FiOS User Finds Limit of 'Unlimited' Data Plan: 77 TB/Month

An anonymous reader writes "A California user of Verizon's FiOS fiber-optic internet service put his unlimited data plan to the test. Over the month of March, he totaled over 77 terabytes of internet traffic, which finally prompted a call from a Verizon employee to see what he was doing. The user had switched to a 300Mbps/65Mbps plan in January, and averaged 50 terabytes of traffic per month afterward. 'An IT professional who manages a test lab for an Internet storage company, [the user] has been providing friends and family a personal VPN, video streaming, and peer-to-peer file service—running a rack of seven servers with 209TB of raw storage in his house.' The Verizon employee who contacted him said he was violating the service agreement. "Basically he said that my bandwidth usage was excessive (like 30,000 percent higher than their average customer)," [the user] said. '[He] wanted to know WTF I was doing. I told him I have a full rack and run servers, and then he said, "Well, that's against our ToS." And he said I would need to switch to the business service or I would be disconnected in July. It wasn't a super long call.'"

Comments

Sounds reasonable to me.

[marklark]

'nuf said.

Re:Sounds reasonable to me.

[2starr]

There's a big difference between sporadically using high amounts of data and continually using high amounts of data.

Re:Sounds reasonable to me.

[Penguinisto]

Reasonable, yes. Sucking down that much bandwidth is well over the usage rate for most businesses, let alone consumers.

OTOH, if Verizon advertised it as unlimited, they (barring any fine print) do have to shut up and provide it. The only loophole I think they can use is that family/friends VPN thing the dude was doing, but otherwise? They either provide it, or they shut the guy off and risk a false advertising lawsuit.

Re:Sounds reasonable to me.

[MBGMorden]

OTOH, if Verizon advertised it as unlimited, they (barring any fine print) do have to shut up and provide it

The fine print isn't about the bandwidth amount - its what he's doing to generate it. He openly admitted he was running servers on it. That doesn't work with the residential terms of service.

Now, that's something that they probably wouldn't nitpick on if the bandwidth usage wasn't so extreme, but you have to expect when you get that specific on the letter of the contract ("This is my bandwidth and I'm gonna use it!") then they're going to in turn do the same. Running servers means he's out.

Re:Sounds reasonable to me.

[div_2n]

Consumers don't generally pay for dedicated bandwidth. Even most small business plans don't cover guaranteed dedicated bandwidth. You are paying for "on demand" bandwidth instead of "always on, always using at full speed" bandwidth.

If you DID pay for the guaranteed bandwidth, the cost would be higher because you would essentially be paying for the cost of running one very long patch cable to your provider's backbone. What you're really paying for is shared bandwidth with other customers. Small business customers usually pay higher which means that their traffic will typically get higher priority in the event of network congestion and they get first attention during outages.

The only way a provider can make money is to oversell their bandwidth. Unless you are Google and you are making money in other ways with the provided connection. Even in the case of bundled services (i.e. IPTV, VOIP, etc.) the margins most likely aren't enough to provide full speed CIR to each residential customer.

Re:Sounds reasonable to me.

[jellomizer]

If you are a rock climber, do you buy a rope that is rated for your body weight, or do you get one rated for multiple times your body weight?

As a home user, having the throughput is useful for the occasional splurge. Say backup your PC to a friends PC, while watching movies. However that is different then a constant load of data on the network.

The pricing of your internet connection is based on the idea you will not use it all. So you can share with others. If you just go nuts on it you will get a call because you are just being greedy.

Re:Sounds reasonable to me.

[tofarr]

Why offer an all you can eat buffet and then complain when somebody tries to stay at a table for days on end?

Any sane individual realises "all you can eat" means "all you can eat within reason".

Same principal with unlimited data. (Unlimited within reason).

IMHO, the ISP acted well above and beyond the call of duty here, giving hum until July to find an alternative rather than simply saying "We don't want your business - as a customer you cost us more than we could possibly make from you in profit."

PS: I am loath to praise any ISP given that I hate mine with the fire of a thousand suns, but have no other choice. I am really surprised he got 72 terabytes out of them - I mean compared to mine they look like saints...

Re:Sounds reasonable to me.

[BitwiseX]

Yep. Running servers is against Verizon's residential ToS. Regardless of how much BW the guy is using, he's breaking the rules.

BINGO!
Another misleading Slashdot title. This is fairly run of the mill for residential ISP service. I bet it was a short conversation! They called him to try to find out if he was doing anything against their ToS, because of his bandwidth usage, and he flat out admitted it.
If he had answered "Netflix" (and that was believable), would the conversation have gone differently? Hard to say, because that conversation didn't even happen.

Re:Sounds reasonable to me.

[squiggleslash]

It sounds like the objection was that he ran servers, the bandwidth thing was merely the trigger to ask.

I'm baffled ISPs still think "servers" are something that needs banning. Reminds me of when so many clueless ISPs banned NAT (or rather connection sharing between multiple PCs in general.)

Re:Sounds reasonable to me.

[Anonymous Coward]

Every all-you-can-eat buffet has fine print at the door that limits how much time you have to eat.

Likewise, Verizon's TOS says, "No servers on a residential account."

When Comcast bills me extra because I watched too much Netflix, that's an entirely different story.

Re:Sounds reasonable to me.

[kthreadd]

If I understood correctly the problem was not necessarily that he used too much bandwidth. The high bandwidth usage just made them interested in knowing what he was doing. Try leaving your taps open and soon the utility company will call you and ask you what you're doing. In this case it sounded like the ToS specified that you were not allowed to run racks with servers, and that the business plan should be used for such usage.

Re:Sounds reasonable to me.

[polar red]

Excessive much? Yes.

what part of 'unlimited' don't you understand ?

Re:Sounds reasonable to me.

[gnasher719]

what part of 'unlimited' don't you understand ?

The customer is always right. But sometimes companies decide that they don't want you as a customer. As in this case.

Re:Sounds reasonable to me.

[Keith Mickunas]

They're not pushing people to their partners. If you have high bandwidth demands they want you on a business plan, which this guy had, then he switched to a consumer plan to save money, and violated their ToS.

Verizon isn't going to stop people who are hosting a personal site (although they block port 80). They aren't going after people hosting a few friends on a game server. But their ToS do permit them to cancel your service if you are hosting a server, and they use this for people abusing the service, like this guy. Their ToS also prevents you from hosting your own ISP on their consumer line or anything like that.

And look at what this guy did, 50TB for multiple months, then he hit 77TB, and that's when they finally called him on it. If their "unlimited" plan (not that they market it as such) goes up into the 10's of TB, is that really a problem?

Re:Sounds reasonable to me.

[GrumpySteen]

Why offer an all you can eat buffet and then complain when somebody tries to stay at a table for days on end?

The guy was using his connection to provide internet connections to a bunch of friends and family. That would be like bringing twenty people with you to an all you can eat buffet, paying for one person and having that one person bring twenty plates of food back to distribute to everyone. There's no way that's going to be allowed.

Re:Sounds reasonable to me.

[Kal Zekdor]

The customer is always right. But sometimes companies decide that they don't want you as a customer. As in this case.

Yeah, seriously. People forget that (most) businesses aren't required to take everyone's business. If you were a customer of a service I was running, but you started costing me more than 30000% more than I had expected, then I would cancel your service also (at least, insofar as our contract stipulates is acceptable). Everyone always wants to rail against the big bad telcos, but in this instance, I'd say Verizon had the right idea. (Unless they violated their contract. I can't say for sure, as I haven't read it, but they likely leave an opening in there for just such occasions.)

This'd be a different story if they cancelled this guy's account just because he was running servers, even if he wasn't costing them excessive bandwidth. I'm a strong believer in net neutrality. That is, they should not be allowed to discriminate service based on the content of his data, but they sure as hell can discriminate service based on the amount of data.

Re:Sounds reasonable to me.

[LordLimecat]

So, if his answer would have been, "Porn. 77TB of porn" Verizon would have had no recourse?

Sure they would. "We choose not to serve you as a customer."

Problem solved.

Re: Sounds reasonable to me.

[Applekid]

Funny how all their advertising says "great for games" and such. - which essentially means servers. The routers come with preset firewall/port forwarding rules for lots of specific games and servers - including HTTP and FTP.

It amounts to misleading advertising, especially where bandwidth useage is concerned.

I'd love to know what Google Fiber's policy on this type of thing is.

Advertising is basically the art of lying just enough to trick people into handing you their money instead of someone else, but not so much that law gets in the way.

Re: Sounds reasonable to me.

[interval1066]

"great for games" and such. - which essentially means servers.

Huh? how does that follow? You're talking like hosting game servers? "Great for games" doesn't mean hosted MMPG's or whatever, I don't even see how that's implied. Still, I'm on the consumer's side on this. I don't particularly feel love for Verizon when they advertise "unlimited" yet cut you off regardless. I've about had my fill of false advertisers and other liars.

Re: Sounds reasonable to me.

[Dishevel]

I am really ok with what they did here.
77TB in a month gives me geek giggles.
But, if he wants to run racks of servers and video streaming VPNs for everyone he knows then we can ask that he get a business plan.

Re:Sounds reasonable to me.

[Dishevel]

A few servers scattered around the house and in the attic is OK but once you start putting them in racks you're looking for trouble?

No.

You can run 30 servers if you want. If you stay within a reasonable amount of data every month they wont even question you.
If on the other hand you start using 10, 20, or 30,000 times as much data as the average guy they will call you up and ask questions.

When you tell them you have racks of servers, VPNs for all your friends and are running a streaming service for everyone you like then they pull out the TOS and tell you how much more that type of service will cost.

Sounds reasonable to me.

Re:Sounds reasonable to me.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention he wasn't sucking it down. He was pushing it out. If you go to the original article look at the graph. 86mbps outbound average and barely anything inbound. Frankly he must think their admins are idiots if he thought he could get away with it.

Re:Sounds reasonable to me.

[lightknight]

And that's why advertising service as 'Unlimited' when they are not is grounds to be sued.

Seriously, how many times do the telecoms have to be dragged into court for blatantly lying to people about what they are and are not offering, before they realize that the courts are never going to suddenly say "Oh yeah, I can see that with normal usage, that's totally what you meant. Hell, I don't even know why people bother with contracts, since they obviously know what each party wants / means with regards to every minor detail." This is, I don't know, a repeat of the past several court cases that involved telecoms and hidden limits? Do the courts need to raise the size of the fines or something? Because they seem to keep forgetting the lesson they just learned not even a year or so ago.

Having said as much, the data from the article is incredibly limited.

From the article: "That's just on premises. Houkouonchi also owns a 2U server running in a colocation facility with 12TB of disk on dual gigabit connections, "which I push quite a bit from as well. It runs game-servers and hosts what used to be the only LA SpeedTest.net server and a bunch of other stuff.""

What I'm seeing is people bugging out at the idea of someone having a rack at home, and crying "Fie' prematurely on this one. It is not rare for a tech to have a server, or several, at home, nor for them to use more bandwidth than others. What more, the 'server' definition Verizon is using in their terms is somewhat loosey-goosy...I say this, as even a regular computer, on a 56K modem, acts as a server with regards to certain services. I believe Verizon's intent is more towards people operating an actual business on a consumer line, as opposed to someone transiting data to and from their business on a consumer line (ala checking your email, but on steroids). Mind you, Verizon's engineers were probably looking with the mind towards illegal or illicit activities, couldn't find any, and ended up calling him (under the premise that illegal activities are responsible for the majority of massive usages). They were, perhaps, hoping this was the case, as it would make terminating his account easier, for the simple reason not that what he was doing was illegal, but because he was less profitable than they had hoped. Again, 77TB is a lot in terms of traffic for the US...but spread across the hundreds / thousands of accounts that Verizon has in that area, it's a drop in the pool of the supposed ocean of bandwidth that Verizon is on the hook for.

That is, unless Verizon has been overselling its capacity. Something which ISPs have a nasty tendency to do. At which point, it becomes a business decision of keeping one tech soaking up 77TB of data, or dropping him and acquiring 77 new customers all using 1 TB of data each; more profitable, the latter, while the former requires putting in a request for more bandwidth, which costs more money.

Still, I think it's odd that Verizon, who is considered a regional Tier-1 provider, would engage in this. They are not, supposedly, lacking in bandwidth. And since techs in general have been responsible for a lot of FiOS's good word of mouth, I find it interesting that Verizon would appear to be engaging in a silly change in policy.

Re:Sounds reasonable to me.

[nabsltd]

Unless you start running 10s of terrabytes a month through it. Then you have to admit your being a bit abusive of a "Residential" plan.

For a 300/65 plan, "10s of terabytes a month" isn't actually unreasonable usage, as it would only take averaging 65Mbps to hit 20TB in a month. Since that's only about 20% of the max, I wouldn't call it abusive.

What this guy did was different in that being over 80% utilization got their attention, and then he admitted to violating the TOS in about a half-dozen ways to get to that utilization. I would be surprised if he could use more than about 40% without violating the TOS, even running some semi-servers (like torrents, or some games that require NAT configuration to work correctly. I pay for a seedbox with 80/80 speed and have a hard time sustaining more than about 50Mbps over the long term simply because there aren't enough leechers who want that much speed.

Re: Sounds reasonable to me.

[Dahamma]

Well, "unlimited" could be open to debate on misleading advertising (though from the article it sounds like the point at which Verizon said "no way" was mention of a file/streaming server).

But "great for games" in no way implies servers. There are many MANY games (probably the majority of online games these days) that do not run as a server. And I'd have to say 300Mbps FIOS would undoubtedly be pretty great for online games.

Besides, it's really about just plain common sense here - they clearly don't give a shit if you are running some FPS online game in hosted mode. They care when someone streams 50+TB a month for their company's testing over a residential connection. It's morons that abuse services like this that cause them to change the policies for the rest of the normal users, usually for the worse.

While I hate someone advertising "Unlimited"

[areusche]

While I hate someone who advertises "Unlimited" with a limited catch, he was running a ton of servers from his home. They have business class internet connections for something like that. Verizon should just advertise their home accounts with the limits posted. 77 terabytes in one month is a hell of a ton of data even if you were watching Netflix 24/7 at HD.

Re:While I hate someone advertising "Unlimited"

[Kaenneth]

"All you can eat" dosn't include carryout for the whole family at the single user rate.

Re:Truth in advertising?

[Frosty Piss]

Why are ISP's allowed to sell an 'unlimited' plan that has limits?

Who said it wasn't "unlimited"? The issue is business use vs home use as related to the plan he signed up for.

Re:Truth in labeling.

[Frosty Piss]

Why these companies insist on calling their plans unlimited?

Folks, the issue here has nothing to do with the reality of an "unlimited" plan (yet).

It has to do with running a BUSINESS on a plan designed for HOME USE.

Hey California Verizon user...

[bwcbwc]

It's because of people like you that we can't have nice things (service).

Nice to see your business is going so well, though.

Re:On the other hand...

[tippe]

No, violating the ToS isn't newsworthy in itself, but the way in which he did it certainly is. I find it incredible that someone was actually able to consume 77TB of bandwidth in a month on a residential connection. That would have been inconceivable even a short while ago. Maybe in a couple of years this sort of thing will become mundane, but at the moment it's quite impressive regardless of how it was done, and certainly deserves to be mentioned on a site that supposedly caters to nerds.

Maybe you just aren't nerdy enough to appreciate this and should hand in your nerd card.

I suppose it's also possible that you are some sort of super-nerd that does this kind of thing regularly and has become so jaded that you won't be impressed until someone streams petabytes of data to their smart watch in less than 10 minutes. If true, prove it, then I'll hand you my nerd card...

Uhm, here's my problem.

[intellitech]

Define "server." Software? Hardware? I think that clause of the ToS is bullshit, and here's why.

If running a "server" is a violation of a ToS, then every single person that has file-sharing enabled on their Windows computer at home is liable to be disconnected. In fact, anybody that has an xbox or a media center PC is likely in violation of this clause, too. I think that the amount of bandwidth he was using was massively unreasonable, but seriously, if you're going to terminate someone, AT LEAST CALL IT WHAT IT IS. Just put a clause into the residential ToS that states that anything beyond 25-50TB in a month is unreasonable and grounds for termination. Ugh.

Bandwidth is reasonable, server policing is not

[SuperBanana]

Yep. Running servers is against Verizon's residential ToS. Regardless of how much BW the guy is using, he's breaking the rules.

"running a server" at one point was taken to mean, by Comcast, to have something listening on port 25, and would result in your connection being shut off. It's one thing to say someone is using too much bandwidth. It's another to say they're not allowed to do certain completely normal things with it.

It wasn't about bandwidth. Cloud backup software uses far more bandwidth than my piddly little web server ever did, but guess which one threw Comcast into a tizzy?

This is about controlling who produces versus who consumes, and Comcast wants you to consume.