Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: What To Do About Repeated Internet Overbilling?
An anonymous reader writes "AT&T has been overbilling my account based on overcounting DSL internet usage (they charge in 50 gigabyte units after the first 150). I have been using a Buffalo NFinity Airstation as a managed switch to count all traffic. As you may know, this device runs firmware based on dd-wrt and has hidden telnet functionality, so I am able to load a script to count traffic directly onto the device. I have an auto-scraper that collects the data and saves it on my computer's hard disk every two minutes while the computer is running. While it is not running, the 2 minute counters accumulate in RAM on the device. Power problems are not normally an issue here; and even when they are I can tell it has happened. The upshot of all this is I can measure the exact amount of download bandwidth and a guaranteed overestimate of upload bandwidth in bytes reliably. I have tested this by transferring known amounts of data and can account for every byte counted, including ethernet frame headers. AT&T's billing reporting reports usage by day only, lags two days, and uses some time basis other than midnight. It is also reading in my testing a fairly consistent 14% higher whenever the basis doesn't disturb the test by using too much bandwidth too close to midnight.
AT&T has already refused to attempt to fix the billing meter, and asserts they have tested it and found it correct. Yet they refuse to provide a realtime readout of the counter that would make independent testing trivial. I've been through the agencies (CPUC, FCC, and Weights & Measures) and can't find one that is interested, AT&T will not provide any means for reasonable independent testing of the meter. It is my understanding that if there is a meter and its calibration cannot be checked, there is a violation of the law, yet I can't find an agency that can even accept such a claim (I'm not getting "your claim is meritless", but "we don't handle that"). If indeed they are not overbilling, my claim of no way to verify the meter still stands. My options are running thin here. So that my account can be identified by someone who recognizes the case: 7a6c74964fafd56c61e06abf6c820845cbcd4fc0 (bit commitment).
AT&T has already refused to attempt to fix the billing meter, and asserts they have tested it and found it correct. Yet they refuse to provide a realtime readout of the counter that would make independent testing trivial. I've been through the agencies (CPUC, FCC, and Weights & Measures) and can't find one that is interested, AT&T will not provide any means for reasonable independent testing of the meter. It is my understanding that if there is a meter and its calibration cannot be checked, there is a violation of the law, yet I can't find an agency that can even accept such a claim (I'm not getting "your claim is meritless", but "we don't handle that"). If indeed they are not overbilling, my claim of no way to verify the meter still stands. My options are running thin here. So that my account can be identified by someone who recognizes the case: 7a6c74964fafd56c61e06abf6c820845cbcd4fc0 (bit commitment).
Maybe they are counting encapsulation?
"No, but understanding is not required, only obedience."
hreh hreh hreh
Can you be certain that their accounting measures the same content as yours? Could there be some filtered packets, lost packets, management traffic, or other data which is attributed to your line but doesn't reach your device? This could even include any encapsulation they might use and account to your line, such as ATM encapsulation, or L2 tunneling?
According to this article: http://blog.ipspace.net/2009/0...
and ATM has about a 10-15% overhead for TCP. So they are likely billing you based on the ATM traffic that crosses their routers, not the ethernet traffic you are passing.
Have you thought that probably AT&T use PPPoA (point to point over ATM) that basically cause an overhead of 15% between your IP traffic and the traffic actually happening on your DSL line ?
http://pflog.net/dsl_overhead/
Looks like they're counting ATM frames, not your IP traffic.
GStreamer - The only way to stream!
Change providers instead of putting up with this abuse... Oh wait...
switch providers. Problem solved.
If you have Uverse, pay the extra 15 dollars a month for their most crappy TV service. The TV bandwidth is through the same series of tubes, and paying their 15 dollar a month television fee removes their ability to charge you for overages. But like all ATT services, be sure to manage your own DNS settings, as their default is so horrible that all my neighbors thought their "internet was down" when it was just a DNS server from hell.
I don't actually know for sure that the TV vs Bandwidth thing is a fact, but I can tell you that I no longer get charged for overages, and my Router's stats tell me I am using more than ever, and the only change is I signed up for "limited basic" or whatever it is called + HBO (for HBO Go) and the TV receiver is sitting in shrink wrap in my closet.
I seem to remember a group of lawyers caught AT&T in the act of subtracting data from a phone that had been turned off and a class action suit ensued. Maybe do a google search on this and reach out to the same attorneys. It sounds like you have something with merit.
Well, I guess there's not much to do. Maybe if you lube it up yourself, they won't notice?
It sounds like you are watching traffic inside of your network, and not the interface between your edge router, and the ISP device.
You could be missing many things; incoming traffic that your edge router drops, retransmissions between your edge router and the ISP device, and firmware/config updates for the ISP device.
We really need more detail.
how much money is it costing you? Small claims court here in Iowa is $85 to file and if you are right and can show a judge they will give you money to cover what you are being overcharged. They also have to pay you the court costs (85 bucks)
I have a friend who used to resell AT&T bandwidth as a whole sale reseller. He caught AT&T overcharging him. He joined with other ISP's and resellers and demonstrated AT&T was doing this to all of them. There was fairly good size money involved in this, north of $10 meg. They filed a class action lawsuit against AT&T. As all the contracts came up for renewal AT&T refused to renew the contracts. It took AT&T about 6 months to these ISP's out of business.
AT&T is not your friend.
During their investigation they found that AT&T uses for separate billing systems to collect the same usage data. They found that the systems use the same inputs but all yield different billing amounts. The highest amount can be up to 20% higher than the lowest amount. It turns out they simply select the system that yields the highest number that month and bill the customer.
Does it matter? In my opinion, the fact that they can't provide evidence of usage that could be independently verified is absurd.
PPPoE and ATM add overhead to about 16%.
Yup your paying for the encapsulation that never leaves their network.
No sir I dont like it.
Your state Attorney General's office has the resources to pursue an issue like this. And in my experience, they get results! While working for a previous employer, we had unresolvable telecom issues and tried everything over the course of months to get them to take some action. A call to the state AG had trucks roliing the next day. It was glorious.
The thing to remember about AT&T's DSL and Uverse data limits are that data coming down AND data going up count against that cap.
So when you download that 4GB movie file, it counts, but when you use Dropbox or Carbonite, those uploaded files/data count against your cap too.
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
Trivially easy to do, I've ditched AT&T as a result of being billed for going over that cap. But I have that option, not everyone does.
I believe my wife watched standard def movies, and I downloaded wildstar and one update during that month. That plus FW updates and normal internet usage was enough to go over. I can't imagine what would happen if we were actually at home enough to really use our internet connection.
Accounting for Ethernet frame headers alone would not be good enough to approximate the full overhead of a typical DSL connection.
You'd also need to account for the PPP, PPPoE and ATM overhead etc.
Short answer: You're underestimating the total overhead of the connection, the value of which is included in most ISP's calculations.
If they are overcharging you or miss-measuring, this could be a consumer protection issue and possibly your State Attorney General or possibly the U.S. Attorney's office could help you. But you're going to have an uphill battle all the way, just like Slashdoters roll their eye's every time a judge makes a crazy ruling in technology related cases that's clearly wrong because they don't have a good grasp of the technology involved you're going to be speaking a foreign language to these people and you're going to have a very hard time getting them to understand the issue i.e. "What's DD-wrt?" or even "What's a router?".
It sounds like ATM overhead addresses your issue. However as far as who to talk to, in California measurement enforcement is handled at the county level: http://www.cdfa.ca.gov/dms/. In Texas this falls to the Department of Agriculture and I'm pretty sure they won't care. http://www.texasagriculture.go...
Its a limit really easy to hit if you do 3 or more of the following things:
1) run Steam on multiple systems and own lots of games that are all currently installed, and keep them constantly updated
2) run Linux distros such as Debian Unstable (sid) on multiple systems and don't use a apt-cacher type proxy, but keep them constantly updated
3) frequently use Netflix streaming
4) frequently use DirecTV OnDemand services
5) own any relatively recent gaming console (ps3, ps4, wii-u, xbox360, xboxone) and own a lot of games and keep it constantly updated
6) listen to streaming music all day long
7) have more than one recent Blizzard game installed (Diablo III, Starcraft II, World of Warcraft) and keep them constantly updated, especially around expansion release times
8) have a home office
Not having cable TV and using Netflix/Hulu/HBOGo/etc regularly could EASILY break 150GB a month.
A lot of geographic areas don't have a second provider other than satellite and cellular. In most cases,* switching from a provider with a 150 GB per month cap to a provider with a 10 GB per month cap (source: exede.com) isn't a good idea. Nor is moving to a different town.
* Watch someone come up with an edge case.
Why create something you know simply cannot work rather than checking the bandwidth use on the interface? That two minute polling garbage is garbage, and you know it. You're just trying to create a situation of shit by intentionally creating a shitty situation. Your kind makes life unpleasant for everyone around you. As Shatner has said to your kind before, go kill yourself.
There are typically four or five ISPs that will serve any area. Many of them are not well advertised. Some of them sublet from the major providers. Find one you can tolerate, contract through them... and try to avoid metered internet plans because they're all bullshit.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Contact one of the big class action lawsuit attorneys. if you can convince them that 10K customers or more are being cheated for more than $100 per year, over a period of years, they will be glad to work for a percent. As a representative of the class you get enough to make it worth your time if you win. Of course they will have to figure out how to break the arbitration clause, but ATT may just settle rather than have the bad publicity.
Is it possible to switch internet providers to Comcast or Time Warner Cable? Just asking.
You missed one. The number one bandwidth application on the Internet. YouTube.
FWIW, our household of four uses an average of 350 GB a month. Despite Comcast's claim that the average account uses 20 to 25 GB a month.
I come here for the love
If it's not the ATM encapsulation overhead as many others have rightly suggested, have a look at the traffic... I had similar concerns with my ISP... I have a Cisco switch between my local firewall and my cable modem... I set one port to monitor mode (copy all packets to a write-only switch port) and captured all of my internet traffic for a number of months... I then analyzed the .cap file and discovered a ginormous amount of SMB advertisements and arp who-has from other cable customers... For those few months, it was on the order of about 10% of my traffic... My ISP has been threatening to bill for over-usage for years so I was gathering data to throw back at them in the event that I ever received a bill. I haven't ever received a bill for over-usage and so haven't pursued the matter.
Yea that's fair. I omitted "automatic Windows updates" too, but you can stuff a lot under the bucket of #8.
Waltz to your local PD and fill out a complaint for criminal fraud. You probably will have to push a bit but they may have no choice other than to investigate and those charges may well rock Att"s world. If that fails file a suit in court. You might claim loss of use and enjoyment of your home. A lawyer may help. But realize that ATT must mount a response and sanity may rule the hour as mounting that defense will cost ATT a fortune. Quickly settling with you may prevent them from having to produce quite a few witnesses, pay lawyers, pay for travel and lodging in your town and numerous other expenses. If a judge finds merit in your claim he just might slap ATT really hard and that possibility may cause them to pay. Also make certain the press gets step by step updates as the publicity for over billing may cause its won horror show for ATT
That's "average" for you. If a majority of households use it mainly for email and Facebook...
Does it matter?
You must have missed the "Out of pure curiosity".
get the ball rolling on court action for a giant class-action lawsuit by explaining to your AG that you're tracking them, and they're consistently lying on your bill. also start engaging the power of the press by calling your local newspaper, promising them a scoop.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Dude, thats less than 5 GB a DAY. Thats nothing on the modern internet. I can go through that just uploading my surveillance videos to my offsite. Our infrastructure needs SERIOUS upgrades to handle these loads. Stop asking this question, start asking yourself why you think thats a lot of data, because it isnt.
Good-bye
I am a software developer and consultant. I download entire system images (4-8GB), client log files (gigabytes), daily system updates for a number of systems (more gigabytes). I download multi-terabytes per month. If I didn't have an unlimited business plan, I would be out of business. Just getting the headers for my system repositories is multi-megabytes per day per system - 3 Linux and 2 Apple, plus updates for 2 phones.
Data caps are bogus and only serve to fuel the undeserved profits of AT&T and their ilk. I pay for bandwidth, not volume. The bandwidth automatically throttles the volume of data I can access, and if I need more, I'll happily pay for it, but nickle and dimeing me to death because I need to download more data than they want is not an option as far as I'm concerned.
ISP's should be concerned about bandwidth, NOT the amount of data you use that bandwidth to access. That said, I understand that sometimes there is so much demand for available bandwidth that download/upload speeds slow down (my wife needs to upload data to the lab, and my download speeds to get the latest RHEL distribution slows), but this is a physical limitation of the pipe available, not an arbitrary limitation by the ISP.
I don't know. I don't walk around the gym showers asking all the men if any of the are gay. Do you?
I have noticed the same with their mobile service. On random months a couple of our phones will use double+ the amount of data compared to previous months with no different in usage. When comparing what the phone says to At&t says we will have 2 completely different numbers, with the phone matching our normal usage.
The only thing that I can think of to cause this type of difference, is that the phone only counts packets that it has received, while At&t counts packets that have been sent. So if there are collisions, errors or other network issues and packets are resent we are getting charged for it.
PPPoE and ATM add overhead to about 16%.
Yup your paying for the encapsulation that never leaves their network.
So then the answer to his question is: hire a lawyer to look over your contract and determine if the PPPoE+ATM overhead is considered their traffic, or yours.
The next step after that is to simply dispute a bill and demand arbitration (since we all know that those contracts forbid lawsuits).
Of course he could skip the lawyer and just submit a dispute/demand for arbitration. But, who pays for the arbitration? AT&T? Customer? "Loser"? Skipping the lawyer might end up costing even more $$.
No, but thanks for asking.
Just a thought - they might be the correct agency to approach, if you want to try one more place before getting lawyered up.
for California http://www.dca.ca.gov/
Maybe his family watches an average of one movie per day on netflix?
If most people use their Internet for email and Facebook, there should be plenty of bandwidth left for "heavy" users.
I quite likely have, but I am not so crass as to go around asking random strangers in the gym what their orientation is.
I was just curious. I don't have any good way to find out what my usage is, and I'm guessing it is a lot lower than 150 GB/mo. We do a few hours of Hulu/Netflix a week and a bit of gaming. I have a 2 year old that mostly consumes my non-working waking hours.
I do a terabyte per month, minimum. Netflix, amazon prime, podcasts(easily a gig or more per episode sometimes) rdio, YouTube, twitch.tv, VPN to work, offsite backups, VoIP, video game playing, downloading games (digital games are easily 30-50gb each), steam auto updating games... Per machine...
Multiply that by each family member...
At one point I was hitting an average of about 600-800GB per month of purely legitimate traffic, mostly Amazon/Netfix/Hulu from both me and my roommate. We did that as a test with no P2P traffic, but lots of legitimate streaming just to see what a legitimate user might show for traffic to discount the ISP saying things like if you use over a certain amount it must be due to illegal downloading. This was right about the time that Cox cable decide to start enforcing limits on internet after we signed up for "unlimited". Currently I think my usage averages around 200-300GB per month mostly Netflix traffic.
You missed one. The number one bandwidth application on the Internet. YouTube.
FWIW, our household of four uses an average of 350 GB a month. Despite Comcast's claim that the average account uses 20 to 25 GB a month.
How is that "despite?" They're not saying that nobody uses that much, just that the average customer does. FYI, Sandvine agrees, they peg mean US broadband usage at 29GB/month. Median is quite a bit lower than that.
https://www.sandvine.com/trend...
Riiiiight
From that page, "Google says that the video site reaches almost one out of every two people on the Internet."
"one of every two" -- so, every other household uses YouTube. When it hits 51%, that would mean the average household uses YouTube.
Comcast's "20 or 25" as an "average" figure is...unlikely.
I come here for the love
most companies charge you for the encapsulation, because some ISP doesn't own the phone cord. if your ISP and phone company are the same, then they SHOULDN'T charge you for internal network encapsulation, but how can you be sure it's the case? at least in some cities of my country you can choose which ISP you can use in your phone, and the phone company charges the ISP for the use of their phone lines so it's natural they charge the client for the encapsulation (but we are lucky enough to have unlimited plans too to avoid us the trouble)
you should do the math for the data usage plus encapsulation AND CRC errors (because corrupt packages are still packages to the ISP)... you may have a crappy line that could affect your bill
sonic.net has no datacaps and no "artificial" speed limits. [Note: I'm not affiliated with them--just a very happy customer since I switched in March].
Of course, I'm assuming that when you said "CPUC" that means California PUC. If so, go to http://www.sonic.net/ and enter your AT&T landline number. They will tell you how many feet you are from the sonic CO. Then, go to http://www.dslreports.com/foru... to see what your likely speed with sonic will be.
I'm 5000 feet to the sonic CO, so I got 1.3 megabytes/second [2x AT&T's elite service]. sonic is also cheaper. And, tech support couldn't be more pleasant or helpful.
In fact, when you post a tech question to a sonic tech forum, you might just get a response from Dane [Jasper]--the sonic.net CEO
Like a good neighbor, fsck is there
Imagine if you went to buy milk and bought a gallon but were charged for 1.25 gallons because of spillage in the bottling plant.
Or to be more similar: you got charged 1.25, because they determine the price by weighting it and thus are also weighting the glass milk bottles and the hard plastic crate carrying them.
And when you ask them why you don't get the same amount of gallons that you measure in your kitchen and on their bill, they just answer "No, everything is okay, our bill is 100% right.". Without ever mentioning that you need to take that overhead into account. Without you having any way to check it or control the milkbottle+crate weighting process neither.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
To answer teh OP's question. I have been in the same boat with ATT DSL but have not gone to all the trouble of actually measuring my actual traffic. Their DSL service had always been 100% reliable, but their tech support human factor... that's a whollly different story. We're talking about level 2 tech who had no idea what a "port 25" was and what I was asking him to do about it.
Based on my departure conversation with them, ATT is probably trying to squeeze customers out of the DSL service ("phase out") and push them towards the much pricier U Verse.
Personally, I had asked them to remove my 150 GB cap (at the time) since my originally contracted plan was called Unlimited. The lady said no cant do, and this is how ATT DSL lost one of their greatest, most intelligent, most attractive customers.
I have been saying for years that the cable and telecom providers are a legally enforced monopoly (What US law says about monopolies does apply to every one of them) but no one has done anything about it and that is at least part of the reason people in the US pay more than almost any other country for internet that is slower than almost all other 1st world countries. It does not help that the cable and telecom companies have gotten laws passed that make it very difficult to change that.
I recently moved to Austin, TX and when I was looking at moving I realized that I had either Time Warner or AT&T to choose from for internet... I am pretty sure that I picked the lesser of two evils (TWC) but I am not sure that there really was a good choice to be made there. At least Google Fiber is coming here so I would get that as soon as I can.
My first response would be to drop AT&T. I don't suppose that is feasible in your case?
"Out of pure curiosity" do you shower with gay men?
Do you like movies about gladiators?
AT&T keeps adding "insurance" charges to our bill without asking. They make up odd excuses to keep adding it back after removal, something like, "Oh, you said, 'Are you sure', I thought you said, "You insure us".
Reminds me of the browser Spam Bar prompts: "Are you sure you don't want to not add the Ask Tool Bar? _Yes _No"
Table-ized A.I.
Mine is a single person (Aussie) household with a 200GB/mo cap. I have a RDC open 8hrs a day to work during weekdays, I watch more YT than I do TV and regularly play WoT in the evenings, often with a friend playing on my second PC. My account rarely exceeds 30GB/mo. 350GB/mo would indicate to me that either someone in your household is downloading a shitload of torrented movies (too many to possibly watch in a month), or more likely you have a malware problem.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Im running anywhere from 800-1200 GB/month running netflix on 2x devices in 1080 (most of the time) and 4 phones, 2 tablets, and 2 desktops, with games updates and everything its easy to hit 25-40 gigs/day...
also, I am with Suddenlink (texas) and they have a 250gig/month cap and $15/50gigs after 250, when they tried to charge me $200 in overages, i flipped sh!t and kept going up the chain at their call center till i switched from a 15Mbps for $45 to a 6 Mbps COMMERCIAL line for $70 with unlimited bandwidth...
"one of every two" -- so, every other household
Forever alone?
I mean to say, this is a household of three adults and all three use youtube (on PCs, phones and ps3).
...
I was just curious.
Oh quit your sniveling, you silly bitch! Only queers and terrorists are "curious".
Seriously... who has the time to configure such an arrangement to measure and figure this shit out?
I have two computers, two cell phones that default to 802.11 for data, two tablets. Between all of those, I'm at 303 GB for August thus far, according to my router. I'm guessing 2/3 of it was split between Netflix, Amazon Video, and YouTube.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
If you don't like how they do things and calling minimium wage reps treating a lawsuit which really a isn't going to happen and b f it does they can out spend you a million to one why not just switch providers? That's the only thing that means anything to them.. Heck they may even work with you since you're wanting to leave..
This is yet another reason I love cox. They keep telling me every month I used 700 GB and my plan has 500 GB, and that I should upgrade to a higher plan. I have the highest plan they have,so there is no upgrading. Yet they never charge you an extra dime, just wanted to let me know I may be happier with higher plan...
This is why I love Slashdot. I discussion of internet overcharging and ATM encapsulation quickly pivots to the etiquette of showering with gay men at the gym.
Honestly, I love each and every one of you. In a purely platonic way, of course, though given enough vodka and grapefruit juice, who knows?.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Just over a month ago, Steam has a sale on some very big games, like Wolfenstein: New Order and Splinter Cell: Blacklist. (maybe it's all the colons that take up the space.
It doesn't take too many games at over 20gig each, along with Netflix for the wife and streaming music before you're knocking on 150gig.
Why in the world the Wolfenstein game came out to over 40 gig I'll never know, but sure enough, for the first time I got the email from AT&T that I was at 90% of my limit. Fortunately, it was two days before the billing cycle rolled over, so I didn't have to pay.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Netflix can add up very quickly if you watch shows a couple of hours each day... 150GB is not that hard to do, especially for cord-cutters...
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
Here's what you should do: nothing at all. Life is too short and there are better battles to fight.
Netflix (one person) and two teens tubing, a lot.
I come here for the love
[Source]
That is our household in a nutshell -- cord cutters. The teens watch zero TV. Same for my spouse. I use TV mainly for sports, and new Top Gear episodes. No ISO downloads, no torrent use at all.
Honestly, I'm a bit surprised by our usage. I'll probably install some program to track it for a while and figure out who and what are the biggest users.
I come here for the love
You definitely need to press your case further with the Weights & Measures people, because this falls squarely into their territory. At&t is clearly selling you a specific amount of product for a specific price, and the main purpose of the W&M department is to test the accuracy of commercial measuring equipment.
If you are actually able to get a live person with relative ease, just keep calling back until you get someone that agrees with you.
If W&M can test the gas pump, why can't they test the internet pump too?
You can always reach out to your legislators office. Give them a list of the executive branch agencies that aren't responding to your requests. (Especially since congress isn't happy with the FCC right now). There is nothing they love more than to have a reason to squeeze executive agencies and the agencies generally respond to questions from congressional offices. Nobody wants to be called up to the hill for hearings.
Avrice
This actually made me wonder what I am using in bandwidth.
A quick look at my bandwidth usage last month as per my DDWRT router gives me
(Incoming: 331873 MB / Outgoing: 51237 MB)
So 331G incoming last month, and I have a somewhat large home network.
Download 4.69
Upload 0.40
Total 5.09
This is what a typical day looks like when I check my online usage with AT&T DSL. Those totals are in GB, so they are saying that I am uploading 400 MB, which is BS. Other than the occasional picture attached to an email, I upload nothing, no torrents, no facetime/skype, nada, yet they say I do nearly 1/2 a GB a day. That's about 10% of my download ratio, so they have to be measuring network overhead. That ovehead adds up to about 12 GB a month, so my 150 GB cap is really in the 130+ range.
But that doesn't really make sense.
Lets say someone wants Netflix access, but doesn't use it that much (a couple shows a week).
They need the bandwidth, but don't need all that much total data. They can't choose a lower bandwidth, since then that would mean not getting HD quality, or not even being able to get it at all.
I looked at my usage on my bill a couple of weeks ago and was suprised to see we used 400Gb then I looked back over the previous months, one month we hit 800Gb. So I installed some monitoring software. It's basically netflix, YouTube and steam. On a quiete day we will use 12Gb no problem. I'd be toast with a comcast type cap
I am a software developer and consultant. I download entire system images (4-8GB), client log files (gigabytes), daily system updates for a number of systems (more gigabytes). I download multi-terabytes per month. If I didn't have an unlimited business plan, I would be out of business. Just getting the headers for my system repositories is multi-megabytes per day per system - 3 Linux and 2 Apple, plus updates for 2 phones.
If you didn't have a fat pipe you would still be in business only difference you would be smarter about how you use the limited resources you could afford.
Keep track of the overages and when they add up to enough to make it worthwhile file a claim into small claims court. Send a letter to legal now explaining your issue and warn them you will file if the meter is not accurate into the future. The advantage over not paying that bill is that you can show your actions were taken in good faith, and even if you lose there aren't going to be debt collectors callling you or bad reports on your credit score. Other option is to start your own ISP.
I get pretty close to there, especially during summer and christmas breaks. Teens, multiple netflix/hulu/youtube/etc streams, gaming and my telework via VPN. The perfect storm. Streaming 5G on a day off isn't incredibly hard. Three simultaneous feeds makes it trivial.
FWIW, my ISP briefly was selling a 50Mbps service with a 50G monthly cap.
Easier summed up with no homo.
I'm on FTTH which includes IPTV, I seperate the VLAN's on a headswitch and use my own gear over the wireless router they provide. Given a heavy use of Netflix for kid shows, I sort of figured that would be the biggest bandwidth driver, but turns out the IPTV traffic absolutely dominates by raw numbers. 830 GB in the last roughly month is just IPTV streams, and that's with just the one box/PVR and kids off on summer vacations. Total traffic is over 1 TB. (The IPTV traffic is multicast though).
A point of history, had a short-lived 4G connection on an external antenna to grab a signal from a distant and marginal tower. It connect, but do so slowly and frequently disconnect. Had a bill for what was an impossible amount of data, even if it could stay up and maxed out 24/7 at the best indicated rate. I believe they were counting errors, retransmissions, etc., all those failed packets they'd see from their side as part of the total data amount, which there was a lot of.
!Equality through palindromes semordnilap hguorht ytilauqE!
Ok, I downloaded NetSpeedMonitor and ran some tests.
Netflix on "auto" quality settings, watching "Weeds" for a minute, translates to 60 GB/month (per 1 hr/day). We quickly dialed that back to the middle setting.
YouTube is about one-tenth of that, for regular quality video. HD was triple the regular amount (but it will depend on what you watch). So, 6 GB/month (per hour watched/day) for standard quality. 18 GB/month (per hour watched/day) for High Def. YMMV.
I come here for the love
I can't believe they're still using ATM. I mean, seriously what is this 1996?
Article Poster here. I read the contract. There is zero mention of overhead anywhere and AT&T pays the cost of arbitration (but not my lawyer).
jeezus, get off your fat ass and do something besides rot on the couch
Why? What the fuck is it to you what other people do with their time?
I would move to Canada like burger king
Why? So you can get bent over and screwed without lube by Bell, Rogers, Shaw, etc?
We pay a premium up here for the crappy service we get because the CRTC, which is supposed to be on our side, is whoring itself out to Bell and Rogers.
All ISP (here in OZ) measure the traffic intended for your IP address, we had someone a while ago on a dynamic IP who was subject to a DDoS which pushed more traffic than his line can handle, this data was counted towards his quota. I think it's a crappy idea how it is billed, this means that data arriving at your modem is only a fraction of your total data "usage", as anything that your ISP blocks heading to your modem is included, any UDP traffic that exceeds the total capacity of your line (common with torrents maxing out), etc IS countered even when you do not receive it.
DrE
Finally some insight. 150GB is trivial for a "modern" family, and would easily be dwarfed if comcast billed their "cable" as "data."
The real problem is that we need internet access provided and regulated as a utility. No, i don't much relish the thought of paying per-(prefix)byte, but I'd rather have an enforced system where everyone pays a rate that reflects what the service actually costs than the current hideously broken regime.
For example, here in downtown seattle, I can get uncapped internet essentially as a dumb pipe in 100mb or 1gb flavors for approx 100$/month. The rest of the state gets to squabble between centurylink and the cable guys. All this does is further exacerbate the "knowledge gap" (really, wealth) between those who can afford to live in one of the country's most expensive areas and everyone else.
Sometimes I think this might be by design =\
I suspect that SuddenLink is fudging its usage numbers, but my router doesn't do usage accounting. Even if it did, I'm sure the reaction from the ISP would be "We don't trust a user device to check our figures." What we need an an Internet odometer, a single-purpose traffic counter that plugs into the Ethernet between modem and router, and is sealed so the user can't tamper with it, and which would track the total time it was in-circuit so a user couldn't evade the count by just temporarily disconnecting it while downloading every Simpsons episode.
Does such a device exist, and do any ISPs trust its use as a check on their own accounting?
If there is no way to test the meter, then AT&T can have their thumb on the scale. I would expect a court challenge would be required for the government to be coerced into 'expanding their scope'. On the other hand, Right-Wing governments absolutely hate the idea of policing corporations, even if there is strong suspicion that the company is cheating, lying, stealing. I would suspect it would be the FCC that should be setting up seals/weights/measures for the electronic domain. But they don't want to.
You seem like a fun person.
LOL.
What's the grapefruit juice for?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I can think of two government agencies that might be interested in this...
The Attorney General of your state might take this up. In some states the AG has taken a very aggressive stance on abuses by telcos.
It also occurs to me that the Postmaster might consider this to be mail fraud. (That is, if your bill is being delivered by the USPS.)
Good luck.
> If you didn't have a fat pipe you would still be in business only difference you would be smarter about how you use the limited resources you could afford.
Translation, you'd spend more time and effort figuring out how to manager your internet connection that you could have spent earning money by doing productive work. Arbitrary bandwidth limits are a clear-cut drag on productivity.
AT&T UVerse is 26-36mbit if your system has their FTTN upgrades. And if you can get sonic.net, chances are it has them.
sonic's tech support is truly fantastic, but I can't deal with the slow speeds anymore. The upstream speed is particularly glacial.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Three words, see title.
"Out of pure curiosity" do you shower with gay men?
Do you like movies about gladiators?
Well, this part of the thread explains the ">150 GB per month" part.
I wrote accounting software in the past for ISPs. In my opinion, having a 10% or 15% difference is pretty normal, and it can be justified in front of a court, be it big or small. Either encapsulation, or the fact that the traffic is being measured at their side, and not in your inside network can account for lost packets too. Some small oscillations about other systems on the net trying to attack your IP will be put into your accounting too. If you are doing p2p, after you close it, the peers will try to contact you for a while too. If you are measuring the traffic passed, also I bet your calculations are only *without* the TCP/IP headers, whilst netflow methods at the data center account for everything. Often depending on the method, you can have problems too with fragmented packets, whilst netflow again does not. Hell, in a pop&mon ISP if you switch for doing the account from iptables to netflow the numbers *will* be different. Another chance is if you are using routing or bridging on you home router, you often only count what is bridged/routed, and you can be missing some traffic. I also have had colleagues that took the traffic data from the modem itself, and then control and monitoring traffic for the internal modem network work properly will be taken into account, and you will never see it. I also often found customers trying to contest data based on MRTG or cacti, without a minimum understanding what an average does to number, which is not apparently your case. The accounting is not only done for you, but for many customers too. Depending on the software, the modus operandi of it can be hourly, bi-daily or daily. Good luck on getting it realtime. There is a high probably the accounting data is written only in RAM (redis, memcache) and then passed off to databases at some wee hour of the night, when they have lower loads. Could the HQ be in a different time zone too? The bottom line of all this, is nobody is caring because it you creating a mountain out of a molehill, and because you have no idea what you are talking about. You are looking at a tree, and forgetting you are part of a forest. (my linked.in https://www.linkedin.com/pub/r...)
No, you wont. Read my thread "Pretty normal"
These days average is watching hours of streaming video from Netflix, YouTube, Amazon, Hulu and all the others.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I feel like I have pretty high usage on my ATT wireless phone... makes sense now. Not shocking they got some formula that nobody understands and even more not shocking nobody seems to care or hold them accountable to explain their process.
Take them to small claims court.
Ask for the difference between the billing tier your meter says you should be in and the one they charged you for. Dump your data in a reasonably clear format and show and explain it to the judge. Be prepared to swear that it is correct.
If they overcharge you next month, do it again.
Keep it up until they fix the meter so the agreement is close enough for you to be happy with it (or until the judge gets tired of it and issues an order - either to you or them - to make the cases stop.) It's not barratry - no matter how vexing to the utility - if the suits are legitimate, with real grounds asking for restitution for real damages, nor if the the suits are repeated because there are new instances of the tort.
First time through, ask for all the months for which you have data that shows overcharging. (If you can demonstrate a rule for the systematic overcharging, ask for the overcharges back to the instalation of the system, but be prepared for the judge to reject that.) Up to the small claims price and time limits, of course.
Be polite to the judge. Assume he's smart enough to understand this if you explain it clearly. (Judges don't get to be judges without being smart and good at figuring these things out.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Federal Trade Commission deals with this kind of thing, not the FCC.
Same guys that go after confusing credit card bills, misleading packaging etc.
1024x1024 vs 1000x1000... that's only 5 percent... or a third of your measurement...
but that could be a part of it...
Also, it would be funny if your monitoring script accidentally sends data over the network causing the other over use..
Civilized countries don't allow you to do that
Hence the complaint of some users.
If you don't weight the container when buying goods (glass bottle isn't counted as milk),
why should ISP do it on their network (they count in the overhead by the particular technology that they happen to use between your modem and their servers, instead of only counting the bandwidth to/from the internet (the things that they themselves need to pay and for what they need the money) )
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Finally some insight. 150GB is trivial for a "modern" family, and would easily be dwarfed if comcast billed their "cable" as "data."
Cable is for the most part a broadcast system though.
The real problem is that we need internet access provided and regulated as a utility. No, i don't much relish the thought of paying per-(prefix)byte, but I'd rather have an enforced system where everyone pays a rate that reflects what the service actually costs than the current hideously broken regime.
You'd have to be pretty careful how the system was set up through. In particular the definition of "what the service actually costs"
The real cost in providing internet access is replacing infrastructure. When you build new infrastructure you (if you have any sense) build it with ample bandwidth but gradually the bandwidth becomes less and less ample. Most people still get their internet through infrastructure that was really designed for phone calls or broadcast TV and has had patchwork upgrades.
The people at the telcos/cablecos look at the cost of the forklift upgrades to handle the growing traffic and get sticker shock. Then they look at the usage patterns and find that households like your ""modern" family" are the exception not the rule (and I fully admit that i'm probablly part of said exception). Then they put in place measures so that those households either reduce their usage or pay more.
I fear with a "cost based" model the utilities would be prone to keep running old (and expensive per-(prefix)byte) infrastructure to an even greater extent than they do today. Why install more modern (and cheaper per-(prefix)byte) infrastructure when it just means you get to charge less for the same data.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
We have been fighting with AT&T at work for the last 9 months. They installed a circuit but have get to get the stuff in order to move our services over to the new circuit. Since the circuit has been installed, we have been receiving bills for services that we cannot use. They finally threatened to disconnect all of our services if we didn't pay the bill for the circuit that isn't operational.
In addition to filling a formal complaint with the FCC, we also contacted the PUC to file a complaint there. The problem we found is that the PUC in Florida no longer handles telecom issues. We were referred to the Division of Consumer Services. Once we contacted them, they were more than happy to help us out. Less than 12 hours later, AT&T managed to finally get their butts in gear.
The fact that they are consistently 14% higher than your measured usage should have tipped you off that they're not just making numbers up, but measuring some sort of overhead you're not privy to. You're not ever going to get them to bill you like you want to be billed, since whatever they're doing is something they're doing for all their customers. I doubt their systems are set up to allow automatic scaling of certain users' bandwidth by some factor (e.g. 0.85). So if you can't live with the extra 14% I suggest moving to another network provider.
Um, why wouldn't you try your Attorney General? Isn't this his job?
Remember, he's a politician in a position to make a name for him/herself by sticking up for "the little guy" against "big business". If he's not able to sort this himself, he'll certainly know where and be able to corral the necessary clout to either change things or require a darn good explanation for the apparent inconsistencies.
Why not? A significant portion of their infrastructure is based off of ATM, if there isn't a need to completely scrap their infrastructure why replace it even for something that might squeak out a bit more performance.
Submitting a Better Business Bureau (BBB) complaint with the information in your article? I had an issue with a provider forcing me into a metered plan (for various reasons) and after I did seemed to be overbillied constantly. I filed a complaint and then they decided to work with me to resolve the matter. Before the complaint I just got the run around and was told it was nothing they could do and I was stuck for 2 years.
It can actually be baked into their resale bit. You know where they charge a 3rd party near as much as you or more to resell the DSL send the connections to them via an overpriced ATM circuit and they still have to deal with internet transit etc. All so they can say to the regulators that nobody else wants to sell DSL in their area or that since they have a couple token providers they are not a monopoly.
Often with AT&T they use this to separate the phone company side from the ISP side and suck the profits from the ISP side. Yup AT&T overcharges itself so it can cry poor and get rate hikes through.
No sir I dont like it.
Unlike most of the other responses to this, I don't have a one-off excuse for needing more data. I play video games, and I watch Hulu/Netflix. That's pretty standard for my generation, and my monthly usage ends up anywhere between 230GB and 340GB. Since I have no data cap, that's not an issue, but it might be if more ISPs start putting on data caps.
Just for Netflix, the usual 1080p stream uses ~3Mbps. To reach 150 GB that's about 4.63 days of streaming, or 111 hours. 111 hours may sound like a lot, but if your billing cycle is 30 days, that's a cap of 3.7 hours per day. There are two adults in my home, which means at most we can each watch ~1.85 hours of netflix a day. And that's considering *just* Netflix. Last night I kicked off a download of 60GB on Steam for 4 video games that I bought, and that seems pretty normal for games these days. I put Steam on a 2 TB drive because "Lol, I'll never have that much video game" and now I'm sitting at 85% capacity(granted, this also includes the entirety of my game collection that was previously sitting on disc carousels, but those are a minority of the data).
Then there's internet radio streaming(seems minimal, tbh, I use it on my phone ~30 hours a week at work and I use little more than 1 GB), online video games, hulu, browsing reddit(high resolution pictures and gifs really does add up over time), occasional youtube videos, etc. It also doesn't include any uploading traffic(syncing/downloading music from google/itunes/etc).
It can be pretty easy to hit 150 GB in a month. I checked my billing history and I have never been under 220 GB while at my current location(~2 years). I imagine for families where kids are off doing their own thing it's even easier.
If you're a consultant, you should switch to the Business class, since that has uncapped bandwidth. I'm also a consultant/dev (sorry, long time lurker, never bothered making a /. account) -- and I had to do this for the *EXACT* same reason as you. Usually the Business class is only $10/20 more a month, and you get unlimited bandwidth, better speeds, and much better support.
An example -- I have Comcast business (fastest I can get, and we're locked into duopoly of Comcast/AT&T). I pay $50/month for 50Mb/25Mb down/up in Houston. A nice Comcast employee put me onto a grandfathered connection type when I signed up (and they'll send actual employees -- not contractors). Even before, he wanted to test out the speeds I paid for -- I believe 12/1 or 10/1, and I was getting that MINIMUM. He was saying that they ensure you get AT LEAST that much as a minimum service -- I was pulling closer to 25/6 when we tested (and when he said, "I think we can do better..." and put me on the older grandfathered plan). No weird blast or other crap -- so I get constant throughput, not just the first 50MB or whatever they claim.
I hate the current state of ISP's, but if you pay just a little extra (especially if you're "going over" and they charge $5 extra -- you'll break even and be way more happy), it leaves you feeling less pained. To give an idea -- I burnt through 17TB of transfer last month on Business class with torrents, backups, imaging, etc. No complaints, problems, etc. imo, most tech professionals would be much happier -- the only downside is that they'll send you mailers every few days wanting to discuss your "services" and how they can help improve them. I seriously have gotten at least 60 in my 1.5 years at my new service address (home).
Out of pure curiosity, what are you doing that gets you up to >150 GB per month?
I can answer this. Since my experience with Concast in 2007 I've been monitoring ALL my traffic and recording it. Now I'm averaging around 125-180 gigs a month according to vnstat depending on the month
What are we doing?
Streaming hulu
Streaming Amazon Prime videos and now music
Video games
Streaming music
Streaming Internet everything
And we have a large family on kindle fires plus several computers. After monitoring in detail our network usage I find it's not all that unusual for a highly technical family to be hitting that munch monthly.
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
There is plenty of infrastructure. Caps aren't about infrastructure they are about monetizing usage.
What about the option of not cheaping out on the connectivity plan and instead getting one that matches your actual usage?
suggest you find 3 or so other screwed over individuals and find yourselves some aggressive tech lawyers and go class action
I did! I got unlimited internet from their competitor. Also more bandwidth. And I also cheaped out and am paying the same money.
a) change providers, or
b) talk to a lawyer. Really. See if they'll take it on spec. If not, it might be worth paying some money, since *sometimes* all it takes is a lawyer letter to their legal service address to get them to move.
mark
Well actually NOT *MY* gas billing.
I happen to live on the opposite side of the Atlantic pond (if my b0rked english grammar wasn't already a telling sign).
Here around the utilities are billed in 2 separate steps: capacity and consumption.
- You get a fixed base, that's for paying the infrastructure no matter how much you use (i.e.: you pay a fixed base because you live in a 4-person house and the city has made certain that the water-distribution infrastructure has enough capacity to support the 4 of you).
- In addition you pay the used volume (you pay X per cubic meter of water).
The municpality's utilities don't need to fudge the price with "out of their arses" factors, their fixed costs is covered by a separate entry in the bill.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I thought I'd log into my modem and find month after month of > 150GB. I don't use as much as I used to. I'm really shocked that I haven't peaked above 100GB in the last year. My Netflix usage is way down lately, and I'm not downloading a lot of ISO files, but 150GB still isn't hard to do. It's only double my average usage, and my wife and I are a household of only 2.
Date, DL, UL, Total
2014-07 75.69GB 13.27GB 88.96GB
2014-06 67.32GB 16.88GB 84.20GB
Article Poster here. I read the contract. There is zero mention of overhead anywhere and AT&T pays the cost of arbitration (but not my lawyer).
Zero mention of overhead could still put it on you as it is "your" modem (seems to me in most cases: inside your house is your problem, outside your house is their problem). Off hand it seems sketchy to charge for the overhead... but then again, the USPS doesn't provide free envelopes & the weight of your packaging is included in the cost of shipping... so non-internet tradition says it is your problem. But this seems to leave you with the same solution: arbitration will get you an answer.
The lawyer part then is just so you can try to predict what the arbiter will say, and what you should present and/or say to convince the arbiter that AT&T should pay for their own overhead.
One Netflix stream = 5Mb/s = 0.625MB/s * 60 seconds/min * 60 min/hour = 2.19GB/hour
150GB / 2.19GB = 68.5 hours of HD Netflix per month. That's a single user, assuming it's not a family of four, five, etc.
That comes to 1.3 hours per day of Netflix. That doesn't include any web browsing, gaming, nothing else just a SINGLE Netflix user.
Well look at it like the modem analogy. Dial up days you "paid" for the overhead as well the PPP overhead effectively reduced your max connection speed/throughput.
No sir I dont like it.
Translation, you'd spend more time and effort figuring out how to manager your internet connection that you could have spent earning money by doing productive work. Arbitrary bandwidth limits are a clear-cut drag on productivity.
In the real world we must all deal with arbitrary bandwidth/resource limits there is no escaping it ever.
Every situation must stand on its own merit. It is possible under specific conditions for laziness in the form of insufficient effort to reduce resource utilization end up costing more in productivity and that what you think is freeing you from having to care is actually propagating a sub-optimal working environment.
Deciding to transmit bulk geographic data in XML because we can or implementing RFC3252 with a straight face is just plain wasteful.
Our modern 30-100 Mbit pipes as impressive as they are after you factor in analytic URLs, endless javascript libraries complete with senseless abuse of xmlhttprequest, ad networks, market intelligence and god knows what is in the several dozen calls to other sites when loading a single page from a single site these days and look web sites don't load any faster then they did 10 years ago despite significant investment and improvement in systems and networks over that time.