Ask Slashdot: How Do You Fight Usage Caps?

First time accepted submitter SGT CAPSLOCK writes "It certainly seems like more and more Internet Service Providers are taking up arms to combat their customers when it comes to data usage policies. The latest member of the alliance is Mediacom here in my own part of Missouri, who has taken suit in applying a proverbial cork to their end of a tube in order to cap the bandwidth that their customers are able to use. My question: what do you do about it when every service provider in your area applies caps and other usage limitations? Do you shamefully abide, or do you fight it? And how?"

Comments

Start your own provider?

[crucifiction]

What would you do if all of the ISPs had 14.4k lines and you just bought that awesome 28.8k modem? They are running a business and have decided to put a cap on your rate. If other providers around you are doing the same thing, suck it up, lobby for a new uncapped plan (good luck), or start your own provider without a cap.

Re:Start your own provider?

[smash]

And how are your customers going to get transit to your datacenter? That's right, equipment in the exchange, cellular airtime or satellite airtime. None of which is free.

Re:Start your own provider?

[smash]

Yup, go for it and see if you can do better. Bandwidth costs money. Sure, it is only photons or electrons, but you need to pay for your share of the capacity on the various links. And no, you don't NEED to download a few terabytes per month. I have capped internet here in Australia (150GB / month) and it is plenty, pretty much. There are terabyte plans available - we're getting to the point where caps are academic now, if you have fast enough internet to stream, there's no need to hoard stuff any more. And at a terabyte a month, you'll run out of space pretty quick if you keep filling your quota anyway. I used to work in a regional ISP, and have seen the bills on the other side...

Re:Start your own provider?

[sabri]

or start your own provider without a cap.

And you'll soon be out of business. Truth of the matter is, that a business simply cannot sustain by providing unlimited broadband internet for the prices that the average consumer is willing to pay.

For example, my connection via Charter is great. I pay for 30Mbps but actually get 45Mbps. If I were to suck up 30Mbps 24/7, that would mean that Charter would have to reserve 30Mbps of bandwidth on their network, and to their transits. So 33 customers like me would fill up a Gigabit Ethernet link. With an average price of ~$4 per Megabit, transit traffic alone will cost approx $4000/month, or roughly $120 per customer. Cut that in half, because my ISP will likely peer a lot, and you're still left with $60 per customer. And then we're not even discussing the cost of the access, core and edge network gear, installation and operational costs. I'm paying less than $60/month.

So, what do ISPs do? They oversubscribe. Since I'm not using my link 24/7 at full speed, it is easy to "share" my bandwidth. The last time I worked for an access-ISP, the oversubscription rates were between 1:35 and 1:50 for consumer-grade access. And in order to make sure that everyone gets a fair share, they'll have to include some type of limitation.

So all in all, the numbers just don't add up. You can't expect premium service for a bargain price and as long as the ISP is transparent about it, I don't have a problem with bandwidth caps. In the end I can still choose to pay for the premium service and not be subject to a cap.

Re:Start your own provider?

[TrekkieGod]

So, what do ISPs do? They oversubscribe. Since I'm not using my link 24/7 at full speed, it is easy to "share" my bandwidth.

That's not the problem. That's perfectly reasonable, and there's no reason why they should do it any other way. All that this means is that during peak usage hours, people aren't going to hit their max.

If you have enough users using enough of your bandwidth that your customers can't hit your peak speeds for a reasonable amount of the time, or it's just too slow during peak, then you're selling too high a bandwidth. You don't have the infrastructure to sell 30 Mbps, you should be advertising 15 Mbps. Alternatively, you can upgrade your infrastructure and raise costs. Either way, I have no problems with my speeds being limited, I have a problem with the amount of data I transfer being limited.

Re:Start your own provider?

[Anonymous Coward]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't streaming part of the problem? I know a few people that use their favorite classic shows in a way that I would call background noise and end up streaming them over and over. I have fallen asleep with netflix running a series and several episodes were streamed before it stopped. Had to stream them again. How many times over do we need to send the same bits before it's reasonable to keep them (and not call it hoarding)?

Re:Start your own provider?

[Skreems]

The key is "for the prices that the average consumer is willing to pay". With ~$15/mo plans I understand why capping has become necessary. But most providers will also have a business plan which is completely uncapped, and usually has much better customer service levels as well. For example, I use Comcast Business, and pay $60/mo for 20/3. I regularly get faster speeds than I'm promised, have no cap, and I've had tech support out on Sunday afternoon with 2 hours notice to replace a busted router. It costs more, but as you pointed out it probably SHOULD.

Re:Start your own provider?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

So, what do ISPs do? They oversubscribe

Caps do not fix the problems of over-subscription. The majority of customers will all have the same usage patterns - basically heavy usage during prime-time and a trickle the rest of the day. Restricting the total gigabytes downloaded by the month can only minimally improve congestion during prime-time ... it does nothing until a couple of weeks into the month when people start to hit their limits and can't download anything at all, otherwise they still go full speed during prime-time.

Furthermore, the modern ISP has huge, huge margins on bandwidth. Like 90+ % gross margins - the vast majority of an ISP's cost are in the infrastructure (cables, equipment, staff) not in bandwidth itself. Wholesale bandwidth pricing itself has been dropping like a stone, reducing by at least 30% a year for many years now and has recently accelerated to about 50% a year.

http://www.telegeography.com/products/commsupdate/articles/2012/08/02/ip-transit-price-declines-steepen/

Download caps are just a wholly inappropriate tool for fixing problems with over-subscription. They are, however, fantastic for hurting competing businesses like NetFlix and Hulu.

Re:Start your own provider?

[Cimexus]

Agreed. Transfer caps in Australia aren't the big problem they were 10 years ago. There are enough choices of cap (at different price points) that there'll be one to suit pretty much everyone. My ISP in Australia (Internode) has caps ranging from 30 GB to 1.2 TB per month.

The problem in the US though is twofold:

1. In many areas there are only one or two ISPs available (the local cable monopoly and the local phone/DSL monopoly). Not like in Australia where pretty much everyone has 15-20 ISPs to pick from (even if many of them are Telstra resellers).

2. Some US ISPs have transfer caps, but it's a one-size-fits all approach. You can't choose different caps for different prices like you can in Australia. My (cable) ISP in the US had a 300 GB cap but there was no option to move to a higher cap if I needed it (other than to get a business connection).

Basically, I have nothing against caps *IF* you provide options. Grandma who just checks her email and does a bit of banking can get by on her 10 GB cap which costs some measly $15/month or whatever, the average family of four can get the mid-range "few hundred GB" plan and Mr. Uber Torrenter can get his 1 TB+ cap (but has to pay more for it). That's how it works in Australia and it's fine. In some other places though there's a cap, and no choice.

Re:Start your own provider?

[ifiwereasculptor]

Well, they are linked. Would you rather max your speed at 50KB/s or reach 1.0MB/s but be limited to 130GB per month? They amount to the same monthly hard limit (unless my math is off), but with the faster connection you can simply burn through your allowance faster. The plus side is needing less actual machine uptime for the same data transfer.

Of course, caps can be reasonable or unreasonable. My ISP sells 10Mbps connections limited to 80GB/mo. I'd much rather reach only 5Mbps limited to 160GB/mo, and they should have a plan tailored for people like me, since it would actually make peak hours easier on them. But, like in all markets, a specific number, feature or buzzword dictates the sway of a mass made by about 80% of largely uninformed people. Or at least that's how executives view things, but the result is the same.

Re:Start your own provider?

[Mitreya]

Yup, go for it and see if you can do better. Bandwidth costs money.

Based on the fact that there is never really any competitors, I think that's not it.

Physical access to customers is monopolized so that there is typically no competition.

Re:Start your own provider?

[shipofgold]

I am waiting for speed caps during peak periods and unlimited data quantities.

Streaming media is only going to grow, and the impact felt by me when my Netflix stream breaks 5 times in 10 mins, is irritating. During peak periods I have no problems with a bandwidth cap to 1 or 2 simultaneous streams.

But I do take issue when ISPs whine about all the bytes downloaded at 3AM when it costs them nothing extra. Don't limit total bytes....but do make sure each customer gets their share of peak.

Re:Start your own provider?

[smash]

Yes and no. We're getting to the point where links are fast enough to stream reliably. Which means you don't need to hoard a whole heap of media for future watching, you just watch on demand. My reference to hoarding was downloading a heap of stuff in advance to MAYBE watch later. If you can easily stream it any time you want, you don't need to hoard stuff any more.

Re:Start your own provider?

[Rockoon]

but there was no option to move to a higher cap if I needed it (other than to get a business connection).

The business connection is an option, so stop disingenuously saying that there wasnt an option. Its clear that you dont like the option, but its still an option. My ISP's business plans start at $65/month.

Re:Start your own provider?

[smash]

No, bandwidth does in fact actually cost money. How do you think you get content from offshore? Via cables between continents, or satellite. Bandwidth on said links is LIMITED.

Re:Start your own provider?

[smash]

The modern ISP also has huge, huge costs on hardware. How do you think they pay for the switching equipment required? Large quantities of Ten and 40 gigabit ports aren't cheap.

Re:Start your own provider?

[green1]

I dropped my business plan when I discovered that:
- Business tech support was mon-fri 8-4, residential tech support was 24/7
- The highest business plan was half the speed of the average residential plan
- The business plan cost 4 times as much as that residential plan
- Data caps were the same on both
- Uptime guarantees were the same on both (none)

In the end, I went from a 4Mbps 2 static IP business plan to a 15Mbps 2 dynamic IP residential plan + a good VPS, and still saved about $80 a month. And on the upside I don't have to pay for electricity or physical maintenance on my server any more, and my server no longer cuts in to my home bandwidth allocation. (not to mention it's on a faster link than it was in my house)

Apparently the business model of ISPs in my area for business customers amounts to "screw them"

Re:Start your own provider?

[greenbird]

And you'll soon be out of business. Truth of the matter is, that a business simply cannot sustain by providing unlimited broadband internet for the prices that the average consumer is willing to pay.

Strange how other countries are able to provide unlimited AND much faster connections than what's available in the US. They must be using magic electrons/photons or something. And I'm guessing you're predicting the demise of Google soon also?

In other words, bullshit. It's not a mater of business. It's a mater of regulatory constraints and lack of competition allowing US ISPs to jack up their prices while reducing their service. That's what happens when there is limited competition.

Re:Start your own provider?

[Skreems]

That's insane.

One potentially mitigating factor, I've heard that often residential plan speeds are quoted as "up to" while business plans are "guaranteed average", so when the links get saturated during busy hours the business plan should be less affected. Although even if that was the case with your provider it sounds like it's probably not worth it.

Re:Start your own provider?

[DarkTempes]

You can easily pass 150 GB a month just watching 720p video from youtube or twitch.tv every day. Maybe even 420p, I'd have to do the math. Don't even think about 1080p. I know that with my 300GB cap that I have to be very choosy about what content I get to watch in 1080p.

If you're a gamer then you can use up large portions of 150GB just from game patches. Actually downloading a new game is frequently 15GB or more (your typical MMO is over 20GB these days, even FPS games get up to 30GB).

You like to clone big projects on github and tinker with them? Tough luck.

And that's just for ONE person without any file sharing; imagine a house full of people that actually use their technology. You wouldn't even be able to buy a plan with a cap that accommodates their needs (the highest my US ISP goes to is 450GB). And if they're all streaming their media then you're actually multiplying the bandwidth cost for any individual media item as they can't just push it over the local network.

Tell me 150 GB / month is plenty when you retire and you're actually home to use your internet more than a couple hours a day.
I mean, sure, you don't NEED the internet. You could survive perfectly fine from subsistence farming. But sometimes nice things are nice to have...

The argument that it's expensive to be an ISP as a reason for caps is flawed. That's a reason to raise prices but not a reason for caps. Hell, do ISPs even pay for bandwidth in their peering agreements? No?

Re:Start your own provider?

[Archfeld]

I see no problem with a 150 GB/month cap as long as the MAIN seling point for the net connection isn't listed as streaming movies and such. We watch Netflix in our household in lieu of cable and would exceed a 150GB/cap in a matter of days. The idea that the ISP can advertise somthing that they can't or WON'T provide as the main selling point is criminal. As for running out of space I don't hoard what I download/stream I/we just watch it and go on to somthing else. This reminds me of the mobile phone ads we see on TV here in the US...Video simulated, bandwidth and download sequences shortened, so that the main selling points of the devices are total fictions. There is NO TRUTH in advertising here.

Re:Start your own provider?

[Arker]

It's also a market where the customer almost never understands what they are buying. The salescritters certainly never understand what they are selling. Just witness all the babble about 'speed' when they arent talking about speed at all, but throughput. (If you have difficulty understanding the difference, consider a Ferrari vs a Road Train. Which one is faster? According to the marketing materials from every ISP I have ever seen, the tractor-trailer is 'faster' which is obviously utter nonsense.)

Re:Start your own provider?

[mic0e]

Are you allowed to share exactly _how much_ your regional ISP had to pay for one TB of traffic? Because I'd really like to know.

Re:Start your own provider?

[sjames]

Bandwidth in bulk costs under $4/Mbps/month, try again.

Re:Start your own provider?

[Wycliffe]

I agree with this post that bandwidth is limited but monthly caps are too simplistic.
95th percential is slightly better but penalizes you for bursting. A hybrid solution
where there is a monthly quota for peak times and no quota for off-peak times
like the cell phone companies did for a while might be the best solution to both
allow fair access to the network but also reward high bandwidth users for
scheduling their high bandwidth usage during non peak hours.

Re:Start your own provider?

[sjames]

OK fine, they over-subscribe. Now that $120/month/customer is actually $2.50/month at 50:1. The problem is when, on top of that effective cap on the rate they ALSO impose a cap on data transferred. I'm not expecting the theoretical peak rate to become a committed rate, but adding transfer caps on top of providing a 50:1 oversubscribed 0 commit connection would be an insult.

So no, the numbers don't add up, but not the way you think.

Re:Start your own provider?

[Anonymous Coward]

but there was no option to move to a higher cap if I needed it (other than to get a business connection).

The business connection is an option, so stop disingenuously saying that there wasnt an option. Its clear that you dont like the option, but its still an option. My ISP's business plans start at $65/month.

A lot of cable company's business connection plans require you to give up access to cable TV signals (not because the bandwidth is repurposed, just because their provisioning coders assumed businesses wouldn't want anything TV).

Re:Start your own provider?

[bitt3n]

Australia (150GB / month) and it is plenty, pretty much

that's only enough because Australia also limits the kind of porn you can watch

Re:Start your own provider?

[MightyYar]

That actually sounds like a feature! ;p

Seriously, I have the basic tier of cable because it is actually cheaper to have the $10/month tier + internet than to have internet alone.

Re:Start your own provider?

[SydShamino]

Maybe it would be better if providers managed this not as a cap, which no one likes, but in terms of burst and sustained speeds.

For example, would it be better to buy 30 Mbps, with a soft cap at 1 GB/month, or maybe buy a package with 30 Mbps "burst" speed, 1 Mbps "average" speed for a four-day rolling window? I made up those numbers, but if something similar would work, it might be better, in that I would at least understand how they were throttling and when it would end.

Re:Start your own provider?

[MightyYar]

Caps are perfectly reasonable (as long as they are up-front about it), but I think they are enforced disingenuously. IMHO, the fairest way to enforce them is with throttling, similar to how T-Mobile throttles bandwidth after your "4G" speeds run out and you are forced back to 2G speeds. If I exceed my 250GB Comcast cap, then don't charge me $10 or cut me off - just only let me use bandwidth when no one else is using it... put me at the back of the line so I don't negatively impact those still under their caps.

Re:Start your own provider?

[TrekkieGod]

Well, they are linked. Would you rather max your speed at 50KB/s or reach 1.0MB/s but be limited to 130GB per month? They amount to the same monthly hard limit (unless my math is off), but with the faster connection you can simply burn through your allowance faster.

Sure, and that's the problem. It should not be possible for you to physically hit your allowance within the billing period.

Re:Start your own provider?

[hot soldering iron]

Did you even read the parent post? He said Physical access to customers is monopolized... by government regulation, paid for by industry through their highly paid lobbyists. You can start an ISP, if you can pony up a couple million to buy a lobbyist, and more millions for equipment, lawyers, employees, and then more millions for finally getting to tap into a backbone for bandwidth...

Artificially imposed monopolies throw a monkey wrench into the theory of free enterprise competition and technology improvement driving down costs of goods.

Re:Start your own provider?

[citizenr]

One nice trick some ISPs use is X speed during the peak hours, and 2x X speed off peak hours.

Re:Start your own provider?

[Lendrick]

You're probably going for an all-government-is-bad angle here, but in the case of services where the providers need to be able to lay cable on private property, either the government needs to get involved or the cable will never need to be put in at all.

I would certainly agree with you that it's bad when the government allows for artificial monopolies, though. What they should be doing is saying that since that cable is a public resource put down in part with public money, that any company wanting to use the cable should be able to do so at cost. In addition, the (local) government should internet to consumers directly, since in the past municipal internet providers have actually compared very favorably in terms of cost and bandwidth to their privately owned competitors, despite the ostensible disadvantage of not being motivated by profit.

Re:Start your own provider?

[greenbird]

Again, bullshit. Even in the densely populated places in the US we have crap internet connectivity compared to most of the developed world.

Re:Start your own provider?

[AmiMoJo]

Caps area always a problem for any country. I don't know if Netflix is available in Australia, but consider that high usage of streaming video could easily hit a 160GB/month cap with a few users in the house. Your economy is hobbled because no-one can come in and just set up a competitive streaming video service, they have to deal with the fact that on top of their fees the user will have to pay more for their broadband connection to get high enough cap.

In the UK broadband is supplied by either a cable company that also supplies TV, or by telephone lines which are mostly owned by a company that also supplies TV. Some ISPs also offer their own streaming video which is excluded from caps. There is a huge conflict of interest and it hurts our economy.

Re:Start your own provider?

[beelsebob]

The problem I have is that if bandwidth costs money (which it does)... CHARGE ME FOR IT... Why are we paying 30€ for a bandwidth capped 60GB service and then being rate limited, when they could just charge 0€50 per gig, and be done with it.

Re:Start your own provider?

[thegarbz]

And no, you don't NEED to download a few terabytes per month.

You don't need terabytes yet. But hey 15 years ago my typical browsing habits would barely top 1GB a month. These days I can't open slashdot without downloading 2MB of javascript. About 5ish years ago youtube went from 320p video to offering 1080p video. Even Facebook no longer resizes your uploaded photos to some crappy 720px wide Not to mention now that every man and his dog has a mobile phone capable of high-def video.

No we may not need terabytes *yet* but I can imagine that if Australia had unrestricted access to Hulu then I probably would have highdef video streaming for hours every day rather than a house full of people watching TV.

Re:Start your own provider?

[slaker]

You don't KNOW what I do or don't need, and neither does my ISP. Your monthly cap closely resembles 19 hours of my average use, but I specifically pay for service that is uncapped and at a service tier such that bandwidth is a functionally unlimited commodity. I pay for the service and goddammit I'm going to use all of it.

Re:Start your own provider?

[PhunkySchtuff]

If it's not possible for you to hit your cap during the billing period, then why would you have a cap in the first place?
I'm on 100Mbs cable. I get 200GB/month. I'd much rather this than be limited to 0.6Mbs which would would render me physically incapable of hitting my cap in a month. If I want to download more (remember that this data transfer isn't free to my ISP) then I can pay more. Simple economics. My speed however is completely uncapped - it's as fast as the DOCSIS3 network equipment is capable of going.

Re:Start your own provider?

[XcepticZP]

So the OP explains to you clearly how government regulations are bad in terms of creating monopolies. Your solution to the problem? "More government". Government, you know, is the single most pervasive, abusive and unavoidable monopoly of them all.

Re:Start your own provider?

[jbolden]

The argument that it's expensive to be an ISP as a reason for caps is flawed. That's a reason to raise prices but not a reason for caps.

They do that. Almost all ISP offer business plans and higher caps from there.

Re:Start your own provider?

[iamnobody2]

my comcast cable has a 300gb cap, and they gave us three grace months where we can go over that cap without penalty, i've had comcast for about two years and i've used one grace month. once my grace months are all gone, they'll charge me $10 for each 50gb over i use, i'm not bovvered

Re:Start your own provider?

[fredklein]

Streaming means you are at the mercy of the provider. If they determine it is not profitable enough to carry a particular show/movie, then you lose access to it. Probably forever.

At least if you "hoard" it, you have a local copy you can watch whenever.

Re:Start your own provider?

[Darinbob]

Exactly. You fight it by paying more, since most of the ISPs allow you to spend extra to remove the limit. Complaining about it is like complaining that none of the restaurants in town are all-you-can-eat buffets. "Unlimited" bandwidth is a money losing option. If one wants more bandwidth than the neighbors then one pays more money than the neighbors.

Re:Start your own provider?

[Anonymous Coward]

However, ISPs may require you have a registered business and require said business to be the customer, so it isn't an option for a residential customer.

Re:Start your own provider?

[Lendrick]

Your solution to the problem? "More government".

This argument is a) tired, b) stupid, and c) a prime example of reductio ad absurdum.

Re:Start your own provider?

[edgr]

And that's just for ONE person without any file sharing; imagine a house full of people that actually use their technology.
<snip>
But sometimes nice things are nice to have...

And there is no reason why a single person using their internet fairly sporadically should pay the same as a house full of people streaming HD video 24x7. Nice things are nice to have, but why should someone else pay for them?

Re:Start your own provider?

[hairyfeet]

That's nice for you, here in central AR, in the middle of a college town no less, you can get the cable home line for $35 a month or get business for...$150 a month! That is nearly 5 times the price for just a doubling of the cap! Want more? Its $1.50 a GB as there are no more tiers after business!

The simple fact is the prices are so high because we were robbed of over 200 billion because that is what we gave the teleco/cableco duopolies in return for nationwide broadband and what did we get? A low rez Goatse while the board stuffed their pockets. We should give them 90 days to pay up WITH INTEREST and if they don't? WE the people control the last mile. They want a monopoly? Any place they run FTTH that isn't already being served with fiber they can have a 15 year monopoly, 25 year if they run it to places that haven't had any service.

But even the libertarians should support such a plan, because we have seen time and time again that monopolies and regulatory capture are cancers on the free market, ONLY by having actual competition will things get better. Until then get used to nastier and nastier caps as they wring max profit from the existing lines.

Re:Start your own provider?

[hairyfeet]

I'll just add that a friend of mine actually tried to do just that and was killed by the duopoly!

Where his business was located there was something like 5 blocks to the nearest junction and neither the cable nor DSL would run to him so he bought a T3 and leased bandwidth to the neighbors who likewise had been screwed, even had set up a server to take some of the load off by hosting Windows Updates as well as FOSS software like Open Office, so what happened? The DSL company also sold dialup and when their sales went down they came up with an excuse to jack his T3 prices a couple hundred percent. they even told him "Yeah just try and sue us". he went to a lawyer who said "Oh sure you'll win, no doubt, after 10 years and a couple million in lawyer fees because they'll drag it out for the better part of a decade." Needless to say he couldn't afford that and closed up shop and moved away.

So you can't even attempt such a thing unless you are at least city government sized to be able to afford the several years their lawsuits will end up dragging through the courts. The duopoly have control, they know it, and they know you can't afford to spend a decade in court, meanwhile they have a law team on payroll. You will have zero chance of success unless your last name is Dell or Gates.

Re:Start your own provider?

[hairyfeet]

I can back this up, I'm just one guy who doesn't do any BTing and I often have to pay as much for bandwidth over my cap during the big Steam sales than I do for the games themselves. Obviously some of the folks here haven't downloaded any recent games, Borderlands I? 37Gb for the game and DLC, Borderlands II? 42GB for the same. Heck even a game with very little DLC, as the Burnout Paradise i got with the recent Humble Bundle? Over 4Gb, now figure in the other 8 games that came with the bundle and you are easily looking at 25Gb+ right there and that is just for a single bundle!

Trust me friend that 150Gb might seem like a not but its not and just be glad you are getting even that, the local ISPs here have plans that are 36Gb,60Gb and the top is 76Gb! These ISPs act like its still 1998 and all folks are doing is checking their email, when IRL everything has gotten bigger EXCEPT their caps.

Re:Start your own provider?

[gottabeme]

I'm wholly against usage caps, but you need to nuance this. At what level is that true? Backbone? What if you factor in all the network down to the edge?

Re:Start your own provider?

[strikethree]

if you have fast enough internet to stream, there's no need to hoard stuff any more.

Not true at all. The stuff you hoard may not be available anywhere anymore, especially in its original form. If you do not hoard, the internet becomes the Memory Hole. We were always at war with Eurasia and Han never shot first.

Re:Start your own provider?

[psypher69571]

And it's sheep like you that keep us laughing all the way to the bank. I bet you actually believe it costs 10 cents to send a text message too.

Re:Start your own provider?

[countach]

Caps per se aren't such a problem in Australia, but getting sufficient download speeds to actually utilise them is still a problem. I think I'm supposed to have a 250GB a month cap, which sounds like quite a lot, but I don't think I have a hope in hell of using it all because of ordinary download speeds.

Re:Start your own provider?

[bemymonkey]

" And no, you don't NEED to download a few terabytes per month. I have capped internet here in Australia (150GB / month) and it is plenty, pretty much. There are terabyte plans available - we're getting to the point where caps are academic now, if you have fast enough internet to stream, there's no need to hoard stuff any more."

You're contradicting yourself - and not in a small way. I mostly stream as well, and 150GB would be nowhere near enough - this is only a two-person household, too.

Consider:

1. A TV show episode per day at 2-3GB
2. A movie every few days at 4-8GB
3. Youtube being used a lot (let's say 2GB of data per hour) by both me and the girlfriend, so easily 10-12GB per day
4. Game downloads/updates (Steam/Origin/SC2)
5. Software downloads/updates (even a ROM for my phone, which is downloaded every day, is 0.2GB) for Windows, Linux and so on
6. Music streaming at 320kbps (~140MBytes per hour)

And that's just weekdays - on weekends, you could see that per-day usage double easily. But let's say per-day usage total is, at minimum, 2+4+10 gigs - 16GB. That adds up to about 480GB per month, and that's without ANY kind of hoarding whatsoever.

Basically: Unless you hardly watch any video at all or are satisfied with SD streams, 150 gigs a month won't cut it. At 500-1000GB, maybe we'll be on a level at which 99% of people can actually use all the newfangled HD streaming services that are being advertised by ISPs without worrying about their cap.

Re:Start your own provider?

[sjames]

That would be any upstream from the ISP that they cannot cover with peering. Given that smash was talking about inter-continental cables and such, I would assume he is discussing upstream.

If your ISP is on another continent and you live in Missouri, something is wrong :-)

Re:Start your own provider?

[Rockoon]

We should give them 90 days to pay up WITH INTEREST and if they don't? WE the people control the last mile.

You don't seem to understand something.

You The People already control the last mile. To top that off, there are no elections where you have as much influence as the ones that determine who the people will be who will negotiate your towns next contract with the telcos and cable companies. You would even have a reasonable chance of winning such a position should you choose to run for one of them.

Put up, or shut up.

Re:Start your own provider?

[samkass]

And while we're at it, why don't we start electricity services which allows everyone to pull down their maximum Wattage 24x7? I think it's completely reasonable to have a very fast connection for when I need it, but cap it so it's not abused. Netflix is essentially a subsidized service these days, and everyone expects to get it for some small fee each month, but the infrastructure can't support that yet.

Re:Start your own provider?

[michael_cain]

At least in the US, local authorities franchise cable-television video service. They have no say in the provision of high-speed data service or voice telephony offered over the same facilities. This puts the cities in the relatively weak position that if they want to franchise a different company for the video service, the existing company can, by simply not selling their facilities, force the new company to build an entirely new fiber/coax network. Years of work, very expensive. In the meantime, the franchising officials will almost certainly have had to run as the people who shut off cable TV in the city -- and probably lost the election as a result.

The balance of power changed drastically over the course of the 1990s, as the cable industry consolidated into a handful of very large companies and enormous amounts of investment were made in fiber to support two-way services.

Re:Start your own provider?

[willem_pardieck]

So if bandwidth is virtually free, I'll take 150TB per month and I'll send you $10. Deal? You're probably $9.50 up on the deal so you'd be a moron not to snap my hand off. It always amazes me that there are morons out there that think bytes are effectively free. They get it that potatoes cost money, they sort of half get it that gas costs money (but they really don't like it), but they really don't see that bytes costs money, probably because it is intangible and it blows their minds that they have to pay something for well, nothing. At least why you buy potatoes, you like, have the potatoes, right? Ever thought that someone goes out there and puts up the base station, or the wire in the ground, fixes it up when it breaks, pays *their* upstream provider, pays someone in a call center listening to you whine that you don't want to pay for it, because you don't get the idea of paying for something that you can't hold in your hand. And all because you want to watch the cat playing the piano.

Re:Start your own provider?

[Hamsterdan]

"We watch Netflix in our household in lieu of cable"

One of the reasons for data caps. They are affraid mor people would cancel their TV service.

Re:Start your own provider?

[Hamsterdan]

Big cities have high density population, but yet we still have crappy ISPs.

Montreal and its surroundings have around *half* the Province's population (one tenth of the whole *country's*), yet we still get pretty crappy net access.

The local cableco has two head ends on the island itself, another one right next to it on the south shore.

Re:Start your own provider?

[sjames]

The cost I stated is actually available moron.

Re:Start your own provider?

[green1]

Nope, not the case here. Basically it boiled down to the fact that in the residential market there were 2 competing ISPs, the cable monopoly, and the telephone monopoly. But the cable company hadn't run lines in to most of the business zoned areas, so there was really only 1 ISP there.
To be fair, this was a few years ago now, and the lanscape has changed. More and more businesses can now be served by cable, and as a result the telco has had to start competing better, they now offer business plans just as fast as the residential ones (though no faster, and no more guaranteed) and they now have longer hours on tech support (though I'm not sure if it's 24/7 like the residential side) and the prices are more like double residential instead of quadruple.

I still maintain though that for the majority of purposes it works out better to buy a residential connection and a VPS then a business connection around here.

Re:Start your own provider?

[TrekkieGod]

If it's not possible for you to hit your cap during the billing period, then why would you have a cap in the first place?

Bingo. That's what we're saying. Data limit caps are bullshit.

I'm on 100Mbs cable. I get 200GB/month. I'd much rather this than be limited to 0.6Mbs which would would render me physically incapable of hitting my cap in a month.

But it doesn't work that way. Some people are going to download a terabyte a month. Others are going to download less than a gigabyte. As long as the average of all of the customers is around 200 GB / month, they can still support 100 Mbps.

If I want to download more (remember that this data transfer isn't free to my ISP) then I can pay more. Simple economics.

Except it's not exactly that fair, is it? After all, how often do you use the 200 GB month? So you're paying for data you're not using!

The ISPs want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to charge you for data usage you're not taking advantage of, and simply bill you for the speed tier you've signed up for, under the understanding that most of their customers won't hit the cap. Then if their customers hit the cap, they want to charge them for the extra data, even though they've already charged you for that extra data, which you didn't use. Either you're average it across your customers or you don't. If the ISP wants to charge me by the byte such that at around 200 GB month I pay what I'm paying now, but when I use less I pay less, then yes, sure, charge me by usage. I won't object. However, if I still pay the same amount the month I've only downloaded 1 GB, then they can't charge me more for the month I've downloaded 399 GB.

Re:Start your own provider?

[Macgrrl]

I prefer not to think of it as hoarding, but rather preserving it before some corporation decides to 'put it in the vault' like Disney does. Why should they control when I can watch something again?

Re:Start your own provider?

[Macgrrl]

That's OK, the Coalitions Fraudband policy will sort out your pesky bandwidth issues. Oh wait!...

Re:Start your own provider?

[bitterblackale]

It's not about bandwidth costing money in some cases. It's about unethical conduct on the part of an ISP. It's not unheard of for cable internet providers to cap bandwidth speeds on Netflix, Hulu, even YouTube. I wonder - could you use a proxy (it'd have to be a really fast one to be worth it) to hide your Netflix use from Comcast?

Re:Start your own provider?

[smash]

Sure. But losing access to the vast majority of content I occasionally watch is no the end of the world. In fact, if you're paying a subscription based fee, it would be in their interests to NOT try and fuck you over that way, or they lose a subscription.

Re:Start your own provider?

[smash]

Backbone != last mile.

Re:Start your own provider?

[smash]

No, it's not. It is a backbone rate, which doesn't include the infrastructure in the local exchange, the cost to rent/lease/maintain the local cabling infrastructure, paying off the switchgear in the local node, the helpdesk, administrative overhead, etc, etc.

Re:Start your own provider?

[smash]

And this is exactly why bandwidth is expensive, and not comparable to some backbone rate that another poster listed above.

Re:Start your own provider?

[smash]

I'm a regular steam user (both borderlands 1/2 with DLC), regular high def youtube user, regular bit-torrent user. I regularly download new operating system ISOs. I regularly come in under 100GB/month, and have not yet gone over quota in 2 years (though I have hit 90% with a couple of days to go). And I spend a lot of time at home.

Re:Start your own provider?

[smash]

No, it doesn't.

Re:Start your own provider?

[smash]

no.

Re:Start your own provider?

[nobaloney]

What would you do if all of the ISPs had 14.4k lines and you just bought that awesome 28.8k modem? They are running a business and have decided to put a cap on your rate. If other providers around you are doing the same thing, suck it up, lobby for a new uncapped plan (good luck), or start your own provider without a cap.

suck it up, lobby for a new uncapped plan (good luck)

I found an uncapped plan easily, switching from a capped 30mbps home plan (which averages just under 20mbps) at us$50/month, to an uncapped businessplan (same speed) at us$75/month. Well worth it in my opinion (and it comes with static IP, which may be a plus or a minus in your circumstances).

Personally I consider it a good deal; in my datacenter we buy unlimited data at up to 1 gbps (all of it available), usage measured at 95 percentile billing (look it up if you need an explanation) at us$60 per mbps per month.

Which means if I fill the (average) 20mbps pipe (which I don't, and frankly really can't unless I throw away all the stuff I download in realtime) I pay us$75/month, and if I move data at the same 20mbps rate at the datacenter for a month I pay us$1200. So I consider my local home provider a bargain.

I didn't switch to business service to get the cap lifted; watching movies and downloading software ISOs I've never approached it. I witched to get static-IP (it improves security as I can allow certain logins to my datacenter only from my static IP), and to get port 25 opened so I can run my own mailserver at home.

If you need your cap lifted you should enquire with your provider about business service.

Re:Start your own provider?

[hairyfeet]

Then you obviously don't buy any bundles. EA Humble Bundle? Clocked in at nearly 45GB. Deep Silver bundle? 40GB. Croteam was the smallest I saw of late and it clocked in at 30Gb. 1C company? 34GB. Steam Crysis set? 28Gb.

Those came out right close to a 30 day period, total? 177Gb and that is if I didn't watch a single video, play a single online game, or do anything else at all.

Re:Start your own provider?

[gravis777]

Well, I did something that may be unique. I was in an area that had two choices - one of which was unlimited. When I looked to move to be closer to work, I actually looked at different neighborhoods, and the ISPs available. The neighborhood I settled on also only had two ISPs available, but one had no caps. I called to verify. They do offer discounts if you use less than 10 gig a month, but no penalties if you go high. They said their "caps" are bandwidth related - ie there is a limit to how much you can pull with a specific bandwidth amount. If you need to pull more than that, you go up to a faster speed.

I am averaging about 300-550 gig a month in transfers according to their bandwidth meter, and have been doing that since I moved to the area 10 months ago. Yeah, I torrent a lot too (that is the months that I am around 550 gig), but in months that I am not torrenting, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and Vudu and Youtube viewing can easily hit 300 gig,

Re:Start your own provider?

[sjames]

Nor are the cables between continents you spoke of. Naturally that lead me to believe you were speaking of upstream bandwidth.

Re:Start your own provider?

[sjames]

Right, it is a rate that would encompass the cables between continents and such. Or did you just toss that in to make it sound more expensive somehow?

As for delivering the last mile, they would do a lot better with fair queueing with borrowing and wouldn't need a hard transfer limit at all. That and not explicitly advertising that you can do exactly the things that will make people go over the limits.

Re:Start your own provider?

[sjames]

I named a US price since TFA is about the situation in Missouri.

Of course, a typical residential DSL connection won't be pegged at 100% all the time and not all of the traffic on it will be international (especially if the ISP provides a web cache).

Re:Start your own provider?

[smash]

Sounds like you're an expert and should start your own business to show them how its done. Good luck.

Re:Start your own provider?

[sjames]

You'll be providing the VC for my little venture, right?

Re:Start your own provider?

[masterjames]

That is exactly what i do. I dont like the netflix's or the Hulu's. I dont allow it in my house. Right now i dont have a bandwidth cap so it doesnt matter too much but i dont want the wife and kids to get used to something that is not gonna stick around when the cap comes back. The only thing we stream is youtube because youtube any other way is crazy. I keep a local copy of anything that is worth keeping and the rest i dont care for. If it doesnt come over the air or from good ole tpb then it doesnt come.

Re:Start your own provider?

[toddestan]

And that's what we have now. Everyone gets the same cap. Grandma has to pay the same amount for a huge amount of data she's not going to use, while a large family pays the same price for a cap that's too small. Granted, there's a business line, but they aren't marketed as an "upgrade" to the standard residential offering but rather to a different market.

Re:Start your own provider?

[halltk1983]

And a lot of others give you discounted rates on the cable, since most businesses need encouragement to buy extra channels, and they're tired of losing Sports Bars, lounges and break rooms to satellite companies.

Re:Start your own provider?

[halltk1983]

An LLC is about $50-$100 one time fee for most states. Definitely an option.

Re:Start your own provider?

[Cimexus]

The business connection is not a REALISTIC option for many people. They are much more expensive than the consumer/residential connections in many cases and you may need to prove you are a registered business to qualify. Yes you could register a company and pay the fees and yes, by that measure it IS an option. But I was comparing the residential markets in two countries and basically saying "caps are fine if there are options". I don't really think anyone could argue against more options not being a good thing.

Re:Start your own provider?

[Cimexus]

1. Even if you did use something like Netflix, if you got a 500 GB or 1 TB+ cap you aren't ever going to hit it.

2. Some ISPs in Australia offer unlimited data (no caps). So again, the option is there. But you can often save money by going on a capped plan (and if you get one that's in excess of your usage anyway, why wouldn't you?)

3. Similar to in the UK, capped plans in Australia have extensive "quota free" zones which include file mirrors, streaming video services etc. My ISP didn't count iTunes traffic, ABC iView (IPTV) traffic, Steam traffic and a bunch of other stuff. Realistically, if Netflix came to Australia, all the big ISPs would have it on their quota-free zone pretty quick (once one did, the others would have to get on the bandwagon to compete).

Obviously no caps is ideal. However I was merely comparing the US (no options, one size fits all) approach with the Australian (clear choice of plans and providers with different caps), and observing that if you're going to have caps, it's OK provided there are choices (including, in Australia at least, some ISPs that offer 'no cap' as a choice).

Re:Start your own provider?

[Cimexus]

The US is no better. There are huge areas here that have 6 Mbit ADSL and nothing else (including where my parents-in-law live, which is in a city of 100,000 people). You can cherry pick places in both countries that have good speeds and bad speeds. My connection back in Australia (TransACT VDSL2, inner-south Canberra) was 60 Mbit downstream and 15 Mbps upstream. Definitely not slow at all. Much faster than what I can get in the US in fact.

Yes I realise I lucked out and just happened to live in a place I could get that in Australia. But my point is that the US also has a lot of places stuck with slow speeds - it's not unique to Australia.

The NBN should hopefully bring more equity in speeds (even if it's the Coalitions plan - this will still bring faster speeds to a greater proportion of the population, though the original Labor plan is obviously better).

Re:Start your own provider?

[cthulhu11]

My (cable) ISP in the US had a 300 GB cap but there was no option to move to a higher cap if I needed it (other than to get a business connection).

Would that be so bad? My business-class connection is not outrageous.

Re:Start your own provider?

[OdinOdin_]

These figures are not completely accurate picture. Most streaming content comes off a load cache boxes on the large ISPs own network. All ISP peer in at least one of their national peering centres to exchange traffic with other national ISPs to reduce the transit requirements. Most internet traffic never leaves the country, UK people use UK google, UK ebay, UK ecommerce sites.

So for example Netflix, BBC, BT TV and things like Windows Updates and Game downloads all come from local cache boxes that are either located inside the ISP network (at a cost to the CDN) or are within the national peering exchange centre and do not stream down transit links.

Sure the cost of 10Gbps links at a national peering centre are expensive but no where near that of you are quoting for transit from a tier-1.

Re:Start your own provider?

[shentino]

It's only criminal in a practical sense if the government decides to prosecute it.

Considering that lobbyists have invested money in getting corporations their way, fat chance.

Re:Start your own provider?

[shentino]

Oversubscription only works because the provider gets to terminate whoever they darn please, including consumers that actually try to use their bandwidth.

Show me a consumer that wants to get the most out of their connection, and I'll show you a consumer that will wind up on the business end of an ISP's "right to refuse service"

Re:Start your own provider?

[shentino]

Water is measured in gallons. Electricity is measured in kWh.

Comparison fail.

The only way possible...

[Anonymous Coward]

With your wallet.

everyone caps speed

[Xicor]

i dont know of a single internet company who DOESNT cap your internet speed. as far as total allowed download/upload, i suggest voting with your money. i couldnt really tell which you were complaining about, but it is standard practice to cap upload and download speed. think about it this way, in a few years you will be able to get google fiber.

Re:everyone caps speed

[CRCulver]

i dont know of a single internet company who DOESNT cap your internet speed

Is this a US thing? With my ISP here in Romania, I've never experienced caps even going into the hundreds of gigabytes a month (I torrent a lot of Blurays).

Re:everyone caps speed

[gl4ss]

well.. some just sell you the max their tech allows.

what the poster is probably referring to is about limiting amounts of transfers though, like limiting to 10gigs per month or whatever.

besides, what you say makes no sense because you're aware of services like google fiber.

and what to do about it? complain, complain complain. some cablemodem systems are hackable, but it's illegal and easy to get caught.

Re:everyone caps speed

[Anonymous Coward]

In the UK, BT Infinity has no data cap. They used to have a Fair Use policy, but were able to drop it last year after realising they had more than enough bandwidth for everybody to go as crazy as they like.

Re:everyone caps speed

[Anonymous Coward]

Speed is capped according to your service level. Usage may also be capped. Some ISPs really don't care, like Verizon FiOS, where you really do have to take the piss before they get on to you. Others like Comcast will give you as little as possible. I've no idea what the handful of people with Google's fiber connection have. That's for the US. In the UK, ISPs throttle the connection after X bytes. You can get a 100mbps service from Virgin, but after a couple of GB in a day, your speed becomes useless.

Re:everyone caps speed

[stonecypher]

Verizon FIOS caps are so far in the sky that you're unlikely ever to hit them.

Re:everyone caps speed

[Frankie70]

in a few years you will be able to get google fiber.

What if you want a server - google fiber bans servers, don't they - http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/08/13/2148245/eff-slams-google-fiber-for-banning-servers-on-its-network

Re:everyone caps speed

[macemoneta]

My U.S. (NJ) provider, Optonline (Cablevision) does not cap or throttle, at least in my area.

Re:everyone caps speed

[Frobnicator]

The story isn't about capping SPEED, it is about capping BYTES TRANSFERRED. Critically missing from the stories are both of those numbers.

• * A setup that runs at 4Mbps can run for a month and struggle to hit a 1TB/month cap.
• * A setup that runs at 12Mbps will never hit a 4TB/month data cap, even if kept saturated.
• * A setup that has a 4Gbps can pass a 4TB limit in about 2.5 hours.

Equipment and infrastructure are not free. Even our business connection (fiber@4Gbps) has caps. We pay quite a lot for it, and are unlikely to ever hit them, but they exist.

Back when people were on kilobit connections there wasn't much point to a cap. Today when fiber to the premises can offer 10Gbps or more it wouldn't take much to saturate the telecom's equipment.

Usage policies and caps mean you can have your high speed connection so data comes to you quickly when you want it, but because the plan is very cheap you can't keep the line saturated. When it comes to bandwidth, transfer limits and costs, you only get to pick two. The third is dictated by the other choices.

Re:everyone caps speed

[theqmann]

I'm on AT&T Uverse, and they don't seem to care with hundreds of GBs per month.

Re:everyone caps speed

[Frobnicator]

i dont know of a single internet company who DOESNT cap your internet speed

Is this a US thing? With my ISP here in Romania, I've never experienced caps even going into the hundreds of gigabytes a month (I torrent a lot of Blurays).

Around here (Salt Lake City, US) people can get inexpensive home connections in the 12Mbps-20Mbps range. The caps on many of these plans are about 1TB/month. As you mention, an individual can transfer quite a lot of data before hitting that kind of cap.

Businesses, especially tech businesses, tend to have much greater telecom requirements than a single residence.

Re:everyone caps speed

[Xicor]

google fiber is 1Gb/s, unlimited data monthly.

Re:everyone caps speed

[Hognoxious]

I guess being on good terms with Him means He grants you an exemption from rule 7?

Re:everyone caps speed

[nosferatu1001]

Currently on Sky Fibre unlimited (FTTC, not true fibre) with no caps and no throttling.

Re:everyone caps speed

[PhunkySchtuff]

No consumer ISP in Australia caps your speed. You get an ADSL2 connection and it's as fast as the line can go, depending on your distance to the exchange etc. Up to 24Mbs. You get a DOCSIS2 cable connection and it's up to 30Mbs. You get a DOCSIS3 cable connection and it's up to 100Mbs.

With respect to your download quota however, you want to download more, either you pay more or you move to a cheaper tier 2 or 3 ISP with some kind of "unlimited" plan.

My Favourite Question Of All Time

[Zontar The Mindless]

When I first ordered Internet service here, and asked them what my monthly bandwidth cap would be, their customer service guy responded with the following question:

"Bandwidth cap? I'm sorry, is that some sort of hat? And what does that have to do with your subscription to our service?"

Sometimes I really do love living in Sweden.

Re:My Favourite Question Of All Time

[multriha]

Back when there was some competition and choice in my area for DSL service, my standard question was "Could I run a commercial porn busisness off this connection and max it out 24/7/365?". (Assuring them that wasn't my intended use, but I wanted that freedom).

One ISP responded by saying, 'Of course, actually until recently one of our customers was one of the biggest porn companies in the US'.

Re:My Favourite Question Of All Time

[girlintraining]

One ISP responded by saying, 'Of course, actually until recently one of our customers was one of the biggest porn companies in the US'.

Porn server on a DSL line. Musta been really into spanking and torture. :) Okay, that aside, yeah, there's plenty of ways to fight a cap if you're stuck in a residential area and have no alternatives; ICMP traffic typically isn't counted or capped. If you setup a micro instance in the amazon cloud or elsewhere, and create a VPN that uses ICMP traffic, you can tunnel through that and out into the wonderful world of unlimited bandwidth.

The fact is, tabulating the actual bandwidth used isn't a matter of just adding up the bytes on the wire transmitted or received, and that's because every way of auditing it is different. Some ISPs track it at the border router, some try to limit it during peak periods... take Comcast for instance...

They have this 'burst' thing where the first 5MB of a http or https connection runs at max speed, then throttles. Well, you can use that to your advantage -- just send a reset packet after 5MB is exchanged, and enable http resume. With a few other tweaks to http pipelining and other things, you can easily get triple what your rated line speed is supposed to be... but it requires you setup your own dedicated gateway/firewall/router combo box and some really complicated ipchains and kernel magic.

My point is, extensively test what your ISP does and doesn't throttle, how it throttles, and how it caps. Then game the system. It's just another hurdle to be overcome. And when you've figured it out, share it with others. ISPs need to get the message that if they aren't going to support network neutrality, the network is going to rise up and kick them in the ass.

Re:My Favourite Question Of All Time

[fustakrakich]

...one of our customers was one of the biggest porn companies...

What, was the Catholic church muscling in on the e-book business and expanding into vids?

Re:My Favourite Question Of All Time

[girlintraining]

Then game the system. It's just another hurdle to be overcome.

What's duplicitous about this? It's advertised as unlimited. We're paying more for less than other countries because they refuse to upgrade their infrastructure, creating an artificial scarcity. All I want is what I've always wanted: Internet at the rated speed that I purchased. If there's bandwidth contention, that's what QoS is for. Caps are an artificial restriction of a resource...

The only duplicity I see is from the ISPs who perpetuate this fraud.

Re:My Favourite Question Of All Time

[Anonymous Coward]

When I first ordered Internet service here, and asked them what my monthly bandwidth cap would be, their customer service guy responded with the following question:

"Bandwidth cap? I'm sorry, is that some sort of hat? And what does that have to do with your subscription to our service?"

Sometimes I really do love living in Sweden.

Good for you I guess, really happy for you. But that doesn't really answer the question. Unless your point was that everyone dealing with this problem should move to Sweden.

Re:My Favourite Question Of All Time

[edcheevy]

Hah hah, reminds me of high school when a friend and I started a small web hosting company (pre dot com years). One night we received a frantic call from the local dial-up ISP where our server was co-located. Turns out one of our customers had started hosting some pretty tame stuff (mostly models in swim suits or underwear, but a few nudie pics) and it completely maxed our both our server and the ISP's bandwidth. It created an interesting legal situation given that the two web host owners were also minors - needless to say we had to turn off that user's account. Good times.

Re:My Favourite Question Of All Time

[RulerOf]

They have this 'burst' thing where the first 5MB of a http or https connection runs at max speed, then throttles. Well, you can use that to your advantage -- just send a reset packet after 5MB is exchanged, and enable http resume. With a few other tweaks to http pipelining and other things, you can easily get triple what your rated line speed is supposed to be... but it requires you setup your own dedicated gateway/firewall/router combo box and some really complicated ipchains and kernel magic.

I've often wondered if anyone's written up a guide on how to game that. I'm guessing that tunneling all of your traffic through an SSL VPN and then running the reset shenanigans might make that particularly easy...

Re:My Favourite Question Of All Time

[serviscope_minor]

ISPs need to get the message that if they aren't going to support network neutrality, the network is going to rise up and kick them in the ass.

What, precisely do you conut as network neutrality?

Provided they do that to all websites, including their own, I'd count it as a neutral but really shitty implementation of QoS.

Also, do you know if kernel magic exists to do that, or is this just a possiblility which could be, but isn't yet implemented. I may be misunderstanding, but if I have it right, then a userland HTTP proxy could do the job.

Re:My Favourite Question Of All Time

[girlintraining]

What, precisely do you conut as network neutrality?

I suppose I 'conut' it as; ISPs enabling (1) all content and protocols (2) regardless of source or destination, and (3) without favoring (prioritization) or blocking on either (1) or (2).

Also, do you know if kernel magic exists to do that, or is this just a possiblility which could be, but isn't yet implemented. I may be misunderstanding, but if I have it right, then a userland HTTP proxy could do the job.

The kernel is the wrong place to do it. Depending on the type of throttling or traffic manipulation used, you may or may not need to pre-empt the kernels' IP stack, the ability to craft custom packets, etc., and then some kind of userland library that can intercept regular network i/o... not dissimilar to event interception/dll injection.

The fact of the matter is, every layer of the network can be fucked with, and unfucking it means implimenting a solution at that layer. This unfortunately means any comprehensive solution would likely be monolithic and likely require significant modification of the application... it is not a simple matter of "create proxy, make bacon."

Re:My Favourite Question Of All Time

[serviscope_minor]

I suppose I 'conut' it as;

Really, a typo?

ISPs enabling (1) all content and protocols (2) regardless of source or destination, and (3) without favoring (prioritization) or blocking on either (1) or (2).

Where do you stand on QoS?

Re:My Favourite Question Of All Time

[houghi]

I do not have a bandwith cap. I pay 284.88EUR per year for ADSL. It is not the fastest connection I could get, but I get a fixed IP, Reversed DNS, no ports blocked and no cap.

I rather have a bit slower connection without a cap that I can use all the time then a superfast connection that I can use only part of the time.

I am able to see FullHD movies, so it s fast enough for me.

Re:My Favourite Question Of All Time

[girlintraining]

Where do you stand on QoS?

It should be handled by the customer, not the ISP.

Re:My Favourite Question Of All Time

[Zontar The Mindless]

Unless your point was that everyone dealing with this problem should move to Sweden.

Or just possibly, "It's long since past time that you guys approached the people who run your telcos with tar and feathers instead of your chequebooks"?

Re:My Favourite Question Of All Time

[serviscope_minor]

It should be handled by the customer, not the ISP.

Not sure I 100% agree on that one, since most customers aren't knowledgable to do it themselves. It would be reasonable for the ISP to provide sensible defaults, provided they actually for example obeyed some QoS protocol.

Generally low latency bandwidth is much more expensive than high latency bandwidth. Naturally few people would want high latency VOIP, and few would care about low latency Bittorrent.

Likewise with HTTP, you're likely to want middling latency on short downloads, but could cope with very high latency on large ones.

The thing is, no one could afford to pay for internet access, if the ISP was capable of delivering the maxium allowed bandwidth at the minimum latency to all customers simultaneously. So, over-provisioning does tend to occur.

If you want cheap internet access, then a sensible place to do the QoS is where the bottleneck is--where the data leaves the ISP.

At that point it would be sensible to prioritise traffic marked as latency sensitive over traffic marked as less so.

An ideal ISP would obey whatever QoS classes the user sends (and provide sensible defaults since most users would have no idea what that's about), and offer different usage caps in different classes, since that's where the cost is.

Re:My Favourite Question Of All Time

[gottabeme]

With a few other tweaks to http pipelining and other things, you can easily get triple what your rated line speed is supposed to be... but it requires you setup your own dedicated gateway/firewall/router combo box and some really complicated ipchains and kernel magic.

How can you get higher throughput than the physical link speed?

Re:My Favourite Question Of All Time

[Zontar The Mindless]

Since February 2013 every household in Sweden which has a personal computer connected to the Internet is required by law to pay a TV-License fee to the limited company Radiotjänst i Kiruna AB of approximately 240 Euros per annum.

"My internet service isn't capped. I just pay 20 euro a month extra to support a failing business model, because my country is super progressive."

Except that I'm not doing any such thing.

Since I already own a TV, I've been paying the TV licence fee for years. They have not increased the fee for those who were already paying it, and I'm still paying SEK 2076 per year (currently €237.70--wow, the exchange rate is heaps better recently... perhaps I should go buy some Euro, thanks for the tip!), just as I always have.

Charging that fee to folks who could access Swedish TV via the Net without paying for a licence seems entirely fair to me.

The rest of your post sounds like you're trying to persuade yourself that you're not suffering from a bit of, well, Stockholm Syndrome on behalf of the corporate interests who are happily raping you in the US.

Re:My Favourite Question Of All Time

[Zontar The Mindless]

Your math makes the assumption that Sweden and the US have the same resources available to provide telecommunications infrastructure and services, and conveniently ignores economy of scale (or pretends that it doesn't exist).

There's also the fact US telcos have already pocketed the tax money that they were supposed to use for buildout, and now complain about how expensive it is.

As I already pointed out, the TV licence has nothing to do with bandwidth.

And you cap your arguments with an anti-intellectual and bigoted troll.

You are obviously a shill, and this discussion is concluded.

Re:My Favourite Question Of All Time

[shentino]

Can't leave the USA, TSA will rape me...

Depends if they cap VPN (encrypted) traffic or not

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends how their usage caps are set. If it is traffic shaping based on type of traffic and ignores encrypted traffic, you pay a good VPN provider and "circumvent" the traffic shaping. Most likely your heavy usage will still get eventually flagged, or it might not.

If it's a raw bytes per month style cap, the only way to fight it is to vote against it by choosing differently. Either by choosing another ISP (which may be more expensive - including poteitnally getting a proper "commercial grade" internet connection) or literally voting with your feet - moving to another location which has an ISP that offers a better deal.

Nobody FORCES you to keep paying a crappy provider. Ask around what a commercial connection costs & what are the terms there. Most likely the monthly fee is several times more than the consumer grade type, but you get what you pay for.

The Double Edged Sword

[postbigbang]

How to fight usage caps: go somewhere else, use multiple providers, conserve what you do (that's you TorFreaks), don't upload every stupid cat photo you own, actually think about what you're doing before you upload/download, complain vociferously and frequently to management.

My suggestion: use another rational provider. If captive, look to conserve. If you hack: (text deleted by the NSA)

Re:The Double Edged Sword

[Elbart]

Then the invisible hand of the market is working as planned.

Business

[michaelmalak]

The solution to get more allowed usage is to purchase business service from your ISP.

Re:Business

[MeanE]

No kidding. If it's an option check it out. You may be surprised.

My ISP's business connection is actually cheaper, faster, no usage cap and comes with a phone line.

Re:Business

[thegarbz]

Yes show it to the greedy customer screwing entity by paying them more money. That'll learn em.

The sad thing is true competition would make this thing go away, but there's no such thing. Choice of internet connection was actually one of the deciding factors when I bought my house and I'm happy to be paying the same rate I used to, except now without caps or limits, at the full rate ADSL2+ supports, with a static IP, and without an overtly hostile terms of service.

At my old ISP I could have gotten that on a business plan .... for $300 per month.

You can't shame something that has no Shame

[multriha]

ISPs have no shame. There's hope of getting anywhere with that.

Most have fine-print in their contracts that unlimited isn't really unlimited.

It sucks.

One thing you can do is look into a business account. You pay more, but you get unlimited bandwidth, and can often run servers and such that aren't allow with a consumer account.

If you want to try to fight the issue, look carefully at your bill and what taxes are being applied. Look up the text of the laws the taxes are based upon. If memory serves one of the common taxes that has to do with telecommunications (wish I could remember the name) has certain requirements of not interfering with you usage in certain ways that /should/ keep them from capping you.

Re:You can't shame something that has no Shame

[AHuxley]

In Australia the idea was to educate as many people via forum post and web sites.
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/ in the Companies section.
Also the "Find a broadband plan" http://bc.whirlpool.net.au/ search would result in a list of local ISP options per exchange. Allowing people to plan, compare ISP and list their caps, services (P2P tracking/slowing efforts) seems to have done some good.
Over time searching for that brands products would bring a flood of negative results or very positive news.

And how?

[fustakrakich]

Dewey, Cheatham...

Accepted capping, and paid for a suitable limit

[Neil_Brown]

... with the possibility of increasing the cap if needed.

I am in the UK and wanted to move to an ISP which offered FTTC, IPv6, a static IP, would be happy for me to run servers and would not implement CG-NAT, and offered good technical support in the event I should need it. The ISP which was most highly recommended to me based on those criteria offered FTTC for a fixed monthly price, with a cap — if paying a proportionate more-than-average-in-the-consumer-market price gave me a proportionate more-than-average-in-the-consumer-market service, that sounded like a good trade-off to me, even with a cap.

Coming from an uncapped connection, I was nervous about buying something with a cap, but, having checked our usage for a three month period, I picked the option with a cap three times that (guessing that a faster connection would mean we use it for me) and, so far, that has worked out well for me. If I want another 100GB, I can pay for that, either as a one-off, on a particularly heavy usage month, or to upgrade the connection permanently.

(The ISP is Andrews and Arnold and, so far, I have been more than happy with them. I guess that they have to pay upstream for capacity, and an unlimited connection would entail a pretty significant premium to ensure that they were not left out of pocket.)

Fight back with compression!

[hawguy]

I fight my carrier's bandwidth caps by only downloading compressed content. For exampe, if I dowload a zip file that contains 100MB of data, but the Zip file itself only consumes 10MB, then I've effectively downloaded 90MB of data for "free" through my ISP and bypassed their cap. Ha! Take that Comcast! Sometimes when I find a file with a really good compression ratio, I'll download it 3 or 4 times just to screw them over even more.

It takes a little more of my time to calculate how much I've exceeded my cap, since I keep a spreadsheet of everything I've downloaded (which can get tedious when adding up all of the requested objects from a website that uses gzip compression) but the satisfaction is well worth it.

Re:Fight back with compression!

[oodaloop]

Jebus man, don't give them ideas! Next, they'll charge more for zip files!

Shop Til You Drop

[wrackspurt]

Shop around and let other potential providers know exactly why you're shopping around. Businesses are by their nature sensitive to competition even if they pretend otherwise.

Use (Pay For) The Right Service Plan

[turgid]

You agree to pay for it, and they agree to provide it. If they don't. go elsewhere. Simples.

Re:Use (Pay For) The Right Service Plan

[gottabeme]

Or you get an incredibly helpful guy in the Philippines who tells you your new U-Verse DSL has no caps. Then when you plug in the new modem and go through the U-Verse registration, you see at the bottom of the page that there's a 250 GB cap.

At least it's better than the 150 GB cap they stuck me with after 4 years of no cap. But it's impossible to get a guarantee I won't be charged for overages, even though the guy sold me specifically on "no caps." And the only alternative is the local cable company, which is more expensive.

And don't tell me to move to a different residence just for Internet access. That should not be necessary.

Re:Use (Pay For) The Right Service Plan

[turgid]

Yes, they lie through their teeth, and no, you shouldn't have to move house just to get internet access. It shows how far we still have to go.

I had an argument with the Virgin Media Salesslug who knocked on my door one evening about "no caps." He was a lying scumbag. And he couldn't understand why I had separate broadband, land-line and TV providers.

Re:Use (Pay For) The Right Service Plan

[gottabeme]

Salesslug. I think I will steal...I mean, share that. :)

Re:Depends if they cap VPN (encrypted) traffic or

[multriha]

Unfortunately, broadband choices are very limited in most of the U.S. (elsewhere too I'm sure, but only know the states).

Where I currently live despite it being a moderate sized city, with an extreme tech community. Your only options are cable through Comcast or DSL through Centurylink. When you factor in what speed you can get where in the city. Voting with your wallet isn't much of an option.

Re:Depends if they cap VPN (encrypted) traffic or

[smash]

I wouldn't want to use an ISP as incompetent as that...

Re:how do I fight CAPS USAGE?

[tocsy]

I'm glad I'm not the only one who misread the title at first. The fact that it was also submitted by someone named SGT CAPSLOCK made it even more confusting.

Business level accounts

[dhickman]

Lets face it, we are not the typical ISP customer anymore.

I learned a long time ago that business customers get treated much better than general consumers.

Yes business accounts cost more, but you get priority services, more technical customer service, static ips, and best of all no restrictions.

So organize an LLC, get a business bank account, and then get business internet service. Since this is probally going to be in your house, sell yourself the cost of local DSL (invoice and pay for it using personal funds) and it is an easy IRS write off.


People on here complain about caps and port blocking all of the time without realizing that everything costs money. In Oklahoma City, Business Internet is $90 a month. That gets me a static IP, 24/7 knowledgeable tech support, free equipment, truck rolls at 2am, 5up/30down ( dedicated priority service over consumer.)
The closest consumer plan has the same speeds but the cable tv support department, caps, blocked ports, must supply own equipment, and the bandwidth is not dedicated. All for $59 a month.

It is worth an extra $30 a month for the access, of which I write the whole thing ($89) off at tax time as a business expense.

Re:Business level accounts

[rworne]

You don't need to be a business to get a business account. At least that's the way it works with Verizon. It's just another set of tiers in their service (more expensive ones). All I needed to do was just ask for it and briefly tell them why.

You are spot on about the benefits of a business account.

 

Re:Business level accounts

[DJ Particle]

With Comcast, you need to give a reason. I run a server, that was good enough for them. :)

Re:Business level accounts

[Damathon]

it is an easy IRS write off.

Did you ask the IRS how easy it is to write off business expenses used only for personal reasons for a business that has no revenue?

Re:how do I fight CAPS USAGE?

[optikos]

I fight using CAPS by turning off the Caps Lock LED.

Let the advertisers know.

[Hans Lehmann]

If you're an average user that mostly uses just a web browser on the Internet, install an ad-blocker of your choice if you haven't done so already. All those ad popups, flash, etc., are consuming bandwidth that count against your monthly cap. When some web site says "Oh please won't you turn off your ad-blocker" tell them to take it up with their advertisers. ISP's will listen to advertisers more than they will to the average customer scum.

Generally speaking

[stonecypher]

Generally speaking, if you call the host and say "I need a line without caps, can you quote me a price," they will.

Oftentimes you'll have to call it a business line though.

Re:Generally speaking

[Kjella]

The "problem" with business lines is that usually you're also paying a lot for uptime and priority support because when they have an office full of people who can't get any work done or customer orders that aren't being processed their losses rack up pretty fast. You don't want that, you just want a residential line with normal service levels but high or no cap. And many businesses are just set up with those two service offerings, they're not going to create a custom deal just for you.

Unlimited Use and UK's Disgrace.

[tuppe666]

In the UK at least 6 years ago when the government was all *cough* pushing the idea it was an E-Govenment. Basically a petition was sent to the Government complaining that ISPs offered unlimited data...which in practice was often seriously crippled that offered little data. The response was to pass the buck to the Advertising Agency Authority who still do little to nothing http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07/03/government_dodges_unlimited/ That was in 2007. It is now 6 years later and nothing changes https://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/ofcom-ban-the-fraudulent-use-of-the-term-unlimited-by-mobile-networks-and-isps .

Re:Unlimited Use and UK's Disgrace.

[thegarbz]

What you need is a consumer watchdog who a) cares about consumers, and b) has teeth.

We went through the same thing in Australia which resulted in fines to several internet service providers. They weren't just because of the word unlimited but also when a plan wasn't available for the advertised price, i.e. $29.95 / month but only if you get their phone service too which adds $20 to the cost.

10 GB/mo ro less

[tepples]

I have capped internet here in Australia (150GB / month) and it is plenty, pretty much.

150 GB/mo? Luxury. In some areas, all people can get is satellite and cellular, and those tend to run 10 GB/mo or less on affordable plans. I'm glad I happen not to live in such areas at the moment.

Re:10 GB/mo ro less

[Em Adespoton]

I remember when I was capped at 8GB/mo... then my ISP upped the limit to 20GB/mo.
The year? 1999 IIRC.
This was commercial single channel ISDN, but still... crazy to see cellular data service actually becoming WORSE than similar landlocked service from 1999. When the data transfer speeds (even at the trunk) are so significantly better, and with single channel ISDN (this has guaranteed bandwidth) going back then for the same price a cellular data plan goes for today, something's wrong.
Now the one caveat here is that you've got a ton more customers using the trunk, and it obviously can't live up to the same SLA for consumer cellular data that ISDN does, but then why is the service so expensive?

Re:10 GB/mo ro less

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.multichannel.com/distribution/mediacom-expands-usage-based-broadband-plans/145303

Mediacom's lowest cap in the new plan is 150GB. You can choose from plans with various caps, up to 3 TB of usage.

"10GB/mo satellite or cellular" is not the problem here.

Submitter is whining because he likes to torrent, and will have to pay a little more each month to move to a higher usage cap.

Re:10 GB/mo ro less

[smash]

Sure. If you live in the middle of nowhere here, you are limited to similar satellite or cellular plans. What's your point? Technology trails behind the curve in remote locations. If you want high tech, you move somewhere it exists.

Satellite bandwidth is expensive because there is limited spectrum available on each satellite, limited satellite coverage in a particular area, and as I'm sure you're aware - designing, building and launching additional satellites is not cheap.

Re:10 GB/mo ro less

[smash]

Cellular is so expensive because there is limited radio frequency available, and a hell of a lot of customers using it.

Re:10 GB/mo ro less

[Jeremy Erwin]

This was commercial single channel ISDN, but still... crazy to see cellular data service actually becoming WORSE than similar landlocked service from 1999.

Actually, landlocked services have less of a excuse to cap bandwidth consumption. Wireless services have a limited amount of spectrum that needs to be fairly allocated amongst its users. Wired services? Not so much.

Re:10 GB/mo ro less

[Em Adespoton]

This was commercial single channel ISDN, but still... crazy to see cellular data service actually becoming WORSE than similar landlocked service from 1999.

Actually, landlocked services have less of a excuse to cap bandwidth consumption. Wireless services have a limited amount of spectrum that needs to be fairly allocated amongst its users. Wired services? Not so much.

As mentioned, the ISDN is/was a guaranteed bandwidth service (really a partial T1 line) -- you can't oversubscribe it like they do with consumer-grade services. Add to this that ISDN had a distance-from-trunk-degradation curve, and the bandwidth limitations were actually somewhat similar to the limited spectrum issue.

However, as I stated, spectrum itself doesn't appear to be the issue here, as it's not being saturated, and the auctions themselves when spread across the entire subscriber base are peanuts.

So the reason for the caps has to either be last mile infrastructure costs or trunk costs -- or as a way of differentiating service levels and artificially inflating certain service levels I suppose.

Has anyone looked into how caps/bandwidth compares to countries who didn't build up a landline infrastructure, where the players aren't all entrenched landline behemoths already?

Re:10 GB/mo ro less

[beelsebob]

What makes you think that the switches in your exchange don't have a maximum bandwidth they can deal with?

Re:10 GB/mo ro less

[nobaloney]

As mentioned, the ISDN is/was a guaranteed bandwidth service (really a partial T1 line)

No, ISDN is actually a dialup service, though digital from end to end and not analog. 64 kbps per channel, two channels available per twisted pair. I used dual-channel ISDN to provision my first hosting company. From a single twisted-pair connection. I ran it from an apartment with two twisted pairs available, and used one for a fax line (and occasionally a modem for testing). The other twisted pair was for a dual-channel ISDN line, which switched automatically from 128 kbps down to 64 kbps whenever a phone call came in.

My upstream provider also worked from home; he had a partial T-1 (he never told me how big a part) and I paid for the ISDN at my apartment and at his home.

This worked because in Florida (where I lived at the time) the local tariffs were for flat rate for residential ISDN. If we worked from offices we couldn't have afforded the per-minute rate. The relatively slow speed and capacity worked in those days (circa 1995-1996 iirc) because the local university only had 56kbps for the entire campus.

Years later running an ISP I had a 25-pair cable, which we used for twenty five incoming phone lines to 25 separate 48-baud modems, and offered dialup service. We didn't pay incoming at all, so the charge was under $500/month for incoming data. Outgoing to the 'net was 384kbps sDSL at a few hundred dollars per month (one twisted pair).

That model stopped working when 56K modems came out; they would only work at 56K downstream, not upstream, so they wouldn't help us provide 56K service. So we dropped our physical plant and began reselling a wholesale ISP who'd invested in the newer equipment.

That turned out to be a good plan; a few years later when everyone was switching to DSL (before the days when you could get Internet from your cable provider) we sold off our clients at a profit, didn't have a great loss from equipment fast becoming obsolete, and moved on to a hosting-only model. Our one competition in town, the local daily newspaper, lost a fortune; they had to write off a much larger infrastructure.

Those were the days.

Buy more bandwidth or Become an ISP!

[BoRegardless]

Don't waste time. Act!

Write to your representative

[dutchwhizzman]

Your democratic representative should fight for uncapped internet at decent prices. If there is some form of a monopoly going on, there should be a price cap on how much an ISP is allowed to ask and what the minimal service for that price should be. That may sound communist, but monopolies have nothing to do with free market. If you want a market economy, you need the government to stimulate innovation and competition, so they should encourage your ISP to come up with ways to give you a better service and/or price if there is no "natural" competition for them.

Re:Write to your representative

[CaitlinAnnPatton]

Oh. So you are saying we should be a Marxist/communist regime where the government dictates prices. You've been reading too many Obama bumper stickers. Chances are, you have one on your own bumper.

Government dictating prices has nothing to do with Marxism or Communism. It's a form of market control that can be a rather effective tool if used properly. The problem is we have all these people who seem to think Laissez-faire economies are wonderful, when in fact, laissez-faire economies tend to run on the long side of a giant clusterfuck. Especially when monopolies are involved. When it comes to internet, there aren't a lot of providers, and they're all more than willing to avoid stepping into a market if someone else is already there. We have the same situation with cellular providers.

There's no problem with asking the local representative to fight for uncapped internet. Capped bandwidth usage makes no sense anyway.

Regulation of the free market is important, 'cause otherwise companies are more than willing to screw the general public over. What do you think got us into the current market state? Y'know, the one we're asking the government to haul our respective asses out of?

If the government has no right to dictate certain things about the market, then we have no right to bitch about the current market conditions. It's the free market, after all.

Terms of service?

[sphealey]

Based on your reading of the relevant documents, is your ISP following or violating its terms of service? If they are following their terms of service then you shop for another service (with the same or different provider).

If you think they are violating their terms of service, you (1) open a tech support request pointing that out. Assuming that the ISP rejects your support request, you then (2) hire a lawyer with some experience in telecommunications regulatory law to advise you. The lawyer might tell you he can try a bark letter or that you should just forget about it. If the latter, you can then (3) direct him to prepare a formal letter of complaint [1] to whatever legal and regulatory agencies might have jurisdiction in your state (state commerce commission, state justice dept consumer fraud, FCC, US Justice). While you are waiting for those to be resolved, you can then (4) shop for another service.

Really there is very little choice here. The US hasn't been great on consumer protection since a brief burst in the Teddy Roosevelt/Upton Sinclair/post-Crash of 1929 days, and the Clinton and Bush II administrations between them pretty much polished off what little was left - particularly in telecom. And in fairness a lot of heavy-duty end user bandwidth consumption was allowed to slip through the gaps in service agreements during a period when ISPs had rapidly growing business and infrastructure and plenty of money. Now that that is no longer the case they are tightening up. Stinks for the high use consumer, but the answer is generally to buy a business-class service with very tightly defined terms of service and pay for exactly what you need.

Oh yeah - don't wait for those letters of complaint to have any effect.

sPh

[1] A formal letter of complaint to a regulatory agency or attorney general's office is a very different thing from a hand-written citizen complaint. It follows very precise form and contains specific information and causes of complaint. Unless you're willing to spend hundreds of hours in an administrative law library figuring it out you'll need a lawyer to write one for you.

Re:Terms of service?

[gottabeme]

Have you actually hired a lawyer to write a "formal letter of complaint" that "follows very precise form" before? If so, how did it go?

Create churn

[Anonymous Coward]

If all the ISPs in your location have a cap and you can't vote with your wallet then just keep changing between them as often as you can. The churn costs them money.

If everybody did that then maybe they would try to do something to keep people from changing.

Re:Create churn

[fustakrakich]

If everybody did that then maybe they would try to do something to keep people from changing.

Yeah, by tacking on 'start-up' and reconnection fees, or making you sign a long term contract. Problem solved.

Re:Create churn

[green1]

Actually around here the ISPs usually have "introductory rates" that are lower than the normal rates to try to lure customers from the other monopoly. As a result you can save some money by switching back and forth every year (the intro rates last 3-6 months, but you usually aren't eligible for them if you've had them within the past year or so) It is somewhat of a hassle though...

Re:Create churn

[gottabeme]

What about the installation fees?

Re:Create churn

[green1]

Both major ISPs offer free install to woo customers from the other one.

Is moving practical or not?

[tepples]

and what to do about it?

Apparently, move. Some people think moving for better broadband is practical (1 2); others disagree (3 4).

Re:Is moving practical or not?

[h4rr4r]

It is for renters or for people buying a new home. It factored in my buying a home. No FIOS, no sale.

Pay

[bmomjian]

You get a commercial account that doesn't have these restrictions.

SGT, Clean This Mess Up

[LifesABeach]

Use this ISP if you need to. Otherwise, "Google" it.

how much data do you use?

[alen]

the website has internet only plans from 150GB per month up to a 999GB
i'm a cord cutter and stream everything and i'm at less than 200GB most months

WTF do some of you people do that required terabytes of data every month? if you have a family of couch potatoes go outside, read a book. same thing if you torrent 24x7. buy a dvd or blu ray. It's $100 for a 3d blu ray player. DVD's are $10 each. cheaper to buy DVD's or get netflix DVD's than pay your ISP and the electricity charges of having a computer on 24x7. in NYC my electric bill is $65 or so on average. $75 i get pissed off about leaving stuff on

Re:how much data do you use?

[slaker]

Personally, I run a Plex server that about 40 people can access; I also have a VPN end point set up for family members who live overseas; I have a not-inconsequential number of commercial web sites running and a private "cloud" storage service that I put together for my and my customers' needs. And yes I torrent like a motherfucker. My main server is a 24-thread, 48GB machine with 130TB of local storage that runs 24x7. I pay about $100 a month for electricity and another $130 for internet service, but I actually make enough money from the services that I provide that it's actually profitable for me to do what I do with it.

Re:how much data do you use?

[geezer nerd]

I wonder the same, but then I seem to be quite a different consumer than those who post here. I don't play games. I don't download music. If I want to watch a movie, I go to the cinema and enjoy sitting in the dark while eating popcorn. I watch TV shows on the "gasp" TV from my satellite service. I spend 4 - 6 hours every day on the internet, mainly following news items (a lot on /.) I watch videos associated with those news items when I want. Sometimes my wife watches the same videos, which costs the data transfer again. I do automatic backup of both computers to the cloud. And all my landline phone usage is VOIP. I use about 25GB per month.

Streaming video services are just almost beginning to be available in NZ.

Here in NZ, we have limited choices I guess. There are quite a few ISPs, but they generally are reselling DSL services on lines owned by the telco. My speeds are ~12 Mbps down, ~1Mbps up. Almost all providers have data caps, either going to dialup speed or $$ extra when the cap is exceeded. I chose one that had no data allowance at all. I much preferred just paying for what I used at NZ$1/GB plus a base monthly charge. I am quite happy with that.

Re:how much data do you use?

[gottabeme]

What's your backup system like?

Try Satellite..

[SuperCharlie]

We had nobody but satellite a while back and got 12G/mo rolling. Try streaming Netflix on that.

Re:Try Satellite..

[faedle]

And the lag. Oh gods, the lag.

I infrequently have to use Starband. Considering where I'm at when I'm using it, I get a pretty solid 1.5M down. But getting around 300ms round trip packet time AT MINIMUM really sucks.

Lead with your left

[dywolf]

Lead with your left.
His gaurd is weak on that side.
And he's got a glass jaw, so one good pop there, and down he'll go.

(actually you know, i think this would have been funnier with the other trope, "The Fix Is In" ... )

I'd shamefully abide if ...

[yelvington]

I'd shamefully abide if I could figure out how to come anywhere NEAR the usage cap. What on earth are you doing? I consume a lot of streaming media -- Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Xfinity, Youtube, Pandora -- on a Roku, two laptops, a couple of Android and iOS devices, and various family members rotate in and out with whatever toys they bring. I'm using about a quarter of my limit. Hitting the usage cap is probably nature's way of telling you to go outside and look at the real world.

Anti-Capping

[pubwvj]

The way to fight usage caps is to not use the service. Don't pay for it either, of course. Instead find another provider and give them your money. May the market forces be with you.

Switch Providers

[lightknight]

Switch providers, tell friends about new provider, watch as old provider's revenues slowly crash over the next three years, while new one enjoys a nice bump.

Business class Internet won't help everyone

[tepples]

Switching to a business rate may help some people who live within range of wired broadband, but it's not for everyone. Some ISPs refuse to provide business-class service to addresses zoned residential. And with all the other people who choose where to live based on broadband availability, the asking price for properties with no access to wired broadband has fallen. This means an affordable place to live may be affordable only because there's no wired broadband. For those in this situation, switching to a business plan won't kill the cap. Verizon and AT&T, for example, advertise business plans where multiple devices access a shared pool of monthly data transfer allowance.

Re:Caps

[DJ Particle]

In my area it's capped.... but I somehow doubt I'll use up 12TB of bandwidth in a month at this time. *heh*

TELL THEM ITS LIKE SHOUTING

[Main Gauche]

Am I the only one who first read the title as if it were "fighting caps usage", ... and then only to find that the submitter is SGT CAPSLOCK?!

Re:TELL THEM ITS LIKE SHOUTING

[funkmotor]

No I thought that too.

I AM ABSOLUTELY *OUTRAGED* TO FIND IT'S JUST ABOUT BANDWIDTH USE.

I think it must be some type of dyslexia. I once read a BBC News headline about "Papal Bigotry" imagining that PayPal had been discriminating against its customers, only to find out, TO MY COMPLETE DISAPOINTMENT (sorry) that it was only about the Vatican.

Choose your neighborhood (and even city) wisely

[tepples]

You can always choose to "go elsewhere" during the last month of the lease on your rented house or apartment.

Re:Choose your neighborhood (and even city) wisely

[faedle]

Which is a great theory.

But have you looked at the footprint of some of these cable companies like Comcast? Here in Oregon, you have five choices based on where you live.

1. Live in a big city in the Willamette Valley, and your two choices are Comcast (soft caps) and CenturyLink (soft caps, limited availability of speeds higher than 12M
2. Live in Beaverton, where your choices are Comcast (soft caps) or Frontier's FiOS (no stated cap, but rumors are that since Verizon's sale there has been a significant decrease in overall speed)
3. Live within coverage of Clear or one of the other LTE/WiMAX providers (all of whom use aggressive traffic shaping and/or very stingy caps)
4. Live in one of the rural areas with a small independent a long way from the job centers, and even then you may have a choice between a cable company that caps (BendBroadband, which for example has a 100Mb product with a 250GB hard cap) or doesn't (such as Crestview, which only does 12), and the phone company. You may have the option in #3 available as well, depending.
5. Get lucky, find a fiber provider that offers a solution that doesn't cap and pay a premium fee for Metro Ethernet or PON service, where available.

That's an awesome set of choices we have here.

Re:Choose your neighborhood (and even city) wisely

[MightyYar]

Problem is, on the long list of things you want a neighborhood to be, "bandwidth caps" is probably quite low. Schools, taxes, crime, proximity to work, and not least of which how much you like the house.

ISPs that refuse to serve home businesses

[tepples]

So organize an LLC, get a business bank account, and then get business internet service. Since this is probally going to be in your house

Depending on the ISP, you may need to get your house rezoned for business use.

Re:ISPs that refuse to serve home businesses

[dhickman]

The way to get around that is to get a LLC that lists your address as the corp address.

From a zoning viewpoint, you should be able to have a consulting business running out of any kind of R zoned property as long as you never have customers come there.

When contacting the business department of the ISP do not even mention that it is a residential address until they make a point of it, at that point you say it is for SOHO use and here is my EIN, bank account, and any needed business licenses.

Is they are still asses at that point, find another provider.

I used SSH port forwarding + compression

[Sarin]

My ISP had a bandwidth limit and a data cap, but you also got a shell account.
So I used SSH port forwarding to redirect and compress my connection to usenet servers, that way I used less bandwidth and my downspeed was higher.

Re:I used SSH port forwarding + compression

[gottabeme]

And they never caught you?

what about bad meter accuracy?

[Joe_Dragon]

not only can meter accuracy be off they can.

round up

bill you for overhead data and APR traffic.

Bill you when your modem is off (well the system is trying to send data to you so we bill for it)

http://www.dslreports.com/nsearch?q=cogeco&old=Search&cat=news

Single purchases that exceed 10 GB

[tepples]

Anonymous Coward wrote:

OK, if I'm on the Internet so much that I'm hitting bandwidth caps, it means I need to get a fucking life.

Satellite caps customers at 10 GB per month (source: exede.com). A single purchased video game or purchased high-definition movie can meet or exceed that size.

just get off the fucking box

Now I'm confused. I thought you just said "get a fucking life", that is, become a swinger. Should people lay off the fucking or start the fucking? :p

Comcast has never enforced its cap for me

[DragonTHC]

I use netflix and amazon VOD and vudu as well as Steam and the multitude of other pay services around the web.
I still use well over 300GB per month.

I'd imagine some ISPs are enforcing their caps.

Comcast decided to counter the flood of online services like netflix by setting up their own netflix CDN. Just can't get SuperHD or 3D yet.

What I did was install Flashblock

[tepples]

When some web site says "Oh please won't you turn off your ad-blocker" tell them to take it up with their advertisers.

What I did was install Flashblock. That blocks high-data-volume ads while allowing low-data-volume text ads and still image ads. Ad networks would ideally recognize that I'm not seeing SWF ads and send me still ads instead, but it amazes me how many ad networks fail to do this. That way I have a good excuse: "I'm not blocking your ads, just a file format. If I wanted Flash, I'd go to Newgrounds. Get some less-Flashy advertisers, and I might even click through."

Pay for it

[Anonymous Coward]

You pay for what you use, get a business class service. You don't have the right to anything you don't pay for here.

Spectrum is auctioned

[tepples]

why is [cellular data] service so expensive?

Because national governments raise money by auctioning exclusive rights to radio frequency spectrum, and the cellular carriers have to bid higher than competing carriers.

Re:Spectrum is auctioned

[Em Adespoton]

While this is true, it was more expensive to lay ISDN back to the trunk in 1999. And ISDN was single-user; cellular is a broadcast frequency, and they haven't saturated it. Therefore, the initial outlay is expensive (prohibitive to small players even), but the band rental divided up among the number of cellular subscribers is so tiny as to be hardly worth noting. The cost of space rental for towers and microtowers far outweighs that cost. And yet, on a per-subscriber level, that's still a tiny cost.

Anyone else have an idea? The money has to be going somewhere, otherwise one of the carriers would just drop the caps.

How about Usage Refunds?

[floops]

I'd be OK with usage caps or extra charges over a set data amount if the bastards would give me a refund for data I DIDN'T use. If I only use half my monthly entitlement I want them to automatically give me a 50% refund.

It should be in the terms of the monopoly

[Sloppy]

Remember that the reason they're your ISP, is that you gave power to the government, who made a deal with them to forcefully prevent competitors, grant easements, and other favors that most people don't get, and that no business would never have in a free market.

The terms of that deal are negotiable. Since we now know that some ISPs have caps, "no caps" should be in all future terms.

It's a utility

[Maxwell]

For gas, electricity and water I pay for what I use plus a monthly fee. Electricity is metered so I pay less at off peak times. For garbage , recycling and bio we have plastic bins we pay for as part of property tax. If I need a bigger bin I can upgrade and pay more tax. If I have a one time issue,I can buy 'bag tags' and put the tags on the extra garbage. For internet I have a tier speed and a free allotment per month. If I need more I can buy more at reasonable rates. For land line we have unlimited local calling, and per call minute long distance. For television we get lots of channels but can only watch two at a time, while recording up to two more. Finally cell phones are a fixed minutes and data with reasonable charges if we need more.

Water is our lowest expense, followed by internet.

What, exactly, am I fighting here?

Re:It's a utility

[Todd Knarr]

With electricity, water and such, you control how much you use. You can reduce your usage if you can't afford the higher bills.

On the Web, the web site controls how much I use. If they include an ad on their site that streams video, I can't stop them from doing it short of not visiting that site at all. And of course I don't know what they'll do until after I'm already on the site and the usage has occurred, so how exactly do I control my usage? Also, in too many cases the caps don't take into account normal or ordinary usage, they're set solely to let the ISP avoid investing in better infrastructure. Too often the caps aren't about backbone bandwidth, they're imposed because of local congestion within the ISP's own infrastructure where bandwidth isn't costing the ISP anything on an ongoing basis. Bluntly put, the ISPs have oversold their own local network capacity and now don't want to invest in correcting that failure. When at the same time they're announcing increasing profitability, my sympathy for them wanes.

Re:It's a utility

[HockeyPuck]

With electricity, water and such, you control how much you use. You can reduce your usage if you can't afford the higher bills...

If they include an ad on their site that streams video, I can't stop them from doing it short of not visiting that site at all....

Ads? We've got caps in the hundreds of GB and you complain about a few ads Which stream probably a few MB of content?

Unmetered wee hours

[tepples]

Restricting the total gigabytes downloaded by the month can only minimally improve congestion during prime-time

Some ISPs have an interesting way to shift heavy use away from prime time. Satellite ISP Exede, for example, turns off the meter between midnight and 5 AM local time. This encourages subscribers to run bulk downloads, such as Steam purchases or service pack downloads, during the wee hours when the bird is less congested. This is similar to how long distance companies and cellular voice carriers offered free nights and weekends.

I don't fight them

[nebular]

I don't fight usage caps, rather I spend my money on an ISP that has reasonable caps.

Data ain't free. The ISP has to spend money to send your data down the tubes and it's usually not an unlimited option for them either. My last ISP gave me 300 GB/mth with unlimited between 1am and 6am. I feel that's fair even without the unlimited overnights.

There's only a fight if ALL the ISPs in your area are gouging in regards to caps. Such is the case here in my new home of Whitehorse, Yukon. The local telco just recently had it's monopoly broken so costs are outrageously high and caps are very low.

Video games unavailable on disc

[tepples]

It's $100 for a 3d blu ray player. DVD's are $10 each. cheaper to buy DVD's or get netflix DVD's than pay your ISP and the electricity charges of having a computer on 24x7.

A lot of video games aren't available on disc. Usually only the bigger publishers do discs anymore; the rest are download-only.

My mother married a farmer

[tepples]

If you want high tech, you move somewhere it exists.

Why must high tech and growing the food that you eat be mutually exclusive? Perhaps the real problem is overzealous zoning enforcement, where cities have been known to fine people for growing vegetables in what used to be called victory gardens.

Re:My mother married a farmer

[zippthorne]

Jobs program for the tractor drivers.

Sure, some crops wouldn't be good candidates, but for bulk crops like wheat and such, with enough bandwidth you could outsource actually driving the machinery to a "tractor drone pilot" living in a city somewhere. With GPS navigation and fields in a flat state like Kansas, the remote operator doesn't even have to devote full attention to a single machine, maybe they'd even only be needed to drive the machines to and from the fields to to pick up seed and supplies and drop off the harvest.

Re:My mother married a farmer

[afgam28]

Isn't it obvious? Because network infrastructure is more economic to build in densely populated areas, and growing food requires more space and forces people to live farther apart. I wouldn't say that high tech and growing your own food are mutually exclusive but it's hard to have both without spending a lot of money.

Re:My mother married a farmer

[Culture20]

Farm machinery is super-dangerous, and farmland isn't 100% flat even in a flat state like Kansas. Random animals and people in the field complicate matters. Always best to have live eyes operating.

Re:My mother married a farmer

[santosh.k83]

Indeed. Urbanisation is destroying the social fabric of India here, leading to chaotic urban nightmares while villages like languishing. These days there's really no excuse for tech to not reach every area, except for the most inhospitable 5%. It's just that our leaders and planners are too lazy, indifferent, or maliciously plan to divide-and-rule, or perhaps they smell money in cities.

Re:My mother married a farmer

[Jafafa Hots]

I'm in the San Francisco Bay area, and the speeds here are the worst and the prices the highest of anywhere I've ever lived.

Sometimes I say that in response to people claiming it's more expensive in rural areas because the cost of infrastructure is higher than in populated areas.

Other times people tell me it's high here because there's a huge population and so more people to serve.

Here in the epicenter of the internet, internet service sucks, and everyone uses contradictory excuses for it.

The REALITY is that prices are high in the US because we have virtual monopolies and no regulation to speak of, and so capitalists do what capitalists do in those conditions:

They gouge.

Re:My mother married a farmer

[willem_pardieck]

Errrr, wow you are one paranoid dude. Ever thought that it might be a matter of $$$ that they don't bring that fibre link to the mountain village with a population of 7 and no compooters?

Re:My mother married a farmer

[squiggleslash]

Overzealous zoning. Not enforcement.

Zoning in the US is ridiculous, and has ultimately caused more damage to our freedoms, and our national security, than any other government policy.

Re:My mother married a farmer

[smash]

Economy of scale. Population density in agricultural areas means your cost per port is huge. It is not profitable to install high bandwidth terrestrial based service in those areas, at a cost that people can afford.

I DONT GIVE A SHIT

[Osgeld]

my eyes wont fall out of socket just cause someone uses caps! I am not a precious little princess where that is the biggest problem in my life

get over it, and go do something useful for fucks sake!

Comcast limits

[HockeyPuck]

Comcast just updated their usage limits and they seem pretty reasonable.

XFINITY Internet Package New Data Usage Allowance
Economy 300 GB
Economy Plus 300 GB
Internet Essentials 300 GB
Performance Starter 300 GB
Performance 300 GB
Blast! 350 GB
Extreme 50 450 GB
Extreme 105 600 GB

If you go over, they charge you $10 per 50GB. I've got the 50/10 Mb plan and I'd have to be running at 50Mb for 16 hours. This is assuming that I'm downloading from a site/torrent that can provide 50Mbps of bandwidth. Over the past three months the most I've used is 150GB. ..but what if you watch lots of netflix...?

They've got a meter with details. Their highest quality tier is still pretty small: Best quality (uses up to 1 GB per hour, up to 2.8 GB per hour if watching HD, or up to 4.7 GB per hour if watching 3D)

At 2.8GB per hour with a 350GB cap you could watch 125HD movies. There's about 720 hours in a month, so do you really want to spend about 1/3 of your time (including sleeping time) watching movies?

Like others have said, how much really do you need? These caps are so high, I can't imagine surpassing them. If you need more usage, call up Comcast, Verizon, ATT or any other SP and ask for a business line. Heck, if you really need bandwidth, most will be more than happy to sell you a 40Gb synchronous circuit.

Re:Comcast limits

[Pentium100]

I have a 300mbps uncapped conection (though the ISP sometimes throttles it to 40mbps during peak hours - not every day though) and I seed torrents - ~30TB/month uploaded. I don't download a lot though - maybe 700 or 800GB/month (that includes the ACK packets for uploaded data). I could probably upload even more if the torrent server had a faster hard drive.

Break existing contract?

[the_nightwulf]

I'm also a Mediacom subscriber. This week they've been injecting the occasional notice into web traffic stating that they'll be implementing this cap. I don't like it, but I can live with it. 250 GB cap, with a $10 charge per extra 50 GB used. That's more reasonable than other ISPs, and it's not like I can go to another provider. Monopoly aside, I live in a town of 1500 people. We're probably lucky to have any high speed options.

All that said, like every cable company their rates are exorbitant. I'm currently under a two-year contract expiring in March 2014 in exchange for lower rates. This added fee doesn't jive with me as, per the contract, rates and service cannot change. My usage last month was about 270 GB (I do a lot of streaming, and yes, the occasional torrenting). I wouldn't lose a lot of sleep over the extra $10 for my usage, but not with this contract in place. I'm thinking about giving them a call and offering two solutions -- no overcap charges until the contract expires, or terminate the contract (thus letting me cancel TV service). I decided earlier this year it's time to cut TV when the contract expires; that decision has nothing to do with this cap.

Not like I have a lot of leverage here, and I'm sure they know that. I can threaten to complain to the municipal authority I suppose. Any thoughts on this idea? My biggest problem is that I don't know what this "contract" consists of as a printed copy was not provided; first step is to request and review that.

Sonic.net CEO on data transfer caps.

[Animats]

Sonic.net does not have data transfer caps. You buy a bandwidth range, and you can use it all 24/7 if you want. Here's what Sonic's CEO says: "My opinion is that caps make little technical sense, and I believe that the fundamental reason for capping is to prevent disruption of the television entertainment business model that feeds the TV screens in most households."

Sonic is one of the few remaining independent US ISPs. They have to lease local circuits from AT&T, but they buy their own upstream bandwidth. In a few areas they have their own fiber to the home, and there they offer gigabit connections for $70 a month.

I get business-class internet

[GWBasic]

I was able to get business-class internet through my employer. It's cheaper than consumer-grade internet, and doesn't force me to buy crap like a TV subscription. If you work for a large company, it might be available through your employee discount program.

I don't know what my cap is, but if I have one, it's much higher than I will ever hit. We use most of our bandwidth for streaming video.

How to you fight usae caps?

[gagol]

Easy: toLower()

Pay More

[canadian_right]

If I want more, I pay more.

Isn't this obvious?

It is a service you pay for

[DaveV1.0]

If you don't like the restrictions and actions of the provider, stop using the service. Problem solved.

DEFEND YOUR RIGHT TO USE CAPS!!!!

[Accordion Noir]

Oh, sorry, read that wrong.

It's all about the last mile

[buss_error]

The barrier to entry for competition in the US is the last mile from the home to the internet hub. This may of course be more than a mile, but usually it's right around that. Cable companies have pumped billions of dollars per large city into their infrastructure. AT&T same. They are not about to allow competition in their areas if they can (legally or under the table) prevent it. Some of the dirty tricks used by incumbent telco operators is to have a "third party" buy up internet cooperatives once they become medium to large (more than 1000 subscribers), then bankrupt them, forcing the current customers to either pay much higher fees for less service via the incumbent, or do without internet all together if the incumbent decides a portion of the co-op is too expensive to build out to.

As far as radio frequency spectrum, look at what most of them already have in inventory versus what they have in use. The incumbents are stock piling spectrum to keep it out of the hands of competitive companies that require it to provide better service at lower cost. The FCC needs a rule that if 50% of the spectrum is not in at least 80% use, the spectrum is taken away and put back up for auction.

It is frequently stated that the US has the worst internet at the highest costs in the world. This is incorrect. It's only about the 8th worst, it just affects the most people.

It's not one entity

[rsilvergun]

that's sorta what a democracy is. The trouble is we've got about 20,000 'entities' (the super rich ruling class) deciding what the rest of use 6 billion get.

Re:It's not one entity

[CBravo]

You don't get to choose business plans, if that is what you are saying.

You can always become an business man yourself and be one of the super rich ruling class yourself. And make better decisions. However: The existing ones already proved that they (or their predecessors) did quite a fine job. But please don't let that stop you to do a better one.

Re: Caps

[Rene S. Hollan]

And in my area that gets you a static IP and you can run whatever server you want. They do prefer that you don't run open relays on port 25, but that's reasonable.

Block sites with the router

[ilotgov]

Block advertising (and tracking sites) with your router for an easy but probably not very significant gain in useful data volume. The major advantage though is to have less ads while browsing.

World Broadband Foundation (fighting caps)

[Drunkenfist]

I actually founded the World Broadband Foundation to fight caps two years ago. http://www.worldbroadbandfoundation.org/ The method being to map broadband globally so it can be easily compared, and at the same time be used as a means to pressure bad/capped regions with the good ones. However I have had to deprioritize it for now and work on immigration reform/startup visa from a combination of needing to be in the US to really grow/raise funds and also Canada/Toronto being an unworkable place for anyone who works from home. Their infrastructure and choices available are also very subpar and you can read the about section to see the events here that forced my hand to found this.

Switching providers or to the competition is a fallacy since most places don't have any competition anymore thanks for franchise agreements, or at best a duopoly especially in the US. To REALLY "switch" people have to be willing and able to move and to invest in places that do have good broadband infrastructure and to ignore and economically affect those that do not. Supporting municipal networks, Google Fiber, and Sonic type projects and stop giving money to providers who cap. Aside from that property values, business investment, even tax dollars. These are now our weapons. The US is lucky enough to still have a private sector and local govts who have the means to build alternative networks. This is a luxury that many other countries like Canada do not. Support it and nurture it. Do not let these bastards win.

Others in the fight.
http://stopthecap.com/
http://www.muninetworks.org/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/186439608067383/ - Stop AT&T from capping, a FB group though no action is really happening. It's just a place to meet other like-minded folks

Re:how do I fight CAPS USAGE?

[vlueboy]

I was just thinking of capscop on twitter. I'll just leave this right here...

Mod parent up.

[gottabeme]

No, really.

Re:Mod parent up.

[gottabeme]

I don't understand. Did you think I was being sarcastic? I wasn't. The GP post was very informative. You're right that most people don't know the difference, so the post was great.

I've never encountered that

[Sycraft-fu]

ISPs seem to really like money and business class liens cost more money. I've had business class service for about 13 years from 3 ISPs over that time, and all were plenty happy to sell it to me. Cox is who I'm with currently and they had no problem giving me a business account in my own name. Their software doesn't understand the concept, the "business name" field has my first and last name in it, but that doesn't hurt anything, and I get my nice business class Internet.

With wireless, well ya, you are going to have issues with that because there are hard bandwidth limits enforced by power output, frequency availability, and atmospheric noise (look up Shannon's Law) that you just can't get around. Wireless bandwidth will always have limits, particularly when you are talking wide area wireless.

Also, oversubscription works

[Sycraft-fu]

So long as people play nice. Companies do the same thing. You'll never find a workplace where every desktop has dedicated bandwidth out to the Internet, or even to the central server. However, so long as people play nice and don't slam it with torrents 24/7, it actually works really well.

Like at work we have a Dell Equallogic storage unit that is where people can put important data. Highly reliable NAS, we back it up to tape, all that jazz. However, it only has 2 gbps to its disks on the SAN. We have one array, and it has two gig uplinks. The NAS head itself only has 8 gbps out to the network so even if we get more arrays, it doesn't have a ton of bandwidth. Each and every desktop has a gig link, and we have a several hundred that might want to access that NAS. So we are massively oversubscribed.

However, it isn't a problem. Performance is good. Why? Because we all play nice and share. People access data when they need it, and let it sit idle otherwise. In fact, since most of the data is archival, fairly static, it really has more capacity than we need overall.

Same deal with our overall network. I work on a campus with tens of thousands of computers and only a gig or two of total Internet bandwidth (and 10 gbps of Internet 2). However things are always fast. Downloads fly, pages load instantly, etc. Reason is we all share and play nice. We get what we need and let the connection sit idle otherwise. If someone did slam the connection, they'd get a phone call from network operations.

I will say that bandwidth caps aren't the best solution to making people share and play nice, but other solutions are a good deal harder to implement, and for customers to understand. Bandwidth caps are something that is pretty easy for people to comprehend, and that will give them a reason to keep usage in check.

You probably needn't bother with that

[Sycraft-fu]

The ISP's I've deal with USWest/Qwest/Centurylink, Speakeasy, and Cox, have all been happy to sell a business account for the asking. You need to call their business division, which is separate from consumer, but that is all. They'll put the account in your name (in the case of Cox a business name is required so they just use my first and last name) and life is good. They are happy to get the money. The account costs more, and you can spend money on addon services like multiple static IPs.

It isn't like they try and keep them away from people to be mean, they are just targeted at businesses because they cost more and most people don't want to pay. In my case I pay about the same for a 30/5 as a consumer would for a 150/20 account. However, I have no bandwith cap, no prohibition on running servers (which I do) and 4 static IPs. The consumer plan has a 400GB cap, and they disallow running servers (and block some common inbound server ports, like SMTP).

Maybe some ISPs are jerks, but try it first. Most you just need to look up the number for their business services division and call them. I've never had one say no. Money is money after all.

It's just not a problem here

[msobkow]

Neither SaskTel nor Access Cable in Saskatchewan implement usage caps. Though Access will give you a call if you're perpetually uploading torrents at full speed, because it degrades the service for other users on your SHUB.

Here you buy capacity, not content. There are different speed tiers available for your links, and the prices go up pretty much exponentially as you get faster and faster service levels.

A 6 megabit downspeed link through SaskTel costs about $45/month, and that really does provide more capacity than I technically need for one person. 1.5 megabit runs about $20-25. But the maxed out 10 megabit runs more on the order of $80-90, if not more (I haven't checked prices in a while, there may be even faster tiers available by now.)

Re:It's just not a problem here

[msobkow]

Hmm. Prices have come down on the highest speed links from SaskTel. You can now get 25 megabit downloads for $80/month. http://sasktel.com/search/controller/_/Tab-4294966321/Ntk-Main_Search_Interface/Ntt-high-speed-internet-personal

If you dislike the infrastructure

[nospam007]

Then Move to a better place.

App that uses all your bandwidth

[greywire]

So how about an app that monitors your usage and towards the end of your cycle it makes sure to use up all your bandwidth? If they're going to cap us to a specific amount, we might as well get our money's worth... See how they like that.

alternately:

[gzuckier]

How do we fight caps usage?

Farming without a farm

[tepples]

Economy of scale. Population density in agricultural areas means your cost per port is huge.

That's why cities should embrace urban horticulture, such as square foot gardens, rooftop gardens, Topsy Turvy strawberry and tomato planters, and the like. One problem is zoning; another is that due to the war on some drugs, authorities tend to assume that this sort of smaller-scale horticulture involves a certain prohibited psychoactive plant. "If we let you grow tomatoes, we'll have to let your neighbor grow marijuana." In addition, there'd have to be some way to reduce demand for meat because growing animals takes even more sparsely populated land. But in any case, bringing more food production capacity within range of wired broadband would reduce the need for living in areas affected by harsh usage caps.

Re:Farming without a farm

[smash]

There's nothing stopping you growing food in your own back yard. For corporations, being able to use heavy machinery to automate seeding, harvesting, spraying, etc precludes attempting to farm in a densely populated area.

Re:Farming without a farm

[tepples]

There's nothing stopping you growing food

I was referring to threats by the City of Oak Park against Julie Bass.