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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?"
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
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.
Is 20-30% A realistic estimation of TCP headers?
If the numbers are correct I would say that a significant portion below the tcp/ip layer is being counted.
How much retransmit/error correction is there in DSL? I personally wouldn't think that's valid to charge, but the argument could be made.
As for for the original poster's question on law, I doubt there is any requirement, though if you challenge them in court, it would have to be revealed, or they have no evidence.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
You are looking at 2.5-5% overhead depending on TCP, UDP, frame size, etc. Not 20-30%. If you're feeling pungent, save up your bills for a year and file a small claims court action. Might cost you a few bucks and a couple hours. In exchange, ATT is 99% likely not so show up (therefore you win by default), or to call and offer you credit for cancellation. Should be worth a few hundred bucks to you.
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.
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.
I'm going to go with this and assume that when the guy said "proprietary" he actually meant "I don't know and nobody I can talk to knows".
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
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.
Why are you defending this practice?
Lets face it, once they have the infrastructure in place, they dont need to charge extra for it.
Sure bandwidth costs may increase as usage increases, but so what.. they are charging for it.
Why is everyone so complacent about this crap?
I'm not digging into the Uniform Commercial Code right now because, well, I'm just not doing that right now.
But I'm -pretty sure- that using an intentionally-different definition of a unit is illegal, whether someone is selling bushels of corn, heads of lettuce, pounds of rice, or gigabytes of data.
A bushel is a bushel, a head is a head, a pound is a pound, and a gigabyte is a gigabyte.
Any significant variation from these standards (and TFS's variation is certainly significant) should be carefully scrutinized, and either explained, corrected, or penalized as appropriate.
Plainly, if someone sells me 1000 pounds of beef and as far as I can measure I only receive 750 pounds then that someone has got 250 pounds worth of explaining to do. I cannot imagine any circumstance under which this would be different for data transport.
Kid-proof tablet..
I will agree with this....having dealt with AT&T as a vendor, I would say their customer service people probably have no idea who in the company might be able to answer the question, so it easier to just punt and give the "proprietary" answer.
Furthermore, I would guess they know which market the caller is coming from, and whether they are the only provider in the area. If they know you can't vote with your feet, they are much less inclined to make you happy.
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.
That is incorrect. Ablock specifically works by blacklisting URL patterns from being requested. I don't know exactly how noscript works, but it's surely going to stop a script from requesting other scripts or ads.
Yeah but if someone gives you a bag containing 1000 pounds of (minced) beef, then you empty the beef out and some of the beef is stuck to the insides of the bag, and you throw the bag away you can't claim that you didn't originally receive 1000 pounds of beef.
I'm not really defending AT&T, just providing perspective.
That said they should definitely be completely transparent about how they measure bandwidth.
SURELY NOT!!!!!
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.
I can't see how one can reasonably include overhead that's suffered only on the first hop into the "traffic" measurement.
It's easier to see if you're getting paid more for it.
They can charge for whatever they want to.
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?
Yep. And they do.
That's why I go elsewhere.
That being said, my mom used AT&T. They never got her bill right (always overcharged), and we had to call and they would correct it, but having to do that every month or two sucked. I told that to an AT&T solicitor at my door once, as to why I wasn't interested. Rather than defending his client and get a sale, he responded, with a dismayed and somewhat depressed, "wow... I heard about the same thing from someone just down the street," and moved to the next door. My mom doesn't know anyone on my street other than me, so it seems to me, overcharing is not an uncommon issue with them, and they are just trying to find more clever ways to hide it.
The author of TFS should verify that he's collecting headers, if so, he may have a case.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Yes, but the question is, is the packaging included in the measure, especially if it is necessary packaging? Usually, the packaging isn't tared on weighted stuff, and volume stuff tends to measure the volume of the packaging (not the items shipped/bought/etc). So, there are options on measuring or not measuring the data overhead of the transport layers, that could affect price.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
For a 20% to 30% discrepancy and claims of proprietary measuring system screams one thing and one thing only, random sampling and rounding up. Basically they are averaging out usage and rounding up in their favour. Basically going for lie, cheat and steal until challenged by a class action law suit forcing openness and accuracy.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
a gigabyte is a gigabyte.
And a gigabyte can be either 1,000 MB or 1,024 MB ;-) obligitory xkcd link
if someone sells me 1000 pounds of beef and as far as I can measure I only receive 750 pounds then that someone has got 250 pounds worth of explaining to do.
Maybe you're just measuring the lean meat but your butcher is measuring the fat as well, or he's quoting gross weight and you're quoting net weight? Someone has suggested that AT&T may be measuring packet overhead and the article poster might not be.
perhaps they've used AT&T's method for counting?
Pay half the bill and tell them you have a proprietary methodology by which you count money.
Unless someone is sending an awful lot of really small packets, the 40+ bytes of TCP/IP headers per packet are not going to add 20-30% to the data that is being sent. For example, the "Simple IMIX" as defined on WIkipedia has 58% of packets being 40 bytes long (they are common because they represent data acknowledgments with no data going in the other direction), probably significantly underweights the number of 1500-byte MTUs, and still only has ~12% TCP/IP overhead. It would be grossly inappropriate for AT&T to include any packet overhead beyond TCP/IP because any lower level overhead is an artifact of AT&T's network design that is outside the control of, and opaque to, the end user.
The availability of competing providers varies by market. There are parts of the US with NO broadband available at all, and others where there is only one carrier. Also, the whole issue here seems to be that the "terms" he accepted withheld relevant information - and that IS grounds for legal appeal.
That's not accurate. They are selling you a service by a standard measure, and that should be an absolute measurement. When you buy gasoline, you are buying a fairly exact amount, and the pumps are regularly measured to ensure they're providing the stated amount. If the petrol station started using their own "proprietary" measurements? GTFOOT.
Sure bandwidth costs may increase as usage increases, but so what.. they are charging for it.
They would love you to think that, but actually bandwidth costs have decreased significantly as usage has increased. The problem is not external bandwidth costs, it is oversubscription. They don't want to invest in expanding their internal network as much as they need to, instead just lumping more and more users on the same local pipes and hoping their access patterns are all little bursts. Of course streaming and P2P kill that.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
Including ATM overhead, and probably even just the AAL5 overhead, would probably be grounds for a lawsuit because that overhead is an artifact of AT&T's network design that is invisible to the user and out of the user's control. What would you do if a shipper charged you by the pound to ship a box and then also billed you for the weight of a hand truck that they decided to send along for their own convenience in handling your package?
I'd complain, and then the shipper would subtract the weight of the hand truck (20% of the weight of the box) and then mark up their per weight prices by 30% saying their had been an increase to the cost of doing business. Which is more-or-less what AT&T will end up doing if they need to adjust the way they calculate usage.
A bushel is a bushel, a head is a head, a pound is a pound, and a gigabyte is a gigabyte.
Except when it's a gibibyte. Chances are his router uses 1024 bytes per KB, and AT&T are using 1000 bytes per KB.
No wonder it is proprietary information.
Except by my math, this only accounts for a 2.4% difference.
The OP could probably contact the Bureau of Weights and Measures, this is the sort of thing that they exist for. Namely to assure customers that if they buy X pounds of Y that they aren't getting (X-1) pounds z ounces of Y where Z isn't equal to 16.
This isn't like that BS suit against the HDD manufacturers for using the SI unit for their HDD capacities, this is potentially a legitimate complaint.
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
Yeah but if someone gives you a bag containing 1000 pounds of (minced) beef, then you empty the beef out and some of the beef is stuck to the insides of the bag, and you throw the bag away you can't claim that you didn't originally receive 1000 pounds of beef.
I think you've got that wrong. If they're measuring DSL overhead, error correction, etc then the proper analogy would be:
Somebody sells you a crate of apples they claim is 1000 pounds. What they neglected to tell you was that the crate itself weight 200 pounds, and they included that in their calculation. You only got 800lbs of actual apples.
GStreamer - The only way to stream!
Agree. If you sell something it should be in a defined unit of measure, and it should be calibrated such that any errors are in the favor of the consumer. That's where the whole baker's dozen thing came from - bakers would include an extra piece of bread to ensure that any errors in their measurements would be more than compensated for. Back in those days if an inspector did a surprise scale test and you came up short you'd lose your hand, so bakers were eager to ensure they were in spec.
I don't care what the unit of measure is, as long as it is defined. That said, it would be nice if we could actually all be metric - I was just shopping for phone cases and it is REALLY annoying when the phone dimensions are in mm and the case dimensions are in inches.
Exactly, but charging you whatever the market will bear, and not telling you what your actually paying for are two completely different things. He's being charged for a service, and he reasonably (SHOULD) have a right to understand how he may be over or under committing his connection to the service level he's selected and being provided. If they're dangling the bait of "you may go over and we'll charge you more money than you ever wanted to spend, or we're going to downgrade your service because we want more money" then it could just be the provider padding the numbers, now I'm assuming he's in the US and is not subject to taking what the grand master has allocated him he should have some kind of recourse.
That being said, TCP/IP overhead accounting for 20-30%? If you utilize your connection regularly I'd be shocked, but it really depends on a lot of factors, there's no numbers on his actual throughput, so was sitting idle all month with just a windows PC checking for updates to Java, flash and windows every 5 minutes and whatever mallware he inevitably has, sure. Maybe he's on an ADSL that has a bunch of ATM overhead that goes on even if he's not transmitting, so there are legitimate reasons, but one would reasonably suspect you have a right to know that your actually being charged for that!
Good leaders run toward problems, bad leaders hide from them.
Yes but they check the gas pumps because in the past crooked gas stations with rigged pumps were common. People noticed and now something is done about it. It should be no surprise that businesses in other industries are cheating that same way. Will the customers catch them often enough to get the regulators to act on it? I don't know but I don't think enough of the customers are likely to know the difference.
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.
Is 20-30% A realistic estimation of TCP headers?
If the numbers are correct I would say that a significant portion below the tcp/ip layer is being counted.
How much retransmit/error correction is there in DSL? I personally wouldn't think that's valid to charge, but the argument could be made.
As for for the original poster's question on law, I doubt there is any requirement, though if you challenge them in court, it would have to be revealed, or they have no evidence.
20-30% isn't realistic, but headers plus a mismatch between a MiB and MB measure would get you a lot closer. The poster also didn't mention if all of the traffic was being totaled in his calculations (TCP/UDP/ICMP,etc).
He's also likely measuring traffic going *though* his router, not traffic coming *to* his router. ATT is measuring at their end, so he's likely being billed for the constant port knocking and vulnerability scanning that is going on.
Does it add up to 20-30%? Maybe no. Is ATT collectively a bunch of shitheads? Absolutely. Is it safe to assume because they're a bunch of shitheads that they're deliberately mis-billing? Also so. And "proprietary" could VERY easily be a corporate policy of "don't tell them anything if you're going to tell them something that is inaccurate". And I wouldn't trust a call center worker to properly explain the byte-for-byte measurement of network traffic. Far better to say "no, its proprietary" than to only explain 80% of it, get 10% wrong and have Slashdot or Reddit get their panties in a bunch because a near-minimum-wage call center worker mis-spoke.
When I was with Comcast their door to door salesmen started accusing/harassing me for stealing cable.
Of course at the time I did not have a cable box and no way to connect the coax to anything.
Turns out, a previous tech had mislabeled the wires, and my Apt had two wires listed. Someone else was plugging in theirs but it was labeled in pencil, as mine.
They shouldn't. You should get a 1.5mb connection and pay less. It will serve your needs well. I should get a 30MB connection and pay for it. It will serve my needs well. We should BOTH get the bandwidth we paid for, even if we cap it out. The problem isn't the customers, the problem is ISPs selling 30MB connections for $20/month and then setting a cap so low I could hit it in under an hour. They're doing this to attract customers with high speeds at low prices, but once they have the customers they're refusing to let them use the product they rightfully purchased because they only charged the customer enough to support 1/10th the speed they promised. This problem will not be solved by the ISPs... they are locked into a price war. The FCC needs to step in a setup rules for speed/caps, etc... They need to test ISPs and make sure they are delivering what they are offering. This "up to 20Mb!" and then getting less than 1Mb nonsense needs to end.
"Buy your fuel on cold days, you get a *little* more for your $50 than you do on a hot day (hence airlines buy fuel by weight, not volume)."
Used to be more true than it is now. Most fuel station tanks in the USA are 2-3 ft underground, below the frost line, so the stored fuel temperature stays at a relatively constant 50 or 60-something degrees even on the hottest summer days. Sure, if it's a bloody hot day at a station that isn't used much, the fuel that's actually in the pump may warm up a little, but they retain very little gas.
Unless, of course, you lived in Centralia, PA. Then....then you have a very good point.
Chris Knight is my hero.
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.
Well... no. They'll just suspend your account for non-payment until you pay.
And that's part of the problem... the service provider ultimately has the upper hand, since the customer needs that internet connection a lot more then the service provider needs the remaining $7. As such, the reality is that pretty much any customer who tried that kind of stunt will panic and promptly pay up as soon as they realize that their internet has been shut off.
This service provider advantage is also why utility companies (gas, water, electricity, etc.) can so easily get away with charging outrageous "reconnection" fees, just to flip a switch and turn you back if you should happen to miss your payment date for some reason. As such, it's that much more important that the service provider be held accountable for their system of measurement. A "proprietary" system of measurement just doesn't hold water.
Someone has suggested that AT&T may be measuring packet overhead and the article poster might not be.
Overhead isn't 20-30%. Assuming a typical setup using mostly UDP/TCP/IP over a PPP connection, he's losing, at most, 48 bytes for every 1500. That's a whopping 3.2%.
A more likely explanation is that someone's not measuring correctly (either the submitter or AT&T). It's feasible that AT&T is fudging the numbers. It's also feasible that the submitter isn't correctly monitoring traffic, such as only measure routed traffic and ignoring packets to the internet originating from the router, such as DNS, NTP, etc.
In Canada fuel sales are volume corrected (to 15C) so regardless of the temperature of the fuel you pay for the same amount.
Lets face it, once they have the infrastructure in place, they dont need to charge extra for it. Sure bandwidth costs may increase as usage increases, but so what.. they are charging for it.
That's the obnoxious thing. See, they sell you a connection; let's use an LTE-Wifi puck as an example. They say "speeds up to 25 Megabits per second," then they turn right around and give you a completely different number but disguise or attempt to justify it as a different metric altogether, such as "5 Gigabytes per month."
Those are both measurements of bandwidth. All they did was move the scale. So let's even out the units:
However:
When you attempt to solve a problem with bandwidth by restricting transfer, all you do is alter the actual bandwidth that someone is paying for, while simultaneously shoving into the customer's hands an extremely effective method for automatically increasing their bill. This creates massive incentive to never use the service at all, which increases the quality of service for those that do use it, and generates significantly more profit than increasing capacity to compensate for actual usage. As a bonus, since the service is faster, it's easier for the less conscious to run up their own bills. Win-fucking-win-fucking-win. For everyone except the customer.
It's just fucking wrong. Transfer caps are an artificial construct that do not actually address the problem. While they can work in theory, the fact that networks slow down in spite of the fact that they exist goes to show that they're a titanic pile of bullshit. They comically generate the money needed to address the actual problem with the service but they will stay around forever. Because fuck the customer.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
Cost is not the issue.
Aircraft measure fuel by weight because that is what is important to flight.
How much weight am I lifting?
How does the weight the fuel and the placement of the tanks they are in affect my CG?
How much more fuel do I have to burn off before my weight is within limits for landing?
This is why Military, Commercial and General aviation use weight.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
And if they are doing so, that would be silly. There's a lot more capacity at the local DSLAM than there is upstream. Everyone has their own copper pair. Upstream usage is what should be subjected to a cap. The overhead of the last mile is irrelevant.
I can do you one better there. When I moved into one apartment I plugged my tv into the wall expecting to be hooked up to the building antenna. Instead, I found I had Comcast. So I didn't say anything and just enjoyed the service expecting it to go away when a tech realized it was hooked up. About three months went by and a Comcast tech showed up at my door asking if I'd like to have their service, I said no thanks. Sure enough a little while later my tv was no longer receiving Comcast and I was on the building antenna. Another three months goes by and another Comcast tech showed up at my door and claimed I was receiving Comcast illegally. I told him no I wasn't I only go the over the air channels, he looked rather confused. Less than an hour later my tv suddenly was receiving Comcast again. Mislabeled wires? Techs that don't know what they're doing? I'm not sure, but it was entertaining.
How are they doing that? That's the entire problem. They're saying 'how' is proprietary and they won't tell you.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people