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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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.

Business

[michaelmalak]

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

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.

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 .

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.

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

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.

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.