at M0bile subsidiaries. The same regulation and push for revealing ATT data counting will be applied as was from Gas to fumes (i.e. 0)
captcha: retrofit
I just recently dropped Uverse for faster speeds with Charter about 4 weeks ago. I was told by a AT&T rep over a year ago that data caps would be implemented for not only DSL users but also Uverse. I found the webpage that would allow me to keep track of my data usage but get this; it was never activated. The page only display a message that data capping had not yet been fully implemented and that I didn't have to worry about data usage affecting my bill.
I thought maybe they had put it on hold or decided not to implement at all.
I downloaded 40GB+ within a 30 day period several times during the few years I had Uverse and my bill never went up nor did I ever receive a warning or notification about my high data usage.
To me it sounds like DSL is getting the cap but not Uverse....
One of the cardinal rules of contracts is that words are given their ordinary plain meaning. This rule is applied within the context of the transaction. If words have a usual or customary meaning within a particular industry, then that meaning is attributed to the word used. If you want to depart from that rule, you have to provide a definition in the contract.
Hard drive manufacturers got into trouble with this principle when they quietly redefined a megabyte to be equal to 1,000,000 bytes instead of 2^20 bytes like everyone was used to.
If I had AT&T as my service provider, I would be complaining to the Federal Trade Commission alleging this as a violation of Section 5 of the FTC Act. I would also be complaining to my state's Attorney General alleging a violation of my state's consumer protection laws.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
"a gigabyte is a gigabyte"
Somebody please tell that to the hard disk manufacturers.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
What about all the bandwidth you didn't ask to use? Think port knocking, SSH brute force, etc that your router may not be relaying to your home network. It still passes your modem so ATT is counting it as traffic.
I had a problem with my local cable provider, Comcast. I was getting horrible jitter on my connection, which was wreaking havok on my Vonage VOIP service. So, I spent a few days gathing all kinds of nice jitter/delay statistics, putting them in a presentation, and emailing it to the Comcast Tech folks, and waiting for a response.
After a week of being ignored, I called Tier 1 support and went through the whole process with an obviously clueless first level call-answerer. I gave her irrefutable evidence that the jitter was introduced in the first three hops, and therefore HAD to be Comcast's fault. I then asked her "How do you guys manage to keep any of your own VOIP customers happy if this jitter makes the calls unintelligable. She told me "Our Triple-Play voice doesn't have any jitter on it. We treat it special on the network. Would you like to switch to Comcast Digital Voice?" So I asked her to clarify, specifically, "Are you guys deliberately degrading one type of service (my VOIP traffic) while enhancing another level of service (your VOIP service), and now you're telling me to switch to your service to avoid the degredation?" She said, "Absolutely, you'll have no jitter with our Digital Voice."
So, I thanked her, went to the FCC web site where they have a complaint form, put in a summary of my issue, a bunch of data from my jitter tests, and a transcript of my conversation with the Comcast tech. I ended by adding that Comcast was deliberately degrading the service of a competitor to push their own product.
Two weeks later, I got snail-mail letter from the FCC saying they had contacted Comcast and the issue was "resolved." Two days later, I got a call from the VP of Engineering for my region, who gave me an excellent technical description of how Comcast's internal VOIP differs from my VOIP (layer 2 priorty vs layer 3, basically), but that they had just made alterations to ALL routers in their area to pay more attention to the IP priority request flags, and that my jitter problems would be significantly better if I made sure I used the right priority bits. Sure enough, he was right. He ended the call with a plea: "If you have ANY more issues, please call my number direct and don't get the FCC involved."
Bottom line, use the FCC complaint form http://www.fcc.gov/complaints and hold on for "interesting times."
That's like me driving a Kia and complaining that it breaks all the time. Switch to a different ISP! Everyone know they're lying, cheating, scam artists with crap support and unfair terms. Give them the boot!
I think you may be asking the wrong questions, instead of saying how do you measure my bandwidth usage, just ask What does the service I'm paying for send in additional overhead to my "good put", how do I get detailed information on that utilization/usage. You don't really care how they measure, you care what they are measuring.
Good leaders run toward problems, bad leaders hide from them.
Why not mail the executive office? Stop being lazy and gather all the info on it that you can. Once you hit a wall or have sufficient data, publish your findings.
If they are doing something weird, I bet you could take then small claims court over any overage charges you end up receiving.
Its not what it is, its something else.
And see how they like it.
"What? I've only paid you $28? But that's not true. The calculation of true dollar value is propriatory and you have been paid $35 true dollar values.".
They won't go "Well, we won't supply you any more" and get a new customer, they'll take you to court for the money.
They said it was proprietary to get you off the phone -- they straight up don't know the answer and were tired of talking to you. You have no way to measure the transport overhead, but they're clearly counting it. Life goes on.
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
You have the choice to deal with them or go elsewhere. If you do not like the fact that they will not tell you how they charge you, then you are free to take your business elsewhere.
Help turn the Fascist States of America back into a free country and do your part to undo the harm caused by Little Shrub.
They have ALWAYS used the standard and correct interpretation. Always. One gigabyte is one gigabyte, 1000000000 bytes. From the first hard drives to the current. You don't need to tell them what a gigabyte is.
It's not their fault your operating system doesn't know the difference between 1000 and 1024.
c++;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte
Interesting read on why there is confusion about the meaning of the size of a Gigabyte.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
it's your fault... it looks like you don't know the system uses a BINARY base
so 1K = 2^10 = 1024
1M = 2^20 = 1048576
1GB = 2^30 = 1073741824
So PLEASE get your shit straight before doing a RAGE POST FFS
They help you their customers the way Warwick Davis in _Leprechaun_ grants wishes.
Inbound data + Outbound data (measured in 512K blocks partial blocks counted as full blocks) +1d30% = charged useage (please note the 1d30% accounts for blocked ads and needed ATT profits)
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
The ISP counts all traffic through the local peering point, and divides by the number of subscriber connections for that point. That is the mean.
The per-subscriber cap is 1 standard deviation above the mean, which means that in a given month, about 15% of subscribers go over their cap.
Normalization is performed based on subscriber usage rank, so if you are in the 94th percentile, your usage is "calculated" to be that which puts you in the 94th percentile on a Gaussian distribution having the mean and standard deviation determined by the whole population. This is why the numbers come out different.
If your paying both ways, Cost = Up +Download, then your paying for being port scanned even if such scans are firewalled out at the router. How should that ever be your cost ?
For me, the top petitions are
- "open brief stop gaybashing", by stijn de geest: 10,399 supporters
- "Vlaams Minister van Cultuur, Joke Schauvliege: Stop de subsidies aan Jan Fabre" by Els De Bruycker, 9,960 supporters
- "United Nations: Support the Keshe Foundation' technologies for power, water, food, space", by Dirk Laureyssens, 4,480 supporters
Since I doubt that the second most popular submission of all time would just happen to be about a local (to me) issue, and since the numbers I get are very different from yours, I suspect that the site uses geolocalization. Frankly, 100,000,000 is not that much in this day and age, especially since anybody who bothers with one probably "signs" several dozen at at time. I think the hundred million is a pretty credible number, perhaps the site is just not popular where you live?
AT&T (in my case, U-verse) might have an annoying cap, but it's big enough to not really bother me much. On the other had, my AT&T wireless cap (3 gigabytes) is terrifyingly low, because unlike the former cap, there's a real chance I could go over it and get charged extra in any given month. So I *do* actually care about the details of how they calculate it.
Specifically, is AT&T Wireless billing "chunky"? Suppose I have an Andriod app running in the background that relentlessly polls some remote server every 10 seconds. Or 60 seconds, if it matters. My hypothetical app tries to keep the bandwidth down, and works as follows:
User sends 1-byte command via UDP, then disconnects.
Server looks at the request to discern the sender's IP and port, decides what to send based on the command byte, and sends a one-byte response.
As far as I know, a UDP datagram with a single-byte payload is 33 bytes long (24 bytes for the IP header, 8 bytes for the UDP header, 1 byte for the payload). It's just a hunch, but I suspect that my likelihood of getting billed for exactly 66 bytes of data use is 100% pure fantasy. I'd be shocked if those two datagrams didn't end up getting billed as two 1k chunks of data, or worse.
Are wireless carriers required to file explicit tariffs with state utility regulators disclosing their exact charges, and explain how they calculate any usage-based fees in detail?
Simply called the sales department, told them that I would like to sign up for their cell phone service. After being approved, casually mentioned that I never agreed to data caps, and they removed it from my account no questions asked. Now I stream porn and netflix all day, without even thinking about it. Life is good.
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There's a big difference between defending a practice a speculating how AT&T might be doing it's calculations. AvitarX does not seem to be justifing AT&T's ethics.
In Canada fuel sales are volume corrected (to 15C) so regardless of the temperature of the fuel you pay for the same amount.
It gets worse than this.
Your wireless bill is highly dependent on usage, considering the typical 5GB limit. LTE links are going to start using ROHC (RFCs 3095, 5225, etc.) as soon as interoperability and stability is good enough. I know because I'm developing it.
Do you think the wireless vendors will charge you for those 40 bytes of IP/UDP/RTP headers that were compressed down to 1 byte? Damn right they will.
"There can be little doubt that union activities lead to continuous and progressive inflation." F. A. Hayek
Since when is an IP header 24 bytes? What IP options would you be using to send a 1 byte UDP message?
I'm surprised the wireless side hasn't had more discussion on what they consider part of your usage. Sounds like we need legislation to require disclosure.
"There can be little doubt that union activities lead to continuous and progressive inflation." F. A. Hayek
The FCC and the State Commerce Commission is a start. Don't forget your State Utility Board and your State Attorney General too.
Also a lot of newspapers have consumer advocates. Write to them too.
If ATT defines their caps using proprietary methods, least they could do is give you a monitoring tool which uses those methods. Then you'd know if you were getting close to the cap or not. Otherwise it's just their damn secret.
I ran into this issue while working for a company that uses cellular wireless for remote sensing.
I don't know where or how your router graphs count data, what they actually count, or at what level of the protocol stack they run.
I do know that I expected to be billed in a manner that matched my IP datagrams.
Big mistake. Need to count on them tracking from any tower at layer 1.
They count every single frame that is recieved by, or sent from the tower to you.
Even if your phone connects to a tower 50 miles away and has something like 90% loss in the medium. And you don't get it. And they're retransmitting constantly.
If you get disconnected and have to re-engaged in PPTP authentication, and request a new address... multiple TCP-IP handshakes as you struggle for connectivity.
If you shut off the modem to save power and reconnect.... (which you should not have to do, but sometimes rural networks suck).
Just trying to send a little 30 byte of payload UDP datagram can take a couple of kilobytes by the time you're done.
Keep in mind, if you have a 'smart' modem -- it sends all of this damned nearly seamlessly before it gets to your 'real' network stack, unless you write a custom driver that copies what it's actually sending into a spare buffer.
Sadly, some of office people killed the argument I was making when they were completely ridiculous, arguing with the sales team that they should have regular packet loss, TCP overhead, and even ACK packets discounted -- they wouldn't have known what any of those were if I hadn't outlined them as a few 'possibly contributing facotrs' early on in the investigation into abnormally high data costs.
I mean, AT&T wouldn't have changed their billing system for us -- but the way they were counting the data was bullshit.
Now... in broadband, I wouldn't expect a lot of these issues -- but I also wouldn't put it past them.
For what it's worth, my recommendation is to actually put in a complaint to the attorney general complaining about apparent fraudulent billing.
At least in our case, AT&T did reply when we pretty much demanded a flat discount -- but we were a bizarre case where we'd send a few bytes periodically and have kilobytes of connection costs quickly adding up too quickly on devices that never roamed.
I'd start with your state's attorney general, assuming that this is a USA issue:
http://www.naag.org/current-attorneys-general.php
My best guess, after seeing the replies above, is that the site is trying to show me localized results. I am not in the US; if the site is primarily US-oriented, perhaps that is an explanation.
To answer one poster's question above, here's what I see on the home page:
Target - save Thanksgiving (207k sigs)
Nominate Malala for the Nobel Peace Prize (144k sigs)
NCAA: Name...trophy after...Pat Summitt (1800 sigs)
Celina High School... (14k sigs)
FEMA's first responders...benefits (114k sigs)
UNC Board of Governors... (147k sigs)
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2410327,00.asp
I completely bungled this link because I googled the wrong magazine. This is the correct link, from /. recently. Sorry about that.
The one in charge of weights and measures. In Washington State, its a division of the Department of Agriculture. They have the authority to inspect and certify any device used for measurements involving commercial transactions. Find out if they have inspected and certified the equipment used by AT&T for billing. In Washington, there should be a little state inspection sticker on it.
Have gnu, will travel.
I asked our corporate lawyer about this. He said unless the information is fully disclosed, any actions based on that proprietary algorithm are not legally enforceable. Contract law requires all parts of the contract can be fully understood by both parties. So you could take it to small claims court and win. Our you could cancel your contract early without termination fee
If AT&T is dispensing a measured quantity of anything, and you feel you are being cheated, make a complaint to the state bureau that deals with this. Look on a gas station pump and you will be able to find them.
I expect they may not be doing this now, but a written complaint and their desire to build their empire may well cause the heavy hand of officialdom to descend on AT&T.
There are studies to do, standards to settle and matters to enforce and little stickers to put on all measuring points. AT&T will quake in their boots, run and hide?
Unless you want all of the ISPs to be regulated even more, and have state inspectors drop by every "gas station" monthly to check to see if the measurements are accurate. If they get enough complaints, they may make all sorts of new laws and regulations, and you may not like the results. Best case the cost of business will go up, and the costs will be passed on to you and me.
My ISP has pretty accurate metrics, by my reckoning. This has always been my experience. The industry is largely self-policing because of competition. If you think you're being ripped off, you can usually go elsewhere, and if you complain publicly enough (Like Slashdot, maybe?), they're aware of the possibility to lose other customers. I would appreciate it if you tried to work it out with AT&T yourself and don't get any regulators involved that might eventually impact MY bill.
CA users just take 3 min to file here. https://ia.cpuc.ca.gov/cimsapp/
at least in europe it's possible to quite easily find wireless billing.
specificially, for example a certain plan might be billed in 250kbyte chunks per kbyte - meaning if you just transfer 3 kbytes in a session, you might just as well transfer 250. of course this counts mainly when roaming since.. well. I wouldn't sign up for a plan that would be limited use in home turf.
usually wireless carriers will provide you with a list of used data sessions too.
...and Ombudsman, assuming your state has one. I think most states have a utility regulatory agency as well. I think these would be the best places to start with the type of billing issues you're speaking of.
The FCC might not be bad as well, but I don't think they get involved unless there is something about the licensing that was tied to the billing as in that recent issue with 4G spectrum and some companies inability to charge extra for the higher speed as it was a condition of the license to start with.
I do seem to recall something as well about ISPs charging for packets the attempted to deliver, whether they were delivered or not. As the packets never showed up at your end, they wouldn't show in your logs. I'm not saying I agree with it, I am just aware that this is one of the ways they count data to keep your bill as high as possible.
For all I know, they have a method for charging for packets they were expecting from you, but didn't receive. This way they can get you NOT coming or going ;)
Contact your bureau of weights and measures also interstate commerce.
Their contract implies a measured service but not how the service is measured.
Measures are the purvue of weights and measures and I've service crosses state and international boundaries
As a minimum this is perhaps enough to break a contract but an attorney would know.
If there is no alternate service Monopoly money rules come to play.
Do count start and stop bits and also ECC overhead and also give attention to binary and decimal counting tricks.
Research central office equipment, they may be pulling numbers from hardware with "confidential" manuals that
may or may not be under NDA causing your contact to stonewall what should be a transparent contract clause.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
What they're selling you is not very different from a 16 kbps line burstable to 25 Mbps.
What satellite and cellular have in common is the single digit GB per month cap, such that it usually takes months to download a single BD-ROM's worth of data.
I'm in Britain so I don't know US law. But how about: 1) Don't pay the bill. Accuse them of breach of contract and challenge them to prove that you exceeded the cap. 2) Do they have any competitors? Can you not switch to a competitor?