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The Internet Technology

New Broadband Capping Techniques? 101

Posted by Cliff from the stuff-to-watch-out-for dept.
doublea16 writes "Upon calling my broadband cable company to see why my modem's upstream was so slow as of late, I was told I had been capped due to excessive uploads. When I dug deeper for more details, I was finally told by a manager that any upload in excess of 35 minutes (size of file or type, etc have no bearing) would result in an automatic capping of the user's upstream. The Terms of Service provided are very vague when it comes to their rights to restrict speed. I was wondering if anyone else out there's broadband company had resorted to tactics like this? Is this fair to the consumers or even legal?"
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New Broadband Capping Techniques? More

New Broadband Capping Techniques?

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  • fair or legal? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Tumbleweed ( 3706 ) on Monday August 04, 2003 @08:19PM (#6611068)
    Fair? Hardly. Legal? Depends on your terms of service, but almost certainly so, due to the weasely nature of most companies.

    What to do? Time to go DSL, of course. Not as fast as most cable connections, true, but DSL providers are on the losing end of the Cable vs DSL "war", and tend to provide more services & rights for their higher cost / (usually) slower speed / harder to get service. Hopefully you can _get_ decent DSL service where you are.

    A more important question: Is this worth posting on Slashdot to whine about?

    Hardly.

    (Cliff, what were you thinking? (yes, hit my karma - I don't care))

    We _really_ need to be able to moderate the editors.
    • It's not just whining, he wants to know if this is becoming common practise, because that's an interesting thing to know.
    • Not really...

      I just switched over to cable. While I may not get as much web space (which doesn't matter to me anyway), I get A LOT better customer support, not to mention faster downloads and smaller bills.

      There's probably not much you can do, possibly report it to the BBB [thebbb.org], that always helps for me. If I were you, i'd just switch services.
    • Seems legal based upon this:

      Cablevision may, in its sole discretion, change, modify, add or remove portions of this Agreement at any time.

      So, they did.

      Actually, in terms of fairness, why 35 minutes? Just because a TCP connection lasts 35+ minutes does *not* mean bandwidth is being wasted.

      • In other words, you are giving them money, and they are promising nothing. This creates a great opportunity to screw the consumer. Corporations enjoy screwing the consumer, because the vast field of gullible and stupid people out there far outnumbers and outdrowns the smaller amount of people smart enough to realize that they are being screwed.

        The great mass of people on the other side of the bell curve are the main reason society is like it is. If most people were like you and me, television wouldn't
      • Seems legal based upon this:

        Cablevision may, in its sole discretion, change, modify, add or remove portions of this Agreement at any time.

        Don't count on it. Hopefully we all know by now that just because something is written into a contract, it doesn't make it binding if the terms are not legal. Contracts that say that one party may modify the contract, at any time and without consulting the other party, are probably the #1 example of this.

    • Re:fair or legal? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by mcdrewski42 ( 623680 )
      Definitely not worth whining about to anyone other than your provider's customer service dept

      Start by requesting official 'notification' of the change under s34 of the ToS (ie: get it documented somewhere). If they won't document it for you, then document the conversation, with the manager's name yourself in a letter.

      You then have the right to quit or change providers under the same s34 of your ToS (which gives you the right to terminate following any amendment which is unacceptable to you).

      Not only th
    • But DSL is still provided by the same weaselly companies that will screw you as soon as they've got enough subscribers that they don't need to be nice any more.

      Why doesn't the /. community put more effort into stuff like Fibre to the Home? http://www.ftthcouncil.org/

      Seems like a great idea to me. I'm not affiliated, I just like the idea of a full speed fibre running through my wall without any weaselly company trying to screw with my connection.

  • What were..... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Nagatzhul ( 158676 )
    the limitations that they gave you for bandwidth? It states that there are limitations and that you agree to abide by them, but did they provide them to you?

    • Capped to what speed? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Last time I checked, Optimum Online had higher upload and download speeds than most other cable/DSL providers. Did they cap the upload to something normal, like 256 kbit/s, or something actually low (like 64 kbit/s).

      Capping by time is pretty stupid - it just encourages people to use more bandwidth, so their transfer will complete quickly. Or to use protocols like BitTorrent, which will use all of your upstream, but could handle connections being dropped every 10 minutes (patching the source to do this woul

  • Charter does it (Score:4, Informative)

    by DesScorp ( 410532 ) on Monday August 04, 2003 @08:26PM (#6611114) Journal
    Look at Charter Broadband's EULA....it's states that Charter can take action for "excessive bandwidth usage". The EULA doesn't specify what excessive is, but you can bet they'll set it as low as they can get away with.
    • People don't believe me when I tell them I used to pay $65 a month for 384down and 128 up on Charter. In 2000 too. With as high 50% downtimes. I hear that since I moved away, DSL came into the area and totally killed Charter. It's easy to see why.
    • Look at Charter Broadband's EULA....it's states that Charter can take action for "excessive bandwidth usage".

      IANAL, but, in grand Slashdot tradition, will weigh in with my legal non-opinion.

      Vague language in a contract is generally subject to being interpreted as if in the eyes of a "reasonable person" -- usually in a court of law. It is precisely because both parties to a contract generally wish to avoid litigation (and to cover their asses if a disupute comes to that), that vague language is to be av

  • Been there, had that problem... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dJCL ( 183345 ) on Monday August 04, 2003 @08:30PM (#6611138) Homepage
    Up here in Canada we went throu a period where everyone who used more then about 5Gig a month( a lot of people, easy to do ) on DSL provided by Bell moved to other providers when Bell capped people. (Apparently they have taken off the cap now that all the major downloaders are off their network...) And I can understand why... Looking at my usage graphs on my router shows that I have a 30 day max both ways of about 6.25GB and for the past week I have averaged around 5.5GB both ways, with most being more than 3GB/day outgoing...

    They want to cap you because bandwidth, while cheap, still costs money, and money is what every business is about. If they can find a way to reduce their costs without significantly reducing their income, they will. Convince a few people to download or upload less and they save money, but usually the customer is still paying the same amount. Some will leave, but that probably saves the company more money to a point. And they can live with the loss of a customer.

    Anyway...

  • Blame partly on technology. (Score:4, Informative)

    by GigsVT ( 208848 ) on Monday August 04, 2003 @08:35PM (#6611173) Journal
    ISPs buy symmetric links to the Internet, but provide mostly highly asymmetrical service to customers, through the design of cable modem systems and the structuring of DSL.

    This technology has always gone against the spirit of the Internet, that every node is a peer, there's no such thing as a "server node" or a "client node" except in the context of a specific connection.

    The irony is that while you are being capped to POTS speeds on your upstream, the ISPs outgoing link is probably nailed on the download, and 10-20% usage on the upload (assuming they don't do co-loc or something to balance things out).

    I feel this effect particularly badly, being on satellite with up to 1000kbit/sec downloads, and 30-40kbit/sec uploads. Yeah, that's right, slower than a modem. The satellite ISPs have more of an excuse, but not much more.

    Just make sure to tell them exactly why you cancelled your service if you do. Tell them you aren't an information consumer, you are a node and a peer on the internet.
    • This technology has always gone against the spirit of the Internet, that every node is a peer, there's no such thing as a "server node" or a "client node" except in the context of a specific connection.
      Oh please. There's nothing in the client-server model that says that the client has to receive more data than it gets. It's just a interaction design model. As is the "context" role-playing of internet nodes. Calling it the "spirit of the internet" is Rheingoldian crap.

    • Re:Blame partly on technology. (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I have to post this AC because whenever I post it logged in, conservative corporate whorshipping shills accuse me of not understanding that you get what you pay for or some other crap, and mod me down so much I can't post for a time.

      As far as I know, there is no piece of equipment in the cable modem infrastructure that is naturally a one way device. If you think of lots of water hoses coming from a single connection, the bottle neck is still a bottle neck whether you are pumping or receiving water. This

      • Another argument sometimes presented is that uploading somehow costs the cable company more in bandwidth than downloading.

        This is, in fact, true. Time Warner Telecom sells web hosting services, and it doesn't want Road Runner customers to interfere with the transfer rates of its commercial web hosting customers.

        If this were the case the cable modem network would cap bandwidth leaving it's system but not the connections from one customer to another.

        This is, in fact, true. Internet connection provid

    • I feel this effect particularly badly, being on satellite with up to 1000kbit/sec downloads, and 30-40kbit/sec uploads. Yeah, that's right, slower than a modem. The satellite ISPs have more of an excuse, but not much more.

      Not to nitpick, but a modems uplink speed is never more than 33600bps. v.90 is (up to) 56k one way. I think v.92 allows you to select which direction the faster channel uses, but I'm not sure. It's been a while since I've been into telco.

      • He was talking about 2-way satellite internet. It's advertised (falsely) as 128kbps max up. On a VERY good day, I might get 60-70kbps up. Usually it is 20-45kbps. Download, on the other hand, is an ungodly 6,000 kbps if I'm doing a multithreaded download using a DL manager. I'd more than happily trade 5Mb down for the advertised 128kbps up. The latency and piss poor upload are a MAJOR pain in the ass, especially for me. I run several web sites and I'm constantly in my FTP client (slow as hell over satelli

  • Plain and simple... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by poofmeisterp ( 650750 ) on Monday August 04, 2003 @08:39PM (#6611209) Journal
    Your ISP probably has metered connections to whatever backbones they use. They pay for excessive traffic. They probably limit downlink speed but don't bother to tell anyone about it. Upload speed is capped to save leased-line money as well, but they're telling you about it to attempt to get you to use even less. Bastards.

    • Nope (Score:2)

      by bogie ( 31020 )
      "They probably limit downlink speed but don't bother to tell anyone about it."

      No they don't limit download speed at all. Many people download 20-30GB a month on OOL and they don't care at all. I've seen downloads which run overnight at the modems max speed and OOL never bothers.

      For some reason though OOL is really pissy about uploading these days. A year or two ago you could upload all you want(ie many gigs), but with the rise of P2P OOL has literlly put the brakes on uploading. I don't know if its a liab

  • I was finally told by a manager that any upload in excess of 35 minutes (size of file or type, etc have no bearing) would result in an automatic capping of the user's upstream.

    That's kind of a vague benchmark. (But of course, this is "Ask Slashdot" where vagueness is mandatory!) Does this mean an upstream connection that active for 35 minutes continuous? 35 minutes per month? 35 minutes total?

    What they're doing here is preventing their customers from operating servers. It's perfectly reasonable that the

    • How do you equate "server" with "commercial"?

      I run a whole tonne of servers (FTP, HTTP, SMTP, POP, and others). None of these net me any commercial gain whatsoever. They are soley for convenience, or for my own edification.
      • Perhaps I should have said "large-scale servers".

        The telecom industry is pretty simplistic about what they call "commercial". A guy in a dorm at Stanford put a humourous announcement on his answering machine that made it sound like he was runninging a business. Even though it was an obvious joke, PacBell told him that if he didn't change it, they'd charge him business rates for his phone.

        Yeah, it's dumb. But that's how things work when you're servicing millions of customers. You come up with rules that

    • What they're doing here is preventing their customers from operating servers. It's perfectly reasonable that they should want to do this: why should they provide commercial service for consumer prices?

      You know, I'd been saying for years that commercialization was going to kill the peer-to-peer nature of the Internet.

      I'm a little surprised that it was this soon, though.
      • Yeah, don't you wish you could go back to the days when the internet was an informal community where the really important rules where self-enforced. Of course, that would mean going back to a tiny system accessible only to a few academics.

  • You're getting UNCAPPED uploads at all? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by hawkstone ( 233083 ) on Monday August 04, 2003 @08:45PM (#6611238)
    Quick question: what are your upload rates before the 35 minute period? What do they drop to? (Or am I misunderstanding, and they cut off any uploads after 35 minutes? If so, that's much worse.)

    Just for another point of reference, I have an AT&T cable modem (though they just switched to comcast).

    I get something like 2-3 Mbps download, and the upload is capped to 256 kbps, all the time. I think it takes about 1 second for the upload cap to kick in, assuming the delay is not just my perception and inaccurate progress dialogs.

    My terms of service explicitly had that upload rate in it, and it was part of the service I knew I was buying. What do your terms of service say?
    • I have the same provider. The download rate is 10 Mbps (no joke) and upload is normally 1 Mbit.. it's not unusual to upload things at a consistent 125 KBps, until you hit the 35 minute limit, and then it drops down to ~10-15 KBps.
      • What exactally are you doing with your line that you're sending ~262 meg to the internet in a 35 minute span? And, you are aware that in most cases, Cable Modems and ADSL lines that are designated 'consumer' are meant for the user to receive information, not to serve it out (that is generally denoted as a business type line).
        • I love BellSouth DSL...It's not that quick (1536/512 or so) but the residential lines are server-friendly. No bandwidth caps, no traffic shaping, no port blocking. The only thing to prevent you running servers is a dynamic IP address - and they were willing to support me fully with help setting up DNS to point to the dynamic account.

          Business DSL is 2x as much for the same bandwidth but with a static IP...of course now you can add a static IP to residential DSL for $22.95/month extra which puts it right in
        • I don't think it's any of your business what I'm doing with my data and how much of it is going where. I pay for 10 mbit down, and 1 mbit up. When I don't get what I pay for, I get mad. And of course these lines aren't made for sending, otherwise I'd have synchronous streams.
        • What a stupid question followed up by a even dumber point. At what point is something consumer or business? Why TF give someone 1Mb of upload speed and then say you can only use it for "a little while".

          If OOL doesn't want people to actually use their bandwidth then they shouldn't have given everyone 10Mb/1Mb lines.
  • I have Time Warner in Chapel Hill, NC and my speed has dropped from a steady 3.1Mbps to 1.7Mbps. You are not alone
    • That sounds more like a bandwidth allocation problem than a capping situation. Contact TW and they will look into it.
    • In NYC, Time Warner speeds are capped to 2Mbit down, 380Mbit up. Welcome to Road Runner.
      • That's nationwide. It used to be 5-10 (or more, if you knew people in the NOC) but people whined that they were getting a slower connect then techs. So The Powers That Be decided everyone should get 2m/384k. And that's what we've got.

        Honestly, I don't mind. It's more then fast enough for me and my IP only changes every two months. I've got a script that wgets a page on my server every 15 minutes, so if my IP changes while I'm at work I can still ssh in. The only inbound port that's blocked is 80.

  • Bandwidth caps (Score:5, Informative)

    by Andy Smith ( 55346 ) on Monday August 04, 2003 @09:35PM (#6611631)
    The award for the most outrageous bandwidth cap so far must go to BTopenworld, the ISP division of British Telecom.

    BT is widely disliked for not providing ADSL in rural areas. Solution? They launched a satellite service costing 900 pounds for installation and then 60 pounds per month subscription. (Why the hell does Slashdot not let me use a pound sign?! Okay we're a small country but we DO still have a currency!)

    They waited until they had around a thousand subscribers, the most they were expected to get and all of them locked-in to a 12-month contract, and then they capped the service to near-dial-up level.

    They had previously signed-up hundreds of thousands of people to a 24/7 dial-up plan and then capped them to a couple of hours per day. (I was one of them. I cancelled, they continued billing me for five months. It's a year later and I'm still fighting them for the 80 pounds they took. Court looks like the next step.)

    And don't get me started on 2-hour cut-offs...

    • Pound signs (OT) (Score:3, Informative)

      by OldMiner ( 589872 )

      No pound sign? I'll be damned, you're right. I tried £ (), £ () and just embedding the character directly (). A pound sign of each version should appear in each set of parentheses. I wonder why they're blocking HTML entities. I can understand not allowing one to type the character directly as a character set concern, but why block entities? Heck, looks like I can't even do umlauted vowels: ä (&amul); ouml (&ouml); ü (). Mumble. Time to check the SoureFor

      • Damn stupid coders/editors. Slashcode's accepted pound signs quite happily until now so why change it?

        Correct me if I'm wrong but they're not just screwing people who want to post pound signs to Slashdot, they're also screwing people who want to run slashcode elsewhere.

        And it's not just the pound sign that's affected - the Yen and Euro currency symbols are also unavailable now.

        Great job guys. Not.

        • Slashcode's accepted pound signs quite happily until now so why change it?

          HTML character entities have been blocked ever since somebody exploited character entities to insert text-direction overrides into subjects and comments that screw up the layout.

          • I can type the Pound and Euro symbols on my keyboard so I should be able to include them into a damn comment without worrying about how Slashcode treats them.

            Just because something can be exploited it doesn't mean shutting it down completely. Email can be exploited in countless ways but we still use it don't we?
    • BT screwed me once too often too. Back in 1996/1997, they were quite happy to charge me 1.6 pence per minute (about $1 per hour) on top of the GBP15 per month I was paying to my ISP for internet access - and that was during the middle of the night. Not only that, but because I was using exceeding their expected usage, they were billing me every 6 weeks or so, rather than every 3 months.

      They were quite happy to make GBP20-30 per week from me in internet call charges alone then, but were damn quick to termin
      • A friend of mine who lives in Yorkshire feels exactly the same way. He's with NTL for his phone and broadband, and he says that if he ever moved house, being able to get either NTL or another non-BT comms provider would be a major influence in his decision of where to live. Like you, me, and many other people, he simply doesn't want to feed BT anymore.
        • I'm the opposite.
          I had a bad NTL experience in the midlands, never able to get customer service, then the introduction of the stupid 3-2-1 tarrif which I never accepted.

          When I moved to Yorks I stuck with BT, but unable to get DSL took BlueYonder for broadband only. When ADSL became available I negotiated a cheaper rate even though I wouldn't take Telewest phone service; cos otherwise I'd go ADSL.

          Lately I tried to do the unmetered calls with Telewest to "give them a try" as it would work out 10 per month
    • I've successfully used moneyclaim.gov.uk [moneyclaim.gov.uk] to claim money back. Give it a try.

    • I've heard about this arbitrary disconnection by BTO after 12 hours of use as well, but it seems very odd. Considering that I must be on-line for very close to that boundary typically one or two weekend days each week, it's amazing I've never hit it.

      As for BTO's policies more generally... I don't think BT or BTO are particularly great, and yes I've have had bad experiences with them in the past. OTOH, I've also had generally good service aside from the occasional screw ups -- better than I've had with alt

  • I meet this girl on irc, and I thought we were hitting it off great. We were talking dirty by the 3 convo, cybering by the 5, then she said you wanna me IRL by the 7th. I thought cool, I'm getting laid....

    Well miss thing capped my advances once I was sliding my hand down her pants. I said, "baby, it's just like IRC, the only difference is you get to reach out and touch some one." Then she slapped me. So yeah, I've been capped by broad-band.

    =)
  • Buy a T3, wire up the neighbors with Ethernet. It's every nerd's dream.
  • 21. Prohibited Uses of Optimum Online: Subscriber shall comply with all of Cablevision's standards for acceptable use with respect to the Optimum Online Service and the Services and shall refrain from any and all illegal and/or inappropriate activities, including without limitation as outlined in the Acceptable Use Policy.

    *SNIP*

    In addition to the prohibitions outlined in the Acceptable Use Policy, Residential Optimum Online users may not:

    (a) Run any type of server on the system. This includes but

    • But where did he say he was running a server on his home system? Maybe he was uploading to USenet. Maybe he runs a web site (hosted somewhere else), and he was uploading files to it. Maybe he was sending a huge email or the mail server was slow. There are plenty of reasons for a 35 minute upload without running a server.

      • Maybe he was uploading to USenet.

        USEnet? 35 minutes at 1 Mbit/sec? If its porn, someone lemme know.

        Maybe he runs a web site (hosted somewhere else), and he was uploading files to it.

        Thats a lot of files. Like I said before, If its porn, someone lemme know.

        Maybe he was sending a huge email or the mail server was slow.

        The limit for Optimum is 20 megs [cv.net]. As for speed of the email servers, from what I hear, they either work, or they don't. They don't slow down, they just go down.

        Sure there's
  • I have yet to see a decent Cable provider TOS. I tend to call these web service providers, I mean, look at it, no IRC, SMTP, DNS, pointing a DNS address to one of their IP addresses (how do they even know that YOU are the one that did it)

    My advise, do what you should do, get a real IP service, DSL, or something similar that provides a decent TOS. Will it cost more, of course - after all you get what you pay for

  • I got a piece of email from Earthlink last week. It talked about them putting in new servers, etc. Then they tagged on the following:

    Additionally, we are changing our Usenet access policies to better serve all of our users. Members will be permitted to download a maximum of 1500MB (1.5GB) over a rolling 30-day period. Should your account exceed this quota, you will not be cut off from accessing our Usenet service.
    However, your download speed will be limited to 64Kbps until the account again falls below

    • Oddly of all things to cap, Usenet probably makes the least sense. At least news server traffic is (generally) local to the ISP, i.e. they don't need to pay for any external bandwidth. Other stuff is relatively bandwidth friendly too: Web traffic can be transparently proxied and cached to save a pretty large percentage of its bandwidth, email isn't time sensitive, and IM (text) has minimal total bandwidth. If anything, ISP's should push people away from P2P. Weird.

      Overall though, I generally accept

      • Earthlink's a national ISP. They have their newsserver at one point, and figure that they can get away with throttling it and eliminating some backbone traffic.

        Most ISPs just suck.

      • If anything, ISP's should push people away from P2P.

        My personal view is that the ToS should not prohibit anything, but instead give you a certain amount of TX (ie upload) bytes (maybe allow unlimited uploads to hosts on the ISP's network), and either (at your option) drop all uploads or charge you extra for everything above that, with no service degradation.

        I really think that that approach would solve a number of the problems (both real and perceived) with the Internet. First of all, it's an absolut

  • Satellite Suckism (Score:3, Informative)

    by garyebickford ( 222422 ) <`gar37bic' `at' `gmail.com'> on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @02:25AM (#6613127)
    For a while I lived in the boonies where a dialup line got up to 21K on a _really_ good day, and nothing else was available unless I wanted a dedicated T1 for a couple $Gs/month. DirecPC became available, and I signed up first for one-way, then two-way.

    I quickly learned two things: One) Bandwidth is not particularly relevant unless you're downloading big files. Latency is what controls your effective speed for interactive applications (everything except big file downloads) - DPC one-way is about 45ms; DPC two-way is about 800-900 ms on a good day. (For comparison, IIRC a dialup modem will run from 30 ms to 300 ms. I think cable is around 11 ms but I forget.) For most web surfing the effective speed is somewhere between dialup and single ISDN, especially during peak times. Latency varied wildly though, in some cases as high as 10 seconds without a packet. Actually I recorded delays of over a minute several times.

    Two) Shortly after I started, DPC unilaterally and without warning instituted their "Fair Access Policy" (FAP). 'Tis true, some folks were abusing the system by essentially downloading nonstop 24x7, or something close to it - probably why my bandwidth sucked! Unfortunately, their software did not have a bandwidth limiter in it, so any big file could trigger the FAP. (IIRC it was 100 MB in 60 minutes.) Once you were FAPped, you got less than 28K for 24 hours - truly egregious since their software had no way to control download of a big file.

    Some folks did build 3rd party download limiters to keep you under the cap, and tweakers to improve the TCP performance. The DPC software leaked memory like a sieve, only ran on Windows, so I had to buy a PC just to drive the satellite dish. That brand new PC (not a cheapie) crashed about every two days due to the DPC memory leaks if I didn't restart it daily. That was the only app running on the box most of the time - nobody sat at it, it just routed packets between my LAN and the net.

    Service was abysmal - I threatened to sue them twice, once just for failure to meet the terms of the service agreement (I naively thought that 10 minute packet turnaround was insufficient.), and once because due to a glitch in their software I had no service for over a month - plus I spent over 30 hours on the phone with them during a one year period - time taken from billable hours.

    Since then moved back to the big city, mostly left consulting and gone back to school, and I'm now on a friend's Comcast cable connection. I was able to D/L the complete Oracle 9i dev version installer without problems - something I was never able to accomplish on DPC. Using DPC I got about 1/2 way there by D/L the package onto a server at my ISP, splitting it into chunks and then using rsync to move a chunk (too small to trigger FAP) at a time. But I got bored with this after a week.

  • Is it fair or even legal?

    Dunno, consult a lawyer, but I would assume so.

    That's why it's important to shop around. Where I live, XMission.com (my ISP) has several options. With a DSL account [xmission.com] I'm allowed burstable quota of 3 GB/week each way, and DSL has 640k/256k up/down. Other options allow 4 GB/week for $25, or more amounts for fairly cheap. Also, DSL accounts have a fixed IP address, no server restrictions, and no bandwith accounting on Sat/Sun or from midnight to 7 AM.

    It really pays to shop arou

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