Ask Slashdot: How Do You Fight Usage Caps? 353
First time accepted submitter SGT CAPSLOCK writes "It certainly seems like more and more Internet Service Providers are taking up arms to combat their customers when it comes to data usage policies. The latest member of the alliance is Mediacom here in my own part of Missouri, who has taken suit in applying a proverbial cork to their end of a tube in order to cap the bandwidth that their customers are able to use. My question: what do you do about it when every service provider in your area applies caps and other usage limitations? Do you shamefully abide, or do you fight it? And how?"
My Favourite Question Of All Time (Score:5, Funny)
When I first ordered Internet service here, and asked them what my monthly bandwidth cap would be, their customer service guy responded with the following question:
"Bandwidth cap? I'm sorry, is that some sort of hat? And what does that have to do with your subscription to our service?"
Sometimes I really do love living in Sweden.
Re:My Favourite Question Of All Time (Score:5, Funny)
Back when there was some competition and choice in my area for DSL service, my standard question was "Could I run a commercial porn busisness off this connection and max it out 24/7/365?". (Assuring them that wasn't my intended use, but I wanted that freedom).
One ISP responded by saying, 'Of course, actually until recently one of our customers was one of the biggest porn companies in the US'.
Fight back with compression! (Score:5, Funny)
I fight my carrier's bandwidth caps by only downloading compressed content. For exampe, if I dowload a zip file that contains 100MB of data, but the Zip file itself only consumes 10MB, then I've effectively downloaded 90MB of data for "free" through my ISP and bypassed their cap. Ha! Take that Comcast! Sometimes when I find a file with a really good compression ratio, I'll download it 3 or 4 times just to screw them over even more.
It takes a little more of my time to calculate how much I've exceeded my cap, since I keep a spreadsheet of everything I've downloaded (which can get tedious when adding up all of the requested objects from a website that uses gzip compression) but the satisfaction is well worth it.