Broadband Providers' Hidden Bandwidth Limits

An anonymous reader sends us to the Boston Globe for a story that will come as a surprise to few here: broadband suppliers will cut you off if you download too many bits. It tells the stories of several Comcast users who were warned — without specifics — that they were using "too much" bandwidth, then had their accounts summarily cancelled. Looking into the future: "...even if only a tiny fraction of customers are downloading enough to trigger the policy, that will probably change as more entertainment moves to the Internet."

Uh huh. Yeah right.

Lemee see. Downloading the max a line will allow is OK. They understood the contract as "unlimited".

Seems to me that they're way overselling their lines. SBC DSL doesnt care how much you use, nor should they. (We had them for 2 years and kept 60% up and down utilized on average).

These cable bastards need to be raked over the coals for this. Or at leat, lose a bunch of profits.

Re:Uh huh. Yeah right.

We had them for 2 years and kept 60% up and down utilized on average

Can I leech your porn collection? Please?

Re:Uh huh. Yeah right.

This isn't a cable/DSL issue. This is a "we don't tell you how much but we cut you off anyhow" issue. In Canada we are generally advised our bandwidth limits.

Shaw (Cable) clearly advise how much bandwidth is permitted with each connection type - High Speed light - 10 GB/month data transfer
- High Speed - 60 GB/month data transfer
- High Speed Extreme - 100 GB/month data transfer
- High Speed Nitro - 150 GB/month data transfer25 Mb download speed
http://www.shaw.ca/en-ca/ProductsServices/Internet /

Telus (DSL) offer you 10GB, 30GB, 60GB and 60GB for their 4 different speed packages.
http://www.mytelus.com/internet/highspeed/prices.d o

Note that Cable offers higher speed and an equal or greater bandwidth in all cases.

Re:Uh huh. Yeah right.

And this is one area that here in Oz we are sucking the hind teat.

Plans start at 300 meg / month (yes meg a month) with a charge of $150 per MEG if you go over. That's one of the REALLY stupid ones from Telstra.

Then we have various 1, 5, 10, 20, maybe 50 GB plans, each of which will be "shaped" back to 64kb, and because you aren't actually charged for what you can suck out of 64 k, they have the cheek to call "unlimited".

Some people have access to ADSL2, but most of us are limited to 1500/256, or if we're REALLY lucky, 8000/512!

AFAIK, there is no such thing as a truly unlimited plan, and the few that go close have a caveat that if you're in the top 3% of downloaders, you'll be shaped.

Cable, where available, has similar limits, BTW.

Isolated Aussies

<devilsadvocate>
Given the relatively limited bandwidth going in and out of Australia, and that 99% of the world's websites are at the wrong end of that, there is arguably some justification for this. Still inconvenient though.
</devilsadvocate>

Re:Isolated Aussies

No, not really, most of it is dark fiber. It is corporate greed. This becomes far more apparent if you travel to Asia (Just a couple of hours flight time away) Without wanting to sound like I'm dissing my own country, Australians are drip fed technology by a small number of corporate players.

GSM is a good example - SS7 being a rather essential component, SMS happens to be part of the payload running over that beast. Given the cost of phone calls and monthly rental charges, the rate to send 1 text is a very tiny fraction of a cent. How much do they charge? When I left Australia it was somewhere around 25 cents per message. No idea what it is now. Here in Asia for about $5AUD I can send an unlimited number of messages per month.

I sometimes wonder if it is simply because the masses have no idea how the technology really works, or they are *ahem* to apathetic to care.

The fiber running between

Re:Uh huh. Yeah right.

Plans start at 300 meg / month (yes meg a month) with a charge of $150 per MEG if you go over. That's one of the REALLY stupid ones from Telstra.

$150 per GIG. $0.15 per MB. Yes, it's still theft. But it's 2007, and anyone who's still with Telstra deserves what they get.

Welcome to the rest of the world

Here in Australia, all broadband is limited by a quota. The same is true of much of the rest of the world, outside the US.

A big reason for this (as it was explained to me) is that apparently the US (or US networks) charges other countries for data transmitted from the US (though that didn't stop local AU providers from charging us equally for Australian content, or even content cached locally by the ISP). I'd be interested to hear someone confirm or deny this theory.

As for limiting a cable user's volume, remember that unlike other transmission methods, their bandwidth is shared with other cable users on the local loop, so they *can't* all get full line capacity. If one user tries to max out the cable continually, it's hardly fair on his neighbours.

I certainly agree that the cable bastards could be much more upfront about these implied limits in their contracts however.

Re:Welcome to the rest of the world NOT

No, it doesn't make sense to sell a plan as "unlimited", and then pull users for using "too much", while simultaneously refusing to come out openly stating what exactly is considered "too much".

It makes *perfect* sense to have one or more plans which are not, infact, unlimited. But when you do, you should have the guts to openly say so, and state up-front what exactly the limits are.

It's fine to sell "2Mbps broadband, will be throttled to 64Kbps if you use more than 100GB/month", and then enforce that.

It's NOT fine to sell "2Mbps broadband, unlimited flat-rate", and then subsequently warn and disconnect users for using "too much" bandwith.

It's ok to have limits. Just be honest about it. Saying one thing in the comersials and another thing to customers who use a lot of bandwith is fraud, plain and simple. If you claim to be selling an unlimited plan -- you better actually *do* that.

Re:Everyone is missing a huge critical point.

If it's any consolation to anyone, I have a 100Mb fiber optic link (full duplex) at my house.

Never been hit for any extra charges, probablly do a couple hundred Gigs of data transfer a month on average up and down.

No torrents here.. way to slow.

Way back when suprnova was up, I grabbed a torrent of some new game to try out. I left it running overnight for the download only to find that, after I got home from work the next day, I had transfered over 1Tb in the space of about 10 hours. (I have to order all my games via amazon so for me, testing before waiting a week or so to receive something I might not ever play again is worth the risk).

Anyways, bandwidth isn't a problem here in Japan...

DSL is shared too in a way

Cable, unlike DSL, is a shared medium. In other words, if some selfish jerk wants to trade torrents 24/7 and max the bandwidth then that can very well impact every other user on that line.

ADSL is just as much a shared medium, as all customers share the DSLAM's upstream connection.

Re:DSL is shared too in a way

I don't have any mod points but I can say that this is spot on, except that it applies to both upstream and downstream, at least here.

Over here in the UK, companies advertise contention ratios (usually 50:1 or 33:1) with their broadband. That means in effect that if everyone is downloading all at once on your DSLAM in the exchange, your 8Mbps line is suddenly only 242Kbps. This rarely happens, but it's something to bear in mind.

Re:Net Neutrality...

Yes, because I'm sure they'll take the money they get from content providers and pour it into upgrading their network. You know, so that they can handle enough bandwidth that they don't have to charge the content providers anymore.

Oh, wait. That would cut off a source of income. Without net neutrality, they'd have a distinct profit motive to never upgrade.

Instead of focusing on speed

perhaps this should be a marketing point for DSL providers. "DSL: the bandwidth you pay for is really yours."

Re:Instead of focusing on speed

Not to mention the telcos are common carrier, and immune to the real Mand in the Middle lawsuit attacks.

Not on your DSL line they aren't. They specifically petitioned the FCC to have DSL declared a data service instead of a communications service because the costs of maintaining the common carrier standards on the DSL lines were making it too hard to compete with the cable companies.

Optimum Online in NY caps uploads

My upload with Cablevision's Optimum online is currently capped. I think it's due to my torrents, even though I had a global limit of 40 Kilobytes per sec. I download at 10 Mbits but upload is 140 Kbits.

I've had this happen with them before, and it seems like there is no way out except to call, and you only get 3 strikes before you're out I've heard.

It's very frustrating, I pay for a fast internet connection and should be allowed to use it within reason. I purposefully capped my torrent uploads at 40KBytes, that's not too much, I shouldn't be capped.

Re:Optimum Online in NY caps uploads

Dude, expect more than a letter from you ISP talking about upload caps...

You have almost 3000 comments, and your number is lower than mine, so I know you're not new around here. That letter from your ISP is a precursor to being sued by the RIAA/MPAA. It means they've subpoenaed your ISP for your name and address based on your IP address. Your ISP is doing you a solid by letting you know they've give up your name. (I don't believe they're legally required to do so.) Expect more unfriendly mail in the near future. Best of luck to you.

"Those Cox-uckers!"

I hear this from Shaw and Cox users all the time, they're getting shitograms from the ISP over their heavy bandwidth usage. Well, Verizon's never bitched at me and I have full uplink running almost 24/7. This was true even when I had a residential line.

-uso.

Re:over-bandwidth notices

I got my Internet access cut off by a local DSL provider a little while back because of a sudden bandwidth spike. They had noticed that my account had suddenly gone to the top of their bandwidth-usage chart and stayed there. They informed me that the account had been suspended because of a "probable virus infection". At first I thought that they were just having problems with (legitimate) torrent use, but I did have a Win2K box up at that point to run some software my wife needed for work. Lo and behold, despite patches and security, the box had been owned. I told them I had taken the 2K box off-line (booted it back into Linux and the other box was a Mac) and they immediately reactivated the account.

Re:"Those Cox-uckers!"

Please mod this "-1, paragraphs are your friend"

How many?

Comcast says that only .01 percent of its 11.5 million residential high-speed Internet customers fall into this category.

ONLY 1,150 customers are at risk of being cut off?

Comcast has an interesting definition of "common carrier". I wonder if the courts will agree with it...

Re:How many?

No. 11500000 * .01% = 11500000 * .0001 = 1150
Do you work for Verizon? ;)

Re:Thi is new how?

I'm surprised that people don't expect this to happen when they use too much bandwidth.

Yes, it's strange. It's as if they were told they had unlimited internet access.

"Reserve the right to terminate at any time..."

For any reason...

That's how this works. That's the only way this works. They can advertise whatever they want, but as long as their contracts have that little clause in them, it really doesn't matter WHAT they advertise.

Re:"Reserve the right to terminate at any time..."

No, it doesn't work that way. They can say whatever they want in their contract and you can sign it, but if just because you sign it does not mean the contract will hold. There are things a contract cannot do. Even if the contract explicitly states it and the person signs it, the contract can still be considered void if the contract violates a law. If I sign a contract that says "We reserve the right to enslave you at our discression", that contract WILL be considered void and they will be arrested if they try to act on it.

There are rights you cannot make people sign away. "Reserve the right to terminate at any time..." does NOT equal "Reserve the right to terminate for any reason..". False advertising is a violation of law and cannot be gotten out of, no matter how fancy your contract is worded.

All symptoms of a larger problem.

This and the net neutrality fight tell us something - the ISPs are not prepared for a large surge in bandwidth. Despite having about 10 years notice and charging up the ying-yang in many places, they're still not ready to provide the necessary speed to even those areas of the country they currently cover. When ISPs tell customers "5 Mb/s", they really mean "5 Mb/s, once in a blue moon, otherwise 512 kb/s normally and maybe a 2-3 Mb/s burst at times". 250 GB a month is only about 756 kbps. When customers realize this, there's gonna be a problem.

250 GB/month is not going to sound excessive when we start rolling out movie downloads in HD (that's 12 movies), or Steam-like solutions take off, or people start using things like Skype. Nowadays, your game console, your HD-DVD player, and your DVR/cable box want Internet access to get patches or content, and these massive numbers are getting more and more reasonable. This shouldn't be a sign to Comcast that users should download less, it should be a sign that they need to upgrade their networks drastically and fast.

No cap for iTunes I'll bet

"...even if only a tiny fraction of customers are downloading enough to trigger the policy, that will probably change as more entertainment moves to the Internet."

If you're downloading gigabytes of movies and music from a service that the RIAA or MPAA approves of then suddenly bandwidth caps will cease to be an issue.

I doubt that anyone will ever get a takedown notice from their ISP for excessive iTunes usage.

Re:No cap for iTunes I'll bet

You would have to be one rich SOB to legally utilize as much bandwidth as I do.

I mean...I don't do that sort of thing. Why are you looking at me like that?

Trying to weed out least profitable customers

It seems like they are simply trying to eliminate customers who are unprofitable, or not very profitable. They have to invest much less money if they get rid of the people who actually USE their service, rather than just downloading the occasional e-mail or web page. You can offer unlimited bandwidth if no one uses it. This is very much like the cell carriers dropping support for users of older phone technologies because those users don't purchase extra services.

The solution...

Download midget porn, it takes half the time (and bandwidth)!

Ya, I've been saving that line for a long time....

And this is yet...

Another reason why Triple Play sales pitches are HORRIBLE.

Cable line has been "exceeded". They then hijack your other 2 services for leverage.

It's free, until you use it.

it has to be said

you've been cox-blocked

I really don't have a problem with the policy,

but I do have a problem with how they handle it. I mean, they don't specify a limit, it's basically a nebulous figure, and that they aren't clear at all about this in their marketing. I mean, if they don't mean to say that always-connected is for always maxed, then they shouldn't use weasel words in the fine print. The claimed interpretation of "unlimited" is that the connection is basically always on, as opposed to dial-up of old where you were allowed a certain number of hours. Of course, they know that unlimited also gives an impression of not having a bit limit either, but they never do anything to prevent that impression except in said fine print.

Welcome to the real world...

I'm glad to see this finally on Slashdot. I've been pushing for Comcast to provide full disclosure since I was terminated. I didn't have DSL in my area until last Monday so now I'm not dealing with 28.8 speeds. While this may be legal, I'm hoping Comcast will come clean. I really appreciate Carolyn from the Boston Globe for publishing the story. There are many other articles coming from various consumer advocate groups in the next couple months so stay tuned.

Since Comcast disconnected me in january, I've found dozens of people who have been disconnected across the country. What's amusing is Comcast is untilling to disclose what "Acceptable Use" is. They only point to their AUP/TOS on their web site and tell you to read it and follow it. Cox Communications and other reputable providers will tell you what Acceptable is in real numbers (50 Gigs a month, 80 Gigs and so on). Comcast will ONLY tell you an example of what Abuse is.

They say an abuser downloads 256,000 photos or 30,000 sounds or 13 million (that's right, million) emails a month. So on my blog I posted what Comcast is saying in english. Abusers of their system are downloasing around 200-250 Gigs a month which is 100 times more than their "average" user. So the average user is only downloading about 1 - 2 Gigs a month. Hardly using the service in my book. Not really streaming video, purchasing movies from Amazon.com Unbox or anything. If you purchase 2 HD-DVD videos from Amazon and download them then you are already violating AUP/TOS with Comcast. Tonight I've updated my blog to include stories of other's who are providing videos for download online.

I've posted my story on the web at my blog [blogspot.com]. I'm hoping to get the word out and have people look at fiber networks such as Utopia [utopianet.org]. Their fiber infrastructure provides choices. If a company (such as Comcast) is abusing customers, they can choose another. Of course having a 1 gig pipe to the house is also faster than anything Cable can provide. Must be why Verizon is rolling out FiOS.

Anyway, Major Kudos to Carolyn at the Boston Globe!

Bandwidth tariffs to explain ambiguity?

I find it ironic reading stories like these where an unlimited account is told his account is in fact limited. My own broadband account is supposedly limited to 30GB a month, at which point I'd effectively be capped to 56k speeds. At the time I started the account broadband had only just been introduced and uptake was slow, the ISP said the limit most likely wouldn't be enforced for a few months. It's now over 3 years later and I've not once been capped, despite going over the 30GB limit numerous times, quite possbly 11 months per year (to give you an idea, I've downloaded nearly 2GB today). This includes P2P, various media streams, and everything else from HTTP and FTP to games etc.

The thing is, I do 90% of this downloading between 11pm and 7am, using timed download managers and just starting P2P software before I go to bed. It seems logical (to me at least) that the ISP is internally using come kind of tariff system to downplay the effect of my broadband usage at off-peak times when I'm basically not affecting contention ratios or anything else. If such a system were being used in this case it could also explain why the ISP is unable/unwilling to provide a hard limit on bandwidth. There must be dozens of people on /. who work for ISPs, any chance of a confirmation/denial on my theory?

exponentially?

From the article: "Comcast has a responsibility to provide these customers with a superior experience and to address any excessive usage issues that may impact that experience," Comcast spokeswoman Shawn Feddeman said in a statement. "The few customers who are notified of excessive use typically consume exponentially more bandwidth than the average user."

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Just to put this all in perspective...

I used to run an ISP, back in the day. When I became aware that some hosting services providers were capping bandwidth and charging per unit of served data, I started to do a few calculations.

Hmm, let's see. A typical T1 line delivers data at the rate of 1536 Kbps (don't bother about the extra 8Kbps, OK?). So, that's 1536000 / 8 / 1024 ^ -2, or a whopping .1831 GBps, or 10.986 GB/min, or 659.16 GB/hr, or 15819.84 GB/day, or 474,595.2 GB/mo.

That's over 474 Tera-frickin-bytes with a capital B every month. On a single T1.

Now, back in the day (mid 90's), a top-tier provider T1 Internet access port cost, what--say, 1500 USD/mo including the local loop? For the math-inclined but time-challenged, that's about .0003 USD per megabyte of data, no? Three hundreths of a cent for a megabyte. When I realized these figures, it just didn't seem...honorable...to charge users for the piddling little amounts of traffic generated by their servers.

I think the cost structures of a company like Comcast might offer them some economies of scale, but hey, let's be generous here and give them the benefit of the doubt. Let's say Comcast has to get all of it's backbone bandwidth from T1's, and they have to pay another provider for it. Let's say that the average Comcast Internet customer pays about 52 USD/mo for the dubious privilege (which is about what they actually charge here in New Jersey, the last time I looked). We'll take that 52 bucks and give up half in administrative overhead. So, our 26 USD/mo buys us 86.666 GB of data each and every month.

Now, Comcast would have us believe that their average user consumes according to the estimates here, about 1% of the data that so-called abusers consume. Comcast admits that these abusers make up approximately .01% of their subscriber base. The estimates tell us that the abuser consumes 200 GB/mo, the average user 2 GB/mo. So, of their stated 11.5 million customers, about (and I'm not actually a statistician, so forgive me, here) 1150 are consuming a total of 230,000 GB/mo, while only paying for a bit less than half of that, or 99665.9 GB/mo. Meanwhile, Comcast is collecting 26 USD/mo from the other 11,498,850 customers, who are paying for a grand total of 996,559,334.1 GB/mo.

So, Comcast's revenues from all of this total 299,000,000 USD/mo when, if those "abusers" were paying for their rightful share, Comcast would be making (and here, let's make the abusers pay triple to cover it all) 299,059,800 USD/mo. Is Comcast really going to whine over a loss of revenue of 59,800 USD/mo over a 300 million dollar a month revenue stream? It would appear so!

Now, what was I saying about the cost of backbone bandwidth? Ah, yes...Comcast, having to provide a total of 996,789,334.1 GB of bandwidth a month, needs to install 2100 T1 lines to cover it all. Let's go nuts here and suggest that Comcast actually needs double that to really cover it. So, Comcast pays out 4200*1500, or 6,300,000 USD/mo to cover their backbone (though, of course, not all the traffic actually leaves Comcast's network).

Ergo, in our hypothetical situation here, Comcast is making 292,700,000 USD/mo from their Internet services, while their users are leaving the backbone network at 50% utilization.

And they're complaining about 1150 users losing them 60 grand a month?

Anyone who knows even the slightest little bit about how the Internet works and is paid for can see how patently ridiculous all of this is. Yes, the numbers I'm using here are widly skewed, but mostly in favor of Comcast. Even if you double the costs and halved the revenue here, Comcast would still be making an fscking /bin/sh load of money, which of course is actually the case. According to what I see on Yahoo! Finance, in the trailing twelve months, Comcast, as a company, made a profit of 2.24 billion USD on revenue of 24.97 billion USD. Are they honestly claiming that they can't make their network perform? Boo fscking hoo. Not all of Com

Well, it's THEIR network.

Well, I am not one for arguing for big business, but it's their network. They don't want to impose hard limits but reserve the right to maintain quality of service. We have all been pissed off sitting there trying to check a quick email only to get the "thinking" status from the browser followed by a timeout error. So, as TFA says:
You look at it and see there's some two to three people in the neighborhood or a college dorm . . . and what they're doing is impairing the customer experience for the rest of the people off that node," Davis said. "Then it's a business decision: Do you alienate a small percentage of customers to make your other customers happy?"

If you have 25 customers pissed off because their $50/month broadband service is constantly slow, and 1 or 2 other people are constantly downloaded 300GB worth of data per month, what would you do? The problem, I am sure is that the situation was not handled with tact and reason. It was probably handled by some schmo customer rep who was like, "naaa, you just download too much, we just can't have that." If a nice polite person got on the phone and explained it just as the guy in the article, then people might be a little more understanding, and if not, tell them to go buy their own T3 line.

Re:A /. dupe, what else is new

Ok. You buy a 1 year subscription to a 3Mbps-down/256Kbps-up line. You are told, along with adverts claiming it is an unlimited line.

They disconnect you for unspeakable limits. That is called FRAUD. No ifs ands or buts.

If they cant maintain profitability on selling those lines for whatever they do, too bad. Not my problem. if they can only sell 512Kbps sync and keep it truthful and honest, all the better.

If the telcos DSL circuits can do it, why not the "Pig"?

Re:A /. dupe, what else is new

You work for time warner? Cause I have had issue with them and both times I've been told it was listed on the CD that came with the internet, I had to click yes to install the software. I should have read it.

I then replied that I didn't install the software because I don't want your stuff on my computer. And the other time, I simply reply, your installer loaded the software and clicked on everything. Did he agree to something On your behalf?

both times, the issues were taken care of with the asumption that I knew better now. But you sound a lot like the guy who asumed I clicked on something.

Now verizon, they specificly told me one thing to take their service out and then told me another afterwards. I specificly asked them on the service's uptime because I was going to run a server on it. I specificly asked them if there was a problem with that and they said no and asured me they had good uptime. I also have this on recording. Now when I got my pachage to install the service, there was a letter with my DSL contract in it. It says in the contract that I'm not allowed to run any server of any kind on the conection. I called and asked about it, They said it was the standard agreement and wouldn't do anything about the server because we had spoken directly about it. Of course i recorded this too.

So, I am waiting for someone to say something this time and I will just take them to taks for it. Although, My service with verizon has been better then with Time Warner and the uptime has been better (for my area). No complsints so far (from me or them).

Re:Linux ISO's...

'I download a lot of Linux ISOs...'

From the ISP's POV, not at all the same as a lot of movies. Not all content moves across the 'net in a similar manner.

Those ISOs are relatively light-weight in terms of xfer overhead. You can pull them down all day and not get any attention, but if you start anything that even barely reeks of streaming or multi-media, you'll trigger a flag that puts you in line for being throttled back.

Try it and see :)