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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.'"
'nuf said.
FiOS user finds how to violate TOS
So switch to the business plan. Jeeze, still a super deal. I have Comcast business and its worth the extra $50/mo for static IPs and much higher bandwidth.
Arrr, tis no man but a remorseless downloading machine.
netflix.
User violates ToS and gets called on it. This is news?
Now, if he had NOT been running all those services for friends, if he himself just liked to stream 200 different movies on his 30 TVs, and download copious quantities of non-copyright infringing torrents for his "library", maybe that would be a different story.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I think "WTF are you doing consuming 77 terabits a month" is a legitimate question. I read TFA yesterday and I realized that Verizon probably can't afford to have a whole lot of users chewing up that kind of bandwidth. Asking him to switch to business service does not out of line to me, considering that he's running these servers for business use.
Note, also, they handled this with a short phone call rather than a nasty-gram or just cutting off his service without warning. That's more courtesy than I'd expect from a big ISP, given some of the horror stories I've heard.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
I'm stuck with Bell Canada who has me capped at 66GB a month. (I know I know - tekksaavy etc. I'll be switching later this summer...) 77TB is almost a fuckton of data. (At least metric, where 10TB is a shitload, and 10 shitloads = fuckton) It might be different in the states, I dunno. I need some coffee...
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Why these companies insist on calling their plans unlimited? It is not like an all-you-can-eat-buffet where there is very good known upper limit for the amount of food one can consume. On a computer, technically a person could buy "all-you-can-eat-buffet" and make a T-junction at the throat and splice in multiple stomachs to the (lone visible to the provider) mouth, so to speak. Yeah, yeah, you can add clauses to the ToS and try to ferret out these users, but unless one does something so egregious like this, they won't be caught. As more and more people with "unlimited" service share bandwidth with friends and neighbors, the average usage goes up and it is more and more difficult to find people violating "ToS". So basically it is detrimental to the ISP to sell anything labeled "unlimited". Why do they do that? There are still people out there who would refuse to buy "Super premium 1 TB/month" connection unless it is called "unlimited"?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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.
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.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Why are ISP's allowed to sell an 'unlimited' plan that has limits? Isn't that against false advertising laws? "Unlimited" has a well known and very specific meaning, and that meaning does not include limits, not even "30,000 percent higher than everyone else".
The limit isn't on the data here; it's on the form of use. They asked what he was doing, and it turned out that what he was doing qualifies as business, rather than residential use. And at that point they told him that he'd need to change account types.
Look at it this way: what if someone got an account like this, and set themselves up as a small ISP for their neighborhood? Would that be acceptable, simply because it's an unlimited account? Of course not...and the ToS that the customer would have agreed to says as much. Since when is it acceptable to simply ignore the contracts we sign? Oh, wait...that was your point, wasn't it? Well, it goes both ways.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
It's not an unlimited plan.
It's an unlimited* plan.
*limited
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.
We are the 198 proof..
"77 terabytes last month. WTF are you doing?"
"I run a small web site that was quoted and slashdotted."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
That make carriers put rules in place which make it against the TOS for me to run a home server for SSH or personal Email. I guess on the other hand though, Verizon shouldn't market it as "Unlimited bandwidth" if they are going to have a problem with what you do with it.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Why are ISP's allowed to sell an 'unlimited' plan that has limits? Isn't that against false advertising laws? "Unlimited" has a well known and very specific meaning, and that meaning does not include limits, not even "30,000 percent higher than everyone else".
The limit isn't on the data here; it's on the form of use. They asked what he was doing, and it turned out that what he was doing qualifies as business, rather than residential use. And at that point they told him that he'd need to change account types.
I don't think that's what TFA says:
[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.'
Does their ToS really say that if you have a server in a rack then it's a violation? I have my home media and DVR servers and disks in a rack (granted, it's a 1/4 rack in the garage, not a full rack). Am I violating some ToS because I put the server in a rack instead of on the floor?
First, the plan isn't simply defined by a single word. The plan and your agreement to use the plan, is conditioned by paragraphs of words that make up a contract.
This contract grants you the ability to use unlimited bandwidth for personal use. They attempt to prohibit you from exploiting this resource by say leasing your bandwidth to a CDN network and running storage servers for them.
This is wise of them.
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
Slashdot readers sounding reasonable. About an ISP and Unlimited data. Wow.
I guess there will be no shortage of ice this weekend in the evil Lord's lair.
Humm,
Verizon FIOS: yeah ok, I have 20/5 d/u
DAAP Music streaming
p2p bit torrent
VPN
UPnP movie server
web page
TOR
SSH tunneling
File server
Still haven't hit anything near that transfer rate in over 5 years total, I need more friends...
"(I) have this unfortunate condition that causes me not to believe a single thing any politician says when a mic's on.
I'd like for someone to point to marketing or promo material from Verizon calling this plan an 'unlimited' plan. While it's possible the marketing guys screwed it up, it's more likely that this plan was never labeled an 'unlimited' plan at all. For some reason when ISPs crack down on excessive use, there are always hordes of people who claimed they purchased an 'unlimited' plan when the evidence says otherwise.
Companies like AOL got in trouble because they went from only having time-metered dialup plans to having so-called unlimited plans where you could stay dialed in as long as you'd like. A lot of people took them up on this and left themselves dialed in for weeks at a time. AOL took it upon themselves to make exceptions to this (as it impacted service for other users - no free lines for customers to dial in to!) but never put in any fine print in. AOL got sued and lost over this, and subsequently they started changing the wording of their marketing materials and putting in fine print.
Now days nobody expects broadband to have the same types of limits so the ISPs simply just don't bother with the 'unlimited' verbage. They prefer to use terms like 'always on' and such, which means something entirely different.
If everyone behaved the same as this guy, I'm sure that Verizon would not be able to offer the service at the consumer price.
70 Terabytes would certainly be the equivalent of "unlimited" to me. This isn't to defend Verizon, as I do agree that they could find a way to make the limits of their plan more clear.
I Suppose Verizon COULD, instead of using the term "unlimited" call the plan: the 50 Terabytes / month plan.
But, for typical consumers, this *IS* unlimited and those numbers just might make choosing an Internet provider more complicated. In fact, if my parents were asking for advice on an Internet service, I would indeed say: "oh, don't worry about those numbers, that pretty much means unlimited for you guys".
By adding these numbers to the plan, competitors could simply up the numbers, while adding no real value for the user. Even Verizon could even offer a 100 Terabyte plan for "only $20 more a month". The average consumer would see this as value, while in reality they would just be paying more.
Completely misleading article and title. This has nothing hitting an invisible cap. His high usage exposed him abusing the TOS and nothing else. Fair, fine and dandy. If this were my ISP I wouldn't give him until July to switch to a business account I'd automagically retro the billing to a business account for the last 6 months and then he can fight it out with the billing dept.
Given the technology in question - PON - where downstream bandwith is shared, "get a dedicated 1GE bussiness fiber, or gtfo" is actually reasonable response from verizon.
For comparison: I'm burning 600mbps 95th on my home connection too. The difference is that the metro ISP in question actually bothered to design the network to handle such load (plain ethernet switched star topology, no shared bandwith media).
This ISP has like 15k customers (fiber in metro area, wifi in suburbs) and I'm consuming 1/10 of their peering bandwith while not slowing down anyone. Usual bussiness of QoS class policy maps on the border/aggregation.
I pay 10eur/mo for that 1GE RJ45 in my apt. They were curious about my high bw usage too, all I had to do is sign 'proclamation of non-commercial usage'.
This case really IS excessive; it goes well beyond what an individual user would reasonably use on their own.
Most of the OTHER cases (esp. cable companies) involve mysterious limits that individuals can break by watching (or downloading) too much online video. Of course, if you buy the cable company's overpriced TV services, you can watch as many shows as you like, on however many set top boxes you have, drawing down an unlimited volume of video-over-IP traffic to do it. Just don't watch video that competes with the cable provider, and it's all good.
Verizon has the right to do business with this guy or not. This guy decided to find the line between what Verizon would accept and what it wouldn't. He found it and now has to pay for a higher level of service with Verizon or decide to pay another vendor for Internet. Sounds fair to me. BTW for those complaining about Unlimited plans... they aren't charging for an "overage" they just don't want to do business with him anymore.
The Service is a consumer grade service and is not designed for or intended to be used for any commercial purpose. You may not resell, re-provision or rent the Service, (either for a fee or without charge) or allow third parties to use the Service via wired, wireless or other means. For example, you may not provide Internet access to third parties through a wired or wireless connection or use the Service to facilitate public Internet access (such as through a Wi-Fi hotspot), use it for high volume purposes, or engage in similar activities that constitute such use (commercial or non-commercial). If you subscribe to a Broadband Service, you may connect multiple computers/devices within a single home to your modem and/or router to access the Service, but only through a single Verizon-issued IP address. You also may not exceed the bandwidth usage limitations that Verizon may establish from time to time for the Service, or use the Service to host any type of server. Violation of this section may result in bandwidth restrictions on your Service or suspension or termination of your Service.
http://www.verizon.net/policies/vzcom/tos_popup.asp
Well here's how they can artificially cap your unlimited plan. 'may not exceed the bandwidth usage limitations that Verizon may establish from time to time' or 'use the Service to host any type of server'.
Plus the AUP allows them to nab you from anything from off-topic posts (Attactment A.2.e) to hitting IP's in embargo'd countries (cuba, sudan, etc) Attactment A.2.l. And unless this somehow excludes personal server, my guess is tons of users are violating some part of the ToS.
The bottom line is that the service is offered for cheaper. If you think everyone wants your 77TB service, you are wrong. The ISP offers a rate and a service that most people find acceptable. They also offer dedicated services for you 77TB folks. The ISP can either charge everyone the same assuming they might be a 77TB user or they can tier their service and offer prices that most people will pay.
This contract grants you the ability to use unlimited bandwidth for personal use.
... Unless "personal use" includes running something called a "server," for whatever purpose.
I sure hope my ISP doesn't find out about the firewall and NAS I run from my garage...
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
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.
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
While it was a "home" use, he was being dumb. There are internet based businesses that don't average 50TB a month. I'm siding with Verizon here. Just because you have an "unlimited" plan doesn't mean you have free rein to do whatever. Sure, some users will run more than others, but not thousands of times higher!
Someone earlier used the analogy of an all-you-can-eat buffet. Sure your stomach has a physical limit, you eat your fill and leave. Doesn't mean you can start when they open and just hang out eating all day until closing time. You're expected to be reasonable. Personal responsibility is involved!
The reason he went Residential over Commercial was to make a point to Verizon that they stiff their business customers for substandard service (and miles cheaper than any colocation facility). The equivalent business class plan was twice what they were charging residential customers. It wasn't really about money either, he had a server rack in his home and the electric bill alone for just operating that would have been many times what it cost him in bandwidth.
The Terms of service makes it plain that it doesn't matter if he's using the service for commercial purposes or not, he can't have a server. He was providing a high bandwidth service to friends and family that potentially impacts the level of service that Verizon is able to give its other customers. I think they did the right thing.
Now in all honesty, I also think as a residential customer I should be able to host a server or two on my Internet connection for my own purposes which would include the ability to host a few files and photos that for privacy reasons I may not want to have on dropbox or flickr.
Maybe the best way to handle something like this and prevent the kind of abuse this guy engaged in is to allow unlimited downloads but charge extra for uploads over a certain amount. Then remove the server restriction.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, do these sound like the actions of a man whose had ALL he could eat?
-- Phil Hartman, RiP
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The only person claiming this plan is unlimited is the author of the story.
While sometimes the marketing people fuck up, Verizon does not label their plans as being unlimited that I can tell: http://www22.verizon.com/home/fios-fastest-internet/fastest-internet-plans/
..I don't see any limit either, just speeds advertised. or anywhere. there's no transfer limits on their marketing.. the only tos that could be found via searching said nothing of it either.
and factually, there is no limit. there's couple of phrases here and there though, like your use must not harm other users of the service.
and then there's this ". You also may not exceed the bandwidth usage limitations that Verizon may establish from time to time for the Service, or use the Service to host any type of server. Violation of this section may result in bandwidth restrictions on your Service or suspension or termination of your Service."
the guy fucked up by simply saying that he has couple of rack mounted servers. should have just hung up on the rep, really. or said that he's streaming his personal video from his other house where he keeps cute cats running around. because, if he had so many machines, I doubt he wanted verizon to cut his service.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
As a customer of Verizon I can personally tell you that they don't care about you hosting a personal web site. They block port 80, but that's no big deal. I used to host a site with my pictures on it and they never said a thing. But then I wasn't running flickr and dealing in TB's of usage each month.
Verizon has never claimed unlimited, and we now know what it takes to be flagged, and that's 50TB or more for multiple months. So host your family photo albums, your git servers, your own personal cloud storage, whatever, Verizon isn't going to care. But don't try hosting hundreds of TB of media for a large number of people to leech off you.
Verizon is promising unlimited data usage in their contract. They only have to deliver that as long as the contract exists, and both sides are free to cancel the contract each month.
Businesses generally do not have an obligation to accept or keep you as a customer. If you talk too loud in a restaurant or make a mess of the buffet, of if they owner just doesn't like you, the restaurant can tell you not to come back. If a casino thinks you card count or they just don't like you, they can keep you out. If a plumber doesn't like the way you treated them, they can refuse to work at your home. It's no different here.
People seem to be willing to call this "commercial" use too readily in this article's comment section here. I find the trend towards calling browse-only internet service disconcerting. I see no reason why I shouldn't be able to run a noncommercial box or series of boxes at home that provide myself, family, and friends, with access. Either you have internet connectivity or you don't. Arbitrarily determining that use is "commercial" simply because the average user does not use their connection the same way is asinine.
My understanding is that with a non-commercial service you pay for the service you get, with no guarantees, so if your service is down for half a month they refund half a month worth of fees. With a commercial service, most of the money I pay is for _guaranteed_ service. So basically, for a business you can be cheap and use the non-commercial service, but don't come crying if the service is down and your business loses money.
"All you can eat" doesn't mean "all you can sell". Buffets, typically, aren't carry-out without adding additional charges.
"Unlimited service" doesn't mean "all you can eat". It means you won't be capped as long as you follow the TOS. I am fairly sure that somewhere along the line, this guy must have put pen to paper that his service was for home use, not for business use, or else the company wouldn't also have a business package.
I'm sure there was probably some agreement, as well, that he would secure his connection from unauthorized use. That's not unusual, these days. A contract can stipulate that the general public can't have access to your bandwidth. If you're operating a business, you're opening your paid share of the bandwidth to the general public.
There's so much wrong with what the guy did. The only interesting thing about all of this is the amount he was able to siphon before he was stopped. That's the only real valuable information, here: how much can the average person get away with? 30,000 x average suggests to me that the monitoring either was relaxed for the moment or is in general very relaxed. Which means that, potentially, 100 or 1000 x the average might still be gotten away with. That's valuable information!
The guy's situation though doesn't even begin to beg debate. I like the "all you can eat buffet" analogy. It's not a license to sit at a window and open your own restaurant to the sidewalk outside using your window seat.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
it should be acceptable.. so verizon shouldn't be selling the bandwidth over their capacity..
thing is, the tos allows them to do anything they want with your bandwidth, restrict it at will and so forth. they do have another page where pledge that they will not do that. but the tos says they may mess with your bandwidth as much as they please. they could have just cut the guy down to 1mbit.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Don't tell them what you're doing. Giving them details is just giving them rope to hang you. It's like talking to the police.
What am I doing? Using the unlimted plan that I pay for.
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.
Please help metamoderate.
Anonymous Reader writes: whaaaa whaaaa whaaaa
OMG Ponies!!! with Glitter!!!! I miss Pink
I'm sure someone has already said this but my first thought after reading this was
This guy was not in violation because of how much data he was using, but rather what he was doing to accomplish it
The amount of data he was using just made him stick out for further investigation
Verizon is clearly in the right that this guy is in violation of the ToS (love it or hate it, if you agree to it you are expected to abide it)
If you dont like whats in a ToS, or the concept of ToS the only option you have is find an alternative provider or go without said service
77 TeraBytes is a limit. They shouldn't call it unlimited.
business service has no caps or much higher ones
The ToS is everything here, and the ISP can choose to dictate its use as they feel
If those terms are unacceptable to you, you can choose to not use the service
As for fine print... not really. It was pretty easy to find the section in Verizon's online ToS, found with a simple Google search and a very quick scan of the document
http://my.verizon.com/central/vzc.portal?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=vzc_help_policies&id=TOS
Section 4.3.
4. AUTHORIZED USER, ACCOUNT USE, AND RESPONSIBILITIES.
3. Restrictions on Use. The Service is a consumer grade service and is not designed for or intended to be used for any commercial purpose. You may not resell, re-provision or rent the Service, (either for a fee or without charge) or allow third parties to use the Service via wired, wireless or other means. For example, you may not provide Internet access to third parties through a wired or wireless connection or use the Service to facilitate public Internet access (such as through a Wi-Fi hotspot), use it for high volume purposes, or engage in similar activities that constitute such use (commercial or non-commercial). If you subscribe to a Broadband Service, you may connect multiple computers/devices within a single home to your modem and/or router to access the Service, but only through a single Verizon-issued IP address. You also may not exceed the bandwidth usage limitations that Verizon may establish from time to time for the Service, or use the Service to host any type of server. Violation of this section may result in bandwidth restrictions on your Service or suspension or termination of your Service.
I was told I used too much bandwidth on a 6mbps DSL line. No warning, just turned it off. Got them to turn it back on, which a week later they shut it down and told me to go elsewhere. So I did. While I didn't do 77TB of data in a month, apparently I hit 1.5TB on my highest month. Which I don't find to be that much, not for someone who spends 16 hours a day on his computer at home.
Anyways, now i have a much faster internet and supposed to have a cap of 450gb a month.
Be seeing you...
Dude, it's assholes like this that make telecom companies see the need for data caps in the first place. If you're doing that kind of data transfer, you need to be on a business plan. If you know enough to create that kind of set up, you know enough to know what kind of plan you need to be on. Stop fucking up the home networks people. You're dealing with companies that have lost their minds! The last thing you want to do is feed their delusions.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
So what, you want the contacts printed in 18 point?
Exactly. You are paying for guaranteed uptime and (in my opinion it's ridiculous that this is considered business-only, but) an unblocked Port 80.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
The bottom line is that the service is offered for cheaper. If you think everyone wants your 77TB service, you are wrong. The ISP offers a rate and a service that most people find acceptable. They also offer dedicated services for you 77TB folks. The ISP can either charge everyone the same assuming they might be a 77TB user or they can tier their service and offer prices that most people will pay.
I have no problem with tiered prices and different limits and restrictions, as long as those limits and restrictions are clearly spelled out in marketing collateral.
Why are ISP's allowed to sell an 'unlimited' plan that has limits? Isn't that against false advertising laws? "Unlimited" has a well known and very specific meaning, and that meaning does not include limits, not even "30,000 percent higher than everyone else".
One word "Statistics".
99.5% of the users will never ever get close to the "cap" , So the powers that be all it to be called unlimited. Combine that with ToSs that almost guarantee that anything that gets you close to the limit would be a ToS violation and you have "unlimited service"
Fine, then make it truly unlimited and eat the cost for that 0.5% that exceed the cap, or set a cap and advertise it so people can shop around for the best deal - if ISP A has an "unlimited" plan with a 50GB cap and ISP B has an "unlimited" plan with a 500GB cap, the consumer shouldn't have to dig through a 10 page ToS to find out what the limit of the unlimited plan is.
Apparently, someone decided that 64 TB ought to be enough for anybody.
I'm confused as to why they actually needed to ask. Don't they have the ability to peek into the direction, ports/protocols and external addresses being used during transfers? I mean, if they can see a bunch of traffic on ports 568 or 119 from "newshosting.com", they can safely assume the user is leeching from a Usenet server, for example. I have to think there's at least one person who works for the ISP capable of running WireShark on a mirrored port and able to make sense of the data. Is it a privacy thing?
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Netflix exists, you do not need to be streaming content to your friends and family.
Unfortunately its guys like this that makes the services and service plans shitty for all of us because I am sure now Verizon will now impose some hard limit on the unlimited plan which will probably be targeted towards the upper 25% of their users.
But really, there is no reason for a consumer level customer to be using even 1 terrabyte a month in usage and not doing anything illegal, so doing so just paints a target for MPAA and RIAA and the rest of them.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Only thing worse than a grammar nazi is an ignorant math nazi.
It means that his usage is 300 times more than the average user meaning, using basic math skills, that the average user is using about 250 GB / month. Its pretty easy to understand the intent of the statement.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
77 TB per month is an average bandwidth usage of around 230 Mbps (more if the TB are actually TiB). That's not too bad for someone who has 365 Mbps of nominal bandwidth available.
He got a call becasue of the huge usage. This is fine, and good customer service.
It terns out he was using his connection for things he agreed he wouldn't do.
They told him to stop mod switch plans.
It has nothing to do with unlimited.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Yes, preach it brother! I would also like to complain because LEGOs are advertised as offering "endless fun"! There are a limited number of combinations and permutations for any collection of LEGO bricks, and even if you kept making the same shapes over and over, the fun will certainly end before the heat death of the universe. FALSE ADVERTISING!
It can also mean "no preset limit" which is what it usually mean for Internet plans. They don't have a hard and fast limit, you can use it without hitting some magic number when you get cut off or charged. However that doesn't mean you can just go crazy and use the max all the time.
This is also how it needs to be, if you want cheap Internet. If you think companies can cheaply provide Internet service where everyone uses it full bore 24/7, then you haven't done much looking in to network infrastructure. The only way it works is if people play nice and use it when they need it, and let it be used by other people the rest of the time.
There's a limited number of combinations for any finite number of lego bricks. You could just keep on buying more and building ever-bigger things.
At 77TB - this guy has an awful lot of friends - and his friends must also be consuming gobs of BW as well
77TB for a business is an insane amount of bandwidth - wtf is some dude doing with that?
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
I find it interesting that the average Fios user consumes that much data transfer. (77TB/30,000%).
Greed is the root of all evil.
It sounds like the guy was costing more than he was paying. At that point excuses are made to either make him pay more or get rid of him.
I think the point is that he only achieved 77TB by violating the TOS. Let me see somebody violate the TOS without running servers or scripting downloads.
But you are talking about a few jerks hogging bandwidth. Not running servers. If Verizon had a problem with hogging bandwidth, then that's whet the TOS would prohibit.
Have gnu, will travel.
I mean if I read that correctly, he has a 65 MBit uplink. Which is roughly 8 Megabytes per second, or 28 gigabytes an hour or 675 gigabytes a day or roughly 20 terabytes a month, given a 30 day month.
How is it possible to rack up 77 terabytes a month? He'd needed to have a 31 Megabyte per second line for that. 4 times faster than what he has now.
Or are they also counting downlink? In that case _that_ would be the scandal here. You have no control over your downlink as people can just send you random packets like DNS replies and you cannot defend yourself.
Boy will we all be laughing at you a decade from now for predicting that Windows would expand to fill any hard drive ever invented, unless you're the kind of person where no-one can see inside your house because your collection of yellowing newspapers has taken possession of every vertical surface.
There will come a day where rendering a ROTK tribute will be an afternoon school project. That decade is not this decade.
We're at the point where we should be measuring bandwidth in dBA where 10x energy is perceived as 2x loudness.
Here in the UK, all providers that I know of advertise "unlimited" broadband deals, but then say there are "fair use policies".
Bottom line is, go above 1GB, or 3GB or whatever your fair use policy is, and these companies shut your account down, and then wait for your complaint call.
I pay £100 a month to go with a company that is at least honest about it, and lets me get away with hundreds of GB of downloading, but only outside peak hours of 8:00-18:00.
This guy was having a laugh, and Verizon did things reasonably here.
-Ken