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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?"
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.
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.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
The solution to get more allowed usage is to purchase business service from your ISP.
Dewey, Cheatham...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
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.
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.
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.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
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 .
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.
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.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
We had nobody but satellite a while back and got 12G/mo rolling. Try streaming Netflix on that.
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.
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
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.
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.
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'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.
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