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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).
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.
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.
I was going to say, ATM/PPPoE encapsulation is approximately 15% of total traffic. Bell Canada and all providers do that up here. I thought everyone knew this, or were able to google it especially if they are able to upload something like DDWRT to their router. Perhaps I had too much faith.
Party?!? What kind of party is this? Where's the damn keg?
Virtus Junxit Mors Non Separabit
Thats all fine and good except, ATT shouldn't be charging for the overhead on their internal network. The reason that the meter their network usage is to limit how much upstream bandwidth they need, not because the DSL network is saturated.
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
Most places I've seen measure with encapsulation, because it's easier. The problem's not with the meter, it's with the small print
The problem actually is with the meter, if you're not allowed to see the meter.
"We're going to charge you based on this gas/electric/water/phone meter, but you have no way to verify the reading" is something the PUC wouldn't accept other than in the case of "the Internet".
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I thought everyone knew this, or were able to google it especially if they are able to upload something like DDWRT to their router. Perhaps I had too much faith.
especially in AT&T if nobody he's ever spoken with about the issue knew enough to mention encapsulation. It doesn't sound like he's a dope, just possibly missed this factor. Somebody there could have simply asked him, "are you counting the overhead of PPPoE and ATM?" and then his post may have been entirely different, if it even existed at all.
With millions of home users and thousands of techs, the onus should not be on the customer base to understand how the vendor's product works internally.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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.
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 exactly what's going on. The company I work for had this problem, at one of our warehouses (not AT&T, different provider, probably subletting from someone).
The warehouse manager threatened his local rep with a law suit, they laughed at him. The company lawyer mentioned a class action law suit, they fixed our billing the same month.
When we had to renew, the new contract spelled out that they will bill us for the 'resulting' traffic. It got signed without anyone from my department getting asked, but the funny thing is, months later, they are still billing us the old way i.e. without the overhead.
As for the original poster - check your contract. If you have not agreed to pay for their internal overhead, you will get amazing results if you remind them that they are overcharging thousands of customers, and that they can be on the hook for millions, when a lawyer agrees to take the case for a percentage. If you have agreed to pay for the overhead... I doubt there is much you can do.
By the way, I am an IT director ,not a lawyer, so don't go blindly follow my advice, either.
No good deed goes unpunished...
Don't you know "Canada" means "Ontario" to those who live there?
Hell, they barely acknowledge Quebec's existence, never mind the rest of the country.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Doesn't really matter though, you can't charge somebody for bandwidth used to move data, only the bandwidth the end user used. 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. Not legal. Not even a little. You have to work that cost into what you charge for a gallon, and then charge for the gallon the end user buys.
I say the sane thing to do about this is class action lawsuit personally. Don't charge for something you didn't supply, it's illegal, plain and simple.
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."
I think people are missing the point of TFA, why are the "weights and measures" people not interested? If it was a greengrocer with a rigged scale he would be in handcuffs explaining himself to a judge.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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 ]
In Alberta Nucleus uses PPOE
As I know them pretty well I just called a guy I know there to ask, and he tells me they adjust their metered bandwidth to allow for the "wastage" due to PPOE encapsulation.
In other words, they do not charge us for it.
Maurice W. Hilarius Voice: (778) 347-9907
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.
My 2x4 lumber is actually 3.5" wide.
Only if it has already been dried and dressed, it comes off the greenchain at the sawmill as 2X4 (to within 1/16th of an inch), as it dries the dimensions change, dressing the timber takes an 1/8th of an inch off each side. If a lumber yard attempted to sell you undressed timber as 2X4 that was actually 3.75 X 1.75 then the weights and measures people would definitely be interested. Here in Oz dressed timber is now advertised with real dimensions not it's undressed dimensions The practice goes way back to the days when most buildings used undressed timber for structural purposes. These days carpenters don't normally build frames on site, it's all prefab frames and roofs that just bolt together, for that technique to work it needs the more consistent dimensions of dressed timber.
Nobody is scamming you out of useful timber, the industry terminology is well defined and is not hidden from the customer. The point of TFA is that comcast's network metering methods are hidden from customer scrutiny and nobody at weights and measures seems to give a damn.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The point of TFA is that comcast's network metering methods are hidden from customer scrutiny and nobody at weights and measures seems to give a damn.
The best part of your comment is that TFA is regarding ATT's practices, and has nothing to do with Comcast. Yet even someone in Australia knows how fucked up Comcast is, and has mistaken another carrier for Comcast because the story is about ripping off a customer. If that doesn't show the incredibly awful nature and reputation of Comcast, I'm not sure what does. It's too bad the FCC won't see this thread.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!