Have You Fought Your ISP Over Bandwidth Limits? 1076
serutan asks: "Recently, a DC++-related mailing list I subscribe to has been buzzing with posts about letters from various ISPs in the U.S., UK, Australia and NZ, warning customers to curtail their download bandwidth usage to an 'acceptable' limit (generally 200 hours/month for three straight months). These are people who thought they signed up for unlimited access. Some of the letters hint that high bandwidth usage may imply illicit activity. All are vague on possible consequences, and nobody has mentioned actually being cut off by an ISP. One guy received an apology after talking to a supervisor about the meaning of the word 'unlimited.' Is this a growing trend? Have you received similar threats from an ISP? What was the outcome?" Of course, would it be so difficult for ISPs to stop advertising "unlimited" access, and instead include in the small (or not-so small) print exactly what the "acceptable" bandwidth usage is? If you did sign up for "unlimited" services and find yourself in this predicament, what have you done to get your bandwidth issues resolved?
Rogers! (Score:5, Informative)
The facts:
1) The service is advertised as 'unlimited'
2) They are unwilling to tell customers how much they've transferred
3) They are unwilling to tell customers what would constitute an acceptable amount of bandwidth
Judging by postings here [rbua.org], they seem to be going after some areas and no others. Here is an interesting thread [rbua.org].
An update to this story (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,8737754~
"My experience with Comcast bandwidth suspension"
Unlimited means.... (Score:2, Informative)
adj.
Having no restrictions or controls: an unlimited travel ticket.
Having or seeming to have no boundaries; infinite: an unlimited horizon.
Without qualification or exception; absolute: unlimited self-confidence.
That's why I switched (Score:3, Informative)
The funny thing is that they do advertise a cap, but just don't enforce it.
EarthLink's policy (Score:2, Informative)
Speakeasy.net plays that game too (Score:0, Informative)
No where was this 150 hr policy written. They claimed it was was considered exessive usage in the contract.
Just a little plug... (Score:5, Informative)
The really cool unlimited part is this:
* I can use as much of that bandwidth as I want.
* There are no content restrictions.
And this is the big one...
* I CAN RUN SERVERS. Yes, I realize that a lot of broadband providers don't stop you at their routers or anything, but most of them have it in their AUP that you can't run your own servers. Speakeasy just asks that you don't make money.
Oh, and I get free nationwide dialup. It's not bad.
Oh, and one other cool thing: They even explicitly say that you can set up a WAP and share your access with anyone you want, so long as you don't charge money for it.
Direcway FAP (Score:5, Informative)
Re:cox (Score:5, Informative)
the max per month is 30GB downloads, 7.5GB uploads.
Its a very common trend (Score:3, Informative)
Whats funny they quitely implemented bandwidth limits that are pretty rediculous, and Sympatico has even blocked port 25. In another incident when I was trying to explain network problems to a customerservice rep at Sympatico, I kept switching between win98 and linux to exhaust all their over-the-phone tests so they know the problem is on their side. Well, when he heard "Linux" he went bonkers and told me there was no way he is helping me with any further issues and I shouldnt waste his time.
So now we're paying an average of $65 per month for our usage, which does not support Linux, let alone the openvmx, solaris and openbsd that I have at home.
Speakeasy.net TOS (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.speakeasy.net/tos
Bandwith Nazis (Score:4, Informative)
Kleedrac
Try a $1000 over bandwidth bill (Score:2, Informative)
I have a friend that uses a local Alaskan cable modem company and after a long month of not-stop movie downloading off Kazaa he got a bill for $1000 (or around there) for going over his like 5 gig limit.
Ouch!
Fortunately they didnt push the issue at all. He called to ask what this bill was for and feigned innocence and ignorance and they just comp'd it. But it does make you look at the terms and conditions a little closer. They never hid the 5gig limit, but none of us ever took it serious.
I know for a fact I was over my limit on several months, just not by like 100gigs so it never was an issue. Honestly I have never heard of anyone actually paying for their exceeded limits but the ISP is fully within their rights.
If you put up enough XMas lights to be seen from the moon and get a huge electric bill next cycle you most likely wouldnt get off, certainly not be able to deny it after confirmation by an blinded airline pilot!
Just tread lightly on their kindness or willingness to please their customers. Don't screw it up for us all.
p.s. there is no such thing as 'unlimited bandwith' there are limits on everything, you just might not ever reach them.
Welcome to months gone by in Canada... (Score:5, Informative)
Unlimited Access can be construed to refer to time, not bandwidth. Thus, ISP's claiming unlimited access aren't offering no download caps.
Think of it this way
Access buys you the key to a car, which is parked in your driveway. You can get into the car through any door, and for as long as you want. You have unlimited access to the car. You are not, however, allowed to drive it anywhere, you do not have unlimited usage.
Rogers Cable (Ontario, Canada) is trying to implement this type of soft cap, and it's not working too well for them. The major issue is they won't define the caps, and people are being cutoff for completely arbitrary amounts of usage. The other huge problem is that they specifically advertise 'Unlimited Usage' (consumers having wised up to the 'access' wording) and this is quite contrary to it.
They have suspended people, only to reconnect them when asked. This lead to a good exodus of people, and recently Rogers have been calling people saying 'all is forgiven' and asking them to return, saying the caps are completely gone.
Whether this proves true or not is yet to be seen.
I have been cutoff (Score:5, Informative)
I had absolutely no warning, no phone calls.
The only reason I know I had been cut off was because I figured that my excessive downloading for the last 3 days had probably triggered it.
I called the cable company and they said that I had been turned off for grossly exceeding standard usage amounts. It took me 2 days and about 4 calls, but I finally got the service turned back on with a verbal agreement not to download more than 3 gigs a week.
So, I had to skimp, but i survived!
I cant imagine someone only allowing 2 gigs a month though, i have downloaded more than that just off of demos and things from gametab.
Buzz OUT
monthly != unlimited (Score:2, Informative)
Monthly doesn't imply an unlimited amount of bandwidth but it does suggest a months worth of access. Seeing as how most people consider utilities to be charged in monthly chunks, I would imagine that most users would be put off at all. Then the ISP could throw in fine print about bandwidth and burst speeds and all the other hoohaa.
Oh no, I've just give them the answer. Must not hit submit, must save the word...
Re:Rogers! (Score:5, Informative)
I've been using it for a couple of years and it works flawlessly.
small print (Score:2, Informative)
We did this in like 99 at the ISP I used to work for (until I was restructured out of a job). I rewrote the TOS as such;
Comment removed (Score:2, Informative)
In ISP speak... (Score:2, Informative)
Pretty much all ISPs have a user agreement that defines what they mean by Unlimited. This usually says that you won't be charged by how much you use but if you turn your PC into a 24/7 downloading machine they will cut you off.
Campus traffic (Score:2, Informative)
On the whole, I have not noticed an increase in speed this year, as opposed to last year, but the network was pretty fast to begin with, and I'm not a very heavy user. The nice thing is that if I don't go over (which has only happened once), I'm paying half as much for the connection, and people who actually use a lot of bandwidth are paying for it.
Read your AUP / TOS (Score:4, Informative)
There's normally some sort of clause in there, about how they have the right to refluse you service. It's true in almost every industry out there. [I think medical, and insurance have some issues, where they're not allowed to reject you outright, but I'm not in either of those industries, so I'm bound to be wrong].
ISPs are not in the business to lose money. If they have someone filling their pipe 24x7, it's costing them more money than what they're bringing in. It doesn't make sense from a commercial standpoint to provide service to these people, and it's entirely possible that those people are detrimentally impacting the service for the rest of the customers.
I used to work for an ISP, but before the days of DSL, and I know our main issue was people staying dialed up all the time (a phone line was costing us $70/month, we were charging $20/month). Our AUP had stated specifically 'unlimited personal interactive use'. Now, we didn't go after those people who were sharing with their family, or stuff like that, but if you were up 24x7, we took issue -- you had to sleep sometime, and that was not part of the 'unlimited' plan.
[that's not to say that someone downloading a software update overnight, they weren't, unless they were doing it every night (we had a user who had less than 1 hour offline, over a 3 week period, and we had a plan for dedicated line, and it was more than $20/months).
So, let's look at this from the ISP's side -- they let you get away with it. They let your friends get away with it. They lose money. They go out of business. You have to find a new ISP, that might be even less forgiving.
So, my message to you -- get over it. There is no such thing as a free ride, and you shouldn't ever expect to get one. Talk to your ISP. Talk to a supervisor or manager, explain what your usage pattern is, and why you're doing it. Ask them if they can work with you. Odds are, they will, if you make some concessions. They might tell you what their off-peak times are, and so, if you run all of your massive downloads at that time, it won't impact them as much. Maybe you can agree to traffic shaping at the really bad times.
[we had users that we agreed to leave on, even with them online for 16+hrs/day, with the understanding that should the modem banks fill up, they'd be knocked offline to make room for other users]
Sympatico User Agreements (Score:2, Informative)
Here's the ever-lengthy Sympatico User Agreements:
http://service1.sympatico.ca/ServiceDesk/ServiceD
Acceptable Use Policy - www.aup.sympatico.ca
"Network / Security
In addition to these Policies, while using your Sympatico account, you are prohibited from conducting activities that include, but are not limited to:
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Read your AUP / TOS (Score:2, Informative)
Imagine if an "all you can eat" restaurant kicked out people who dared to get a third plate for "abuse."
I used to work for Road Runner... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Comcast (Score:5, Informative)
Now, whether or not a group of customers is willing to start a class action suit against ComCast based on the DirecPC ruling is another thing altogether.
inside perspective (Score:4, Informative)
the problem was not really the bandwidth, because if you're not surfing or doing somoething then you're not really using any bandwidth. the problem was that idle connections left open consume a modem in the isp's modem bank, so other people cannot connect at all when ther's no modems left.
at the time they were changing their contract from essentially: '24 hours a day any time you like for as long as you like' to something more like 'x number of hours a month, then it runs out'.
people were always furious because they hadn't read the conditions and had used their connection for more than 12 hours in a 24 hour period and been barred.
in ireland there was uproar two years ago when a major isp changed the terms of their 'unlimited' connection to restrict useage because they claimed they couldn't keep up. anyone who kicked up enough of a fuss was allowed to keep their connection because it was in their contract that it was unlimited. anyone who didn't complain lost their 'unlimited' contract. i believe some people still have these contracts, because it was not a condition of the contract that further restrictions could be added later.
funny story: in the job i mentioned, anyone who breached the 12 hour rule was 'upgraded' to use another telephone number. they would call up conplaining 'i can't connect' and we would check their file and see that they'd been flagged as abnormally high users. we would tell them that, because they were heavy users of the service they had been changed to our 'high useage' dialup number, and help them change their settings to dial the new number, and they were so happy that they had been recognised and helped.
of course, now they were neatly switched to another modem bank along with all their selfish idle connection loving kindred, and could barely connect anymore. we were instructed that, if anyone called complaining that their new high useage dialup number wasn't good, or they couldn't connect, we were to get rid of them quickly. this is a reputable firm, but they couldn't have people tying up a modem, when they were sleeping, or out of the house, or otherwise not using it.
Re:guilty until proven innocent? (Score:3, Informative)
Speed caps for home use, not a big deal. Transfer caps, that's another story.
It's all about the benjamins and the ego (Score:2, Informative)
On a whim he would scan the stats program for the dial-in boxes and find anyone connected over nine hours, and cut off the ones that were on the longest(usually 12 hours plus) He would then instruct us through the billing system not to reconnect them unless we tell them to go to our boradband service or find another provider. His rationalization? Dial-up was not a dedicated service, them tying up that phone line cost him money. I've had many a customer scream into the phone at me that they paid for access, and they shouldn't be penalized for using it. We also had wirless access, he had us (Sys-Admins) use HTB to throttle many PTP connections to uselessness.
$900 ISP bill (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Bandwidth throttling and traffic shaping is bes (Score:2, Informative)
Canada: Golden Triangle Online DID THIS. (Score:2, Informative)
I bitched about having an unlimited account and the jerk on the phone said that their policy was to cut of the top 5% of users. No matter the amount of bandwidth used. I happened to be in the top 5%, so therefore I was toast.
I DID get a call when I failed to return the modem AT MY EXPENSE to them. I bitched and tried COD and they refused and tried to charge my CC for the modem. I gave up the fight (better things to do) and drove the modem to their offices... AGAIN AT MY COST.. though it wasn't more than 10km.
I switched to Bell Sympatico (since I was cut off abruptly) and have consistently exceeded 30Gb for 3 months. No problems yet. When I signed up I asked for a definition of 'unlimited' and they said that no one had ever been cut of for LEGITIMATE uses of bandwidth, regardless of amount.
Fingers crossed
Wonderful Shaw :) (Score:3, Informative)
Last year I got a notice from them that I was exceeding "expected" usage on their cable service, and please contact us before further action is taken (ie: disconnect). So, I politely emailed them back and asked what they meant by "expected usage". I was told it was usage that didn't negatively impair their network, as outlined by their TOS. I think 4 or 5 exchanges later, they finally told me it was about exceeding their expected bandwidth limits. I had fun with the word "limits". Oh, did I have fun. I started pulling out press releases and other advertisements from their web site, plus pretty much any dead tree promotional material I could find, scanned it in, and sent them a really nice package of information, with the word "unlimited" circled all over the place. No asterisk, no fine print, just the word "unlimited".
Well! You'd think I just made a "yo mamma" joke. I got a several hundred word email back explaining to me that "unlimited" means they do not limit the hours I can connect, as opposed to dial-up ISPs. (Quick note of humor, this is 4 years after almost everyone I knew had broadband. I had unlimited dialup as far back as 1996. I haven't seen anyone use hour-limited internet access in so many years, I honestly didn't think they still existed outside of AOL). They went on and on telling me how their service was better than dial-up, because they didn't limit your hours, etc, etc, etc. So, after a thinly veiled false advertising threat, I asked them just what my bandwidth limits were. They replied that they had no official limits, but anything that "exceeded expected usage". Wee, we're chasing our tails!
Anyway, I managed eventually to get someone to admit that they flag anyone who goes over what one of their small business packages is limited to (6/2, iirc). If it goes on for a long time, you get warned.
I promised to be a good little netizen and left it at that, informing them that perhaps they should rethink their misleading advertising campaign and TOS, neither of which ever mention limits of any sort.
I'm still with them, btw. I've slowed down my activity, and I use a lot more sneaker net than in the old days. But switching to the other high speed provider in town means about half the speed, and practically no usenet access.
Lesson: you can't fight the big guy. When the competition stinks even worse, life sucks.
Re:Unlimited = ?? (Score:2, Informative)
Not really.
Not so much it's redifined, as it's assumed you know the understand what's not said. The ISP I work at has a very good definition of "unlimited". So yes, it it unlimited, as long as you are actually using it. If you walk away from the computer for 8 hours, then it goes beyond unlimited.
If you need a better connection there is always the options of a dedicated connection with the costs rising, of course.
Legitimate use for multiple gigs in a short time (Score:4, Informative)
We set it up in a weekend on our personal DSL server, assuming that we could transfer it later if it got popular.
Well, it got popular FAST, because over 150 people from the for-profit board wanted an alternative, and they flocked to our board. In a two week period, we had more than 5gb of traffic. We were flabbergasted at the sheer volume.
Needless to say, we've moved the board to a hosting provider that allocates us a specific (and very high) amount of bandwidth.
It should be noted that our ISP, DSLExtreme [dslextreme.com], was exceptionally supportive and patient with us during this time. The for-profit board attempted to get us shut down, and the legal folks at DSLExtreme would have none of it. They also allowed us to rack up that temporary 5gb traffic burst with no warnings, no stoppage and no extra charge (I only know how much we used from my own logs.) I can't thank them enough.
IANEFAMCC (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Speakeasy.net plays that game too (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Bandwidth limits? (Score:4, Informative)
No, I'm sorry, this is just silly. Bandwidth is not related to power. A one milliwatt signal can carry just as much data as a one megawatt signal. This is not why uploads are slower. And the only FCC licensing required for cable-based RF systems are the type certifications that measure radiated signals. You can run an unlicensed megawatt signal into a cable -- as long as you keep it in the cable.
The real reason is the TDMA -- time division multiple access -- used on the upstream. It's not an issue of the collision of weak signals, the signals would collide no matter how powerfull they were.
"Nothing we can do about it" (Score:3, Informative)
Re:guilty until proven innocent? (Score:2, Informative)
MediaOne, AT&T BB then Comcast...
The speed is always 1500/350... lately it's been peaking over 1500 to upwards of 2000... they claim to have capped uploads at 128, but I still receive 350.
The prices have gone up over the years slightly, and the services have gone done.
Most noticably I miss my unlimited newsgroup server access... they used to allow unlimited bandwidth up to 3 connections. Now they're down to 1GB/mo with unlimited connections.
So I'm paying Giganews $24/mo for a 20GB account... but I'm still happy with it, because I think that what I get from it is worth that (ass loads of pr0n, mp3s, ROMs, movies, etc).
I download stuff constantly, gigs apon gigs apon gigs each month...
I have open ports, 25, 143, 80, 443 and a few others... I have a no-ip.com hostname associated with my machines at home...
But they have never complained, never shut me off on purpose...
In return I pay my bill on time every time.
We're all happy...
These places could not stay in business if you maxed out your theoretical 1500Mb/s pipe 24/7/365.25.
Give them a break and stop whining. You all know what acceptable usage means, and to a "normal" user the definition of unlimited is WAY beyond what they might use. The whole point of using the term "unlimited" is to make your computer-illiterate mom won't think she has to unplug the cable modem to prevent extra charges from showing up.
Re:guilty until proven innocent? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Speakeasy.net plays that game too (Score:3, Informative)
That was a nice nice time period.
Re:guilty until proven innocent? (Score:1, Informative)
All my ports are blocked except for SSH and MS Directory Service or some thing...
I was not allowed to run my own firewall!!!
On top of that they raised the price, because I am not getting Cable TV from them.
Now I am using both DSL and comcast cable, but this will be the last month my money will go to comcast.
I am happy with DSL. I get about 1200/354 they promised 1500/354...
Comcast is controlling too much with poor poor service...
Oh, I live in San Jose, CA.
Thank you for your time...
Not in the UK you don't (Score:3, Informative)
Take a look at the UK dial-up ISP market.
BT Internet (as they were before numerous name changes) are one of the big players. They advertised their dial-up (56k modem) service using the name "Anytime", and it was billed as unlimited access. What they didn't tell you was that your modem would be cut off after 2 hours (so great for games and big downloads, then), that if you were on-line for more than 12 hours out of 24 you'd immediately have your service terminated (according to large numbers of people on UK newsgroups) and that a few months later, "any time" would mean 150 hours/month and no more. And this is with a dial-up ISP whose service is crappy at the best of times. If half the universe didn't know my e-mail address from back when they were better than the other guys, I'd move in a heartbeat.
Bandwidth is pretty irrelevant if you can't get a connection.
And no, I can't get broadband.
I work for a british ISP... (Score:2, Informative)
It's basically impossible for us to make money at the market rate (around USD20.00 / month) without imposing the surcharge, because of BT's pricing strategy. We could offer alternative packages - 300 hours for USD 40 for instance - but the market isn't there - forty bucks a month buys you DSL in the UK.
Our advertising materials include mention of the cap (though we don't like to dwell on it...) and we notify our customers that they are about to exceed their "free" quota.
For our broadband offering, we've implemented some limited traffic shaping - the P2P application ports don't get as much bandwidth as the games or web ports.
Sucks if you're leeching the latest britney album, but if you're playing medal of honour, you get decent ping times.
read something besides slashdot. (Score:4, Informative)
Cnet, yahoo news, and others- have had stories spelling out the increase and the reasoning behind it.. dsl competetion.. where verizon is trying to entice folks with lower rates for DSL, comcast is competeing by raising the d/l limit.. not reducing prices..
if I could get dsl I would, it's the 256k upload cap that is my biggest problem.
I work for the largest ISP in Canada and... (Score:2, Informative)
If the usage doesnt change, and complaints continue from other subs, they get cut off for a day, then a week, then permanently.
I believe the level where complaints can flag a person as an abuser is above 1.5/2GB a day.
I haven't seen anyone permenantly disconnected from this yet, I haven't even seen anyone go past the one day disconnection under this system.
Really, at least at MY ISP, Unlimited still holds, as long as it doesn't affect other subscribers.
Re:guilty until proven innocent? (Score:3, Informative)
There are many papers on this subject and many routers implement the protocol -- even to "hundreds of thousands of hosts".
Google for "Weighted Fair Queueing". I don't have the time right now to right a tutorial on the subject. There are papers that answer your other questions.
Yes but your connection to the Internet sucks (Score:3, Informative)
Here's the problem with your service:
So I am at work, chatting with a guy in Sweden. He wants me to send him some files. I don't want to be here all that long, so I ask him how fast his conenction is. 10mb he says. Great, that'll finish in a couple minutes. I start the transfer. It levels off at about 15 kilobyytes/second, that's 120k in linespeed terms. I'm like WTF? He claims the problem is on my end. Wrong. I work for network operations at a university. We have two OC-3c lines to seperate providers. Those hook through dual gigi ethernet to our core, into which the switch I sit on hooks via gig. I check the router stats to make sure we aren't doing excess traffic. Nope, we are at like 40% usage on each line.
So I start investigating and testing, have him transmit to me, test with other people. My connectio is working fine, I can get 2 megabytes/second to and from other fast Internet locations. More research yeilds BBB to be the problem.
See, they give you a fast DSL LINE. That gets you a fast connection to them. So anyone on their network (other DSL users mainly, but also peers) you get blazing speeds to. However bandwidth to the Internet are expensive, and they don't have a whole lot of that. So they cap their users. I believe 20 kbytes/second is thw current cap. That means any time you're doing traffic with a part of the Internet that ISN'T one of BBB's peers (and that would be most of it), you get speeds little better than ISDN.
Well US DSL connections, espically from providers like Speakeasy, aren't like that. You pay for soemthing, you get it. I have a 1.5mb/768k Speakeasy line and I get every bit of that. Doesn't matter if it's to next door or to Japan. They allow me to use my full bandwidth to anywhere, and have the connections themselves to support it.
Static IPs also factor into price. IPs are a scarce resource, so they cost money. Static IPs cost more since you use them all the time, even if your comptuer is off (because they are assigned to your line only).
Sorry, but it's not the broadband paraside you think over there. Not saying it's a bad way of doing thigns, just that there are tradeoffs. It's very much like a university campus, on a larger scale. For example most of our users here can claim to have a 100mbit connection. Their desktop is conencted to the switch at 100mbit. That means that they'll get that bandwidth to anyone else on that switch. If they are on the campus proper, then their switch usually has 2gbits of uplink to the distribution switches, which have the same to the core. So they can get 100mbit to more or less anywhere on campus at any time. However they can't off campus. Why? Well we only about 300mbits of total off compus bandwidth. That is shared between all 25,000 computers. That means that the 100mbit link they have hits a bottleneck. It's still fast, but not 100mbit.
BBB's situation is a little more sever since they ENFORCE limits. Our limits are a product of necessity. If the network has enough free resources, you can get your full 100mbit speed, but that basically enver happens since there are always a number of people using the network (we almost never go below 30%). The BBB limits are there all the time (near as I can tell), even if their netowrk links would support more speed. this is probably because they have one or more metered linsk where they pay per the amount of bandwidth used.
Re: assymertrical bandwidth offering (Score:3, Informative)
Because they can?
The typical Internet user uses very little outbound bandwidth, so 80% of your customers have little need for high upload bandwidth, so the ISPs are limiting their network infrastructure costs by setting upload limits lower than download limits.
If you're one of the 20%, who would really benefit from broadband uploads as well (online gaming, personal web servers for friends and family, etc.), you either pay extra or you're just plain screwed.
Since this 20% of your customer base represents such a small percentage of your overall revenue, the savings outweigh the churn from that part of your customer base.
That's why you don't see shoes that fit Shaquille O'Neal in regular shoe stores
I agree, this is extremely shortsighted and doesn't enable us to take full advantage of the capabilities and promise of broadband services. I think this is one of the reasons why broadband adoption has been slow in the US.
Re:guilty until proven innocent? (Score:2, Informative)
Someone who is more familiar with the actual technical details please elucidate, or explain how I'm wrong.
Mike
Re:Bandwidth limits? (Score:3, Informative)
Misnomer (Score:3, Informative)
Its plain and simple how Highspeed works.. They get a Highspeed line and share it among its customers.. Say your highspeed ISP has a 1Gig/sec line and they doll out 1Meg/sec connections. That means that it only takes about 1024 people using the full 1meg that they are portioned out on a consistant 24/7 basis to congest the incomming trunk. say Your paying 40$/month for your connection which is pretty much the going rate for the most part... Do you actually think Any ISP could find 1Gig/s of bandwidth for Less than 40K$ a month.. Thats just Bandwidth charges.. They still need to Feed thier greedy pocket and pay for infastructure upkeep and Support yet too not to mention Advertising Ect..
There are a few reasons why they do not Publish What they currently consider Acceptable use.. As time goes on What the Typical user uses on the ineternet is going to change.. and Thats what the economics of high speed are about... Typical users.. Another reason why they don't want to publish any numbers be because alot of people have a odd mentality of "They told me I can use up to 20 gig's in a month So I am gonna use it all Dammit!".. In which case They will loose some of thier profitability when alot of people are doing thier best to use thier alotted bandwidth.
If you think you are getting ripped off by your ISP ask them if they will provide you with a metered connection.. Then Download and Upload as much as you want then take a peek at your bill at the end of the month. I am sure you will be greatful for the unmetered conection you had with its unwritten limit.
there is a difference... (Score:2, Informative)
ISP's (as several people have already posted) base their bandwidth needs on an average user. This is common sense - you don't send 6 delivery people to drop off 1 letter. Paying for too much bandwidth would be a waste and likely result in inflated rates as well. The money is better spent maintaining or upgrading the network.
I work for a fairly large high speed provider and when we go after a "severe" case it's not someone who's downloaded 40gb of data in a month even if our limit is 15gb. Believe it or not but there are users out there who somehow manage to hit well over 120GB's(and more) in a calendar month. These are the people that are using well above and beyond what would be their "fair" share of the available bandwidth. These people are pushing their connections 24/7 which is fine - but they are using every bit of their available pipe - which is not so fine, and it impacts other users as a result - just like if you were to block up every lane on the highway.
If you want a QOS (Quality of Service) that allows you to use a full 1.5mb for 24/7 of every month with no limits then I would suggest you lease a T1 line and pay what the ISP's are paying for your "unlimited" connection. I think your tune will change quickly enough.
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Re:guilty until proven innocent? (Score:3, Informative)
* Some give priority to specific protocols or
ports
* Some give priority to smaller packets over
larger
* Some give priority based on the ToS bit
* Some just drop packets for "high bandwidth"
connections and hope IP drops its window size
There are also about a dozen different ways to do each of the above and each vendor has a different name for it. Thus there is much confusion on this subject and I did not make it clear in my post which I was speaking of.
The idea is to schedule packets based upon origin / destination IP address rather then by a protocol, port or connection. The simplest schemes such as WRR mentioned above, require little CPU because they are simply round-robin. The down-side to this is that they make the TCP window size thrash. More advanced algorithms use a modified token-bucket scheme and grant a specific number of tokens per second to each IP address it sees.
In both cases, because it is done by IP and not by protocol or connection, Joe P Hacker can have 1,000 P2P connections going and if Grandma loads a web page, Joe's connections will not slow her down while still giving Joe all the availible bandwidth he wants. If Grandma and Sue down the street load a web page, again they will load fast (slowing down Joe for a second) and then Joe resumes. If Joe loads a web page while he has 1,000 P2P connections, his own connections will drown him out. If Joe P Hacker is running 1,000 P2P connections while Julie is downloading the latest Linux distro and they are the only two on the wire, they'll get equal bandwidth.
Who cares if the pipe is saturated by P2P people if we can guarantee that everyone else's traffic gets through when they need it?
So this type of a scheme is not a backbone solution, it is a near-leaf solution. ISPs implement this scheme (or at least should) within regions and then balance their regional routers with another scheme more suited to massive bandwidth.
Granted, I have never done this in a NAP scenario, however in a company with ~500 employees after proper tuning I never had to worry about any one person downloading too much crap ever again. But as mentioned before, this would not be done at the NAP anyway -- it should be done more towards the leaves.
Re:guilty until proven innocent? (Score:3, Informative)
is that data going upstream from their
network to others is billed higher
Also Caching servers download common websites,
and files and store them on the equivalent
of a advanced Squid box and requests are
filled from it vs. going to the true
source on a remote network
Pushing data out to other networks is much
more costly for them, and thus the upstream CAP.
Peace,
Ex-MislTech