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.

[EmagGeek]

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

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.

[iamhassi]

Why offer that much throughput then complain when people actually make good use of it.
If you want people to buy business lines, make it competitive with your home accounts.

perhaps you didn't read the summary. He has a 300Mbps/65Mbps plan (300 megabit/65megabit = 37.5 megabyte/8 megabyte). He used 77 terabytes in a month. Most people only has 1 to 4 terabyte hard drives in their home computers. He used 77 terabytes. That would fill the entire hard drive of the average home computer about 50 times, and he did that in a month. Excessive much? Yes.

According to Math, 37.5 megabytes a second is 3.2 terabytes a day, so he had to be running full bandwidth for 24 days straight. Pretty sure all of our ISPs would be calling us if they noticed we were downloading at full speed for 24 days straight.

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.

[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.

[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.

[jeffmeden]

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.

I can see that conversation turning out fine:
          "Sir, records show you moved 77 terabytes, with a T, as in 77 thousand gigabytes"
"Yeah, I don't know how to explain it, I have been watching a lot of netflix lately"
          "Sir this amount of traffic is equivalent to watching netflix on 90 screens at a time, 24 hours a day, every day of the month"
"Yeah, you obviously haven't gotten addicted to Breaking Bad yet"

Re:Sounds reasonable to me.

[PPH]

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

The whole 'server' restriction is more about pushing business to Verizon's partners then limiting bandwidth. I have a couple of home servers for e-mail and my video security system. Nobody gets into them but me, so I don't pop up on anyone's usage radar*. If Verizon doesn't like the bandwidth, then have them address that in the ToS (specifically with an upload restriction). But they can't say they don't like competition by users who roll their own because of antitrust issues.

*I don't have Verizon service.

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.

[drakaan]

...actually, the ToS specifically says in section 4.3:

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.

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.

[RatherBeAnonymous]

Here is the Verizon TOS: http://my.verizon.com/central/vzc.portal?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=vzc_help_policies&id=TOS Below are sections where, judging by TFS, he may have been in violation. In my layman's opinion, they had him dead to rights.

"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 .... use it for high volume purposes, or engage in similar activities that constitute such use (commercial or non-commercial). ....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.

"You represent that when you transmit, upload, download, post or submit any content, images or data using the Service you have the legal right to do so and that your use of such content, images or data does not violate the copyright or trademark laws or any other third party rights."

ACCEPTABLE USE POLICY

"General Policy: Verizon reserves the sole discretion to deny or restrict your Service, or immediately to suspend or terminate your Service, if the use of your Service by you or anyone using it, in our sole discretion, violates the Agreement or other Verizon policies, is objectionable or unlawful, interferes with the functioning or use of the Internet or the Verizon network by Verizon or other users, or violates the terms of this Acceptable Use Policy ("AUP")."

"Specific Examples of AUP Violations. The following are examples of conduct which may lead to termination of your Service. Without limiting the general policy in Section 1, it is a violation of the Agreement and this AUP to: ... (g) violate Verizon's or any third party's copyright, trademark, proprietary or other intellectual property rights; (h) engage in any conduct harmful to the Verizon network, the Internet generally or other Internet users; (i) generate excessive amounts of email or other Internet traffic; (j) use the Service to violate any rule, policy or guideline of Verizon; ....

"Copyright Infringement/Repeat Infringer Policy. Verizon respects the intellectual property rights of third parties. Accordingly, you may not store any material or use Verizon's systems or servers in any manner that constitutes an infringement of third party intellectual property rights, including under US copyright law. .... it is the policy of Verizon to suspend or terminate, in appropriate circumstances, the Service provided to any subscriber or account holder who is deemed to infringe third party intellectual property rights, including repeat infringers of copyrights. In addition, Verizon expressly reserves the right to suspend, terminate or take other interim action regarding the Service of any Subscriber or account holder if Verizon, in its sole judgment, believes that circumstances relating to an infringement of third party intellectual property rights warrant such action."

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.

Sweet

[bhlowe]

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.

Re:Sweet

[jtownatpunk.net]

If only it was always that easy. Comcrap put me on 6 months of "probation" a couple years ago. "You're moving too much data. If you don't stay below 250 gigs per month, we're shutting off your service and blacklisting you for a year." This was their first contact so I figured no biggie. Let's just switch me to a business account. What's the monthly limit on those. "I don't have information on business plans but you can't switch because you're on probation. Call back in six months."

That's when I realized ISPs don't want you to pay for the data you move. They want you to pay for data you don't move. They want a bunch of octogenarians who fire up the computer once a week to check their email for pics of the grandkids.

They quietly stopped enforcing the 250 gig cap around the time my probation was up so I'm back to my old patterns on the normal residential account. If they'd been smart enough to let me switch to business class service instead of spanking me like a child, they would have been collecting more money all this time.

77TB? Sigh.

[Ralph Spoilsport]

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...

Re:77TB? Sigh.

[samkass]

We use the English system, where there are 3 shits to a crap, 1760 craps to a holycrap, ...

Re:Misleading Title

[homey of my owney]

Right. In fact the user did not find what the title claims. He found the point at which they would ask WTF. And it turns out TF was that he was doing something the TOS said he couldn't. Nice job misleading.

Re:Think of Verizon's position

[Nadaka]

The ToS for residential service forbids running of servers. He was violating the ToS. Sure, he got noticed because he was using a lot of data. But that isn't why they are terminating service.

Re:Think of Verizon's position

[Reschekle]

Verizon doesn't call their plans unlimited.

http://www22.verizon.com/home/fios-fastest-internet/fastest-internet-plans/

No mention of any unlimited plans.

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.

Zoloft, scourge of society

[Thud457]

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, do these sound like the actions of a man whose had ALL he could eat?

-- Phil Hartman, RiP