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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."
According to this article: http://blog.ipspace.net/2009/0...
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!
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.
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.
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.
A less drastic, but equally annoying solution might be to just turn it off for a month. See what they bill you then.
"It was turned off" is a lot more likely to persuade a small claims court to your side than "I was overcharged by 14%, and here are the dozen esoteric ways I can prove it".
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
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.
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
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.
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".
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.
This is the type of approach most of us "law hackers" (aka "armchair attorneies") would try as a next step. The flip side (and the down side) is that AT&T will never allow the actual issue to appear before a judge. They will:
- parade out yours terms of service agreement as a contract and request sunmary dismissal
- cancel your service
- bury you in motions: change of venue to their HQ state (which is likely in those terms of service), dismissal insufficient standing — you're not an expert, you hacked your gear to obtain incorrect figures, et cetera
At the end of the day, they can simply outspend the average user, and it's in their best interest to do so. Lending any sort of credibility to such a lawsuit would expose them to similar suits from other users — up to a potential class action. The lawsuit will never even make it to anyone technical for review of it's merit. They have an in-house legal team and many firms on retainer to deal with just such suits.
It all sucks, but that's the real world view for the little guy in our legal system.
"Adventure? Excitement? A Jedi craves not these things."
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 ]
Lies, base64 encoding (as in e-mail) only bumps it up to 4/3. Even when you add TCP, ATM, and all the rest you are likely to run into, it will only be about 1.5x.
A worst case there and back is more like ever so slightly above 30 than 60. To get 60 on an e-mail you would need to bounce it between a totally stupid number of mail servers to get the mail headers to become 30MB.
I'm a signature virus. Please copy me to your signature so I can replicate.
And if you're using email to transfer a 10M file, you should be banished frmo the internet.
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.
[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
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.
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
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 ]