To Verizon, "Unlimited" Means 5 GB 743
Jason writes "For years there have been stories about people getting their unlimited Verizon EVDO Wireless accounts terminated because of excessive data usage, but Verizon never explicitly said that there is a limit. Now if you dive into the terms of the Unlimited Data Service plan they have put a section in that specifically states that anything over 5GB of data usage in a one month period is considered prima facie evidence that you must be downloading movies, and you will be cut off."
What the hell? (Score:5, Insightful)
Limited != Unlimited (Score:2, Insightful)
If it has a fixed cost, it has a fixed limit (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:What the hell? (Score:5, Insightful)
It is just easier for them to sell something called "unlimited" than it is to sell something called "limited to 5GB".
Re:What the hell? (Score:1, Insightful)
Let me get this straight: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:If it has a fixed cost, it has a fixed limit (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Forgive my statistics, but... (Score:0, Insightful)
What case? You just posted a bunch of numbers, you didn't say what we're supposed to conclude from that.
Re:Forgive my statistics, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Let me get this straight: (Score:5, Insightful)
If you read the actual terms you'll see this:
Examples of prohibited uses include, without limitation, the following: (i) continuous uploading, downloading or streaming of audio or video programming or games;
Basically, they don't want you using the internet to purchase movies or music from anyone other than Verizon. It's an incredibly anti-competitive action.
assumed legitimate traffic. (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone who's IM'ing 13.5 GB/Month won't be in college long...
Re:If it has a fixed cost, it has a fixed limit (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:If it has a fixed cost, it has a fixed limit (Score:4, Insightful)
That aside, the thing is that companies like Verizon have seen their old pricing model prove inadequate over time, and they want to distance themselves from the previous model. The interweb was such that only people downloading illegally were exceeding their previously undefined upper limit. I would imagine they got the 5gb value by doing some data mining on their customers. I'd bet that most never go near 5gb.
I imagine they know people will soon start buying movies and other large media online as a matter of course, and they want to be able to charge for 'premium' access. The best way to achieve that is show that they are taking action now against heavy downloaders, demonstrating the need for different levels of access, so they cannot be accused of suddenly instituting a new system for the sake of profit only.
I would cope with metered access, if it meant no hassle when I did transfer a lot. I do often have to transfer large amounts of data between home and my lab overnight.
Re:If it has a fixed cost, it has a fixed limit (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Forgive my statistics, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What the hell? (Score:3, Insightful)
Basically, get as much money from the customer while providing the minimum possible, often less than you lead the customer to expect. As long as you can hold it up in the court of law.
The email trick will hold up because it's being deleted by date, not size. The "unlimited bandwidth"... I don't think that could hold up.
Re:What?! (Score:1, Insightful)
If you're downloading games and patches, you should probably use your home Internet connection, and not Verizon's outdoor-wireless service. I don't think you really need to download America's Army at the beach.
Google calculator has something to say (Score:5, Insightful)
In other news, I pay 25 euros/month for a 8 Mbps down/512 Kbps up unlimited cable line, and I consider it expensive, and plan to change to the competitor that offers a 4M/512K by under 20 euros. God bless Europe.
Re:5 GB not much (Score:3, Insightful)
So on the one hand, they're advertising this as an easy and convenient alternative to DSL, while at the same time rewriting the terms of service to make it abundantly clear that it's not intended to compete with DSL. If you're going to be actually using the bandwidth you're paying for ($79.99 is about twice as expensive as a regular DSL line in my area), they want you to get a real DSL setup that can actually handle the advertised bandwidth.
Re:Can you say "deceptive marketing"? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:False Advertising (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, the best way to avoid any of this is to avoid advertising "unlimited". Unfortunately, laymen currently define "unlimited" as "at least a little more than I would ever use", and relatively few are ever going to complain about Verizon's and others' like policies.
Remote back-up software (Score:2, Insightful)
The initial backup of data (not
Re:If it has a fixed cost, it has a fixed limit (Score:3, Insightful)
If it says unlimited, then yes. My ISP offers contracts with a limit of 2 GB, 6 GB, and 30 GB per month, at different cost. I have a 6 GB contract. If I went with a competitor who offers "unlimited", then I would expect more than the 30 GB limit that my current ISP offers, and definitely not less than my current 6 GB contract.
Re:Limited != Unlimited (Score:5, Insightful)
In fact many ISPs claim to have unlimited use (despite all ADSL in the UK being limited) most only state in the small print that they have 'Fair Usage Policies' (FUP) which will come in when they decide you have used too much, they always imply that there are no limits (one even states "that you dont have to monitor your usage!").
This is simply illegal IMHO, you cannot state that something is unlimited when it is limited. Even if this contradiction comes in the small print, especially when you do not state how limited it is. A c
This page http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/caps.htm [kitz.co.uk] outlines it perfectly.
Re:.ca (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:This is 2007. (Score:3, Insightful)
Now for the 5GB limit. Get real. 1 DVD ISO for a linux distro is 4GB alone. I could easily reach this limit in about 20 minutes without even trying, just setting up a new machine. Heck, I'd be willing to bet that just 2 weeks ago, I probably downloaded over 15GB of data in about a 3 hour time frame, and there wasn't a single song, movie, or illegal download involved. And that was only part of 1 day. I'd hate to see what my monthly download was. And let's not forget that all good linux distro downloaders user bittorrent with a share ratio of 1 or greater, so that's also a minimum of 4GB upload.
Heck, is there an upload limit? I upload 8MB pictures for printing at my favorite printing place. I'm sure a 1 day upload of roughly 1GB might raise eyebrows as well?
5GB might have been a realistic threshold in 2000, when everything was a lot smaller. It's ridiculously small today for anyone that actually does anything.
Re:Whoa! (Score:4, Insightful)
5 GB is too little when you sell it as "unlimited".
Nobody would complain if they advertised and sold it as "limited to 5 GB per month".
Re:This is 2007. (Score:3, Insightful)
There are many ways to use more that 5GB a month....
Well this makes the typical South African's complaints about a very low 3GB cap seem invalid... (I know users thats able to use more that 50GB / month on local only accounts....)
Re:.ca (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Whoa! (Score:4, Insightful)
What's too little for one person would be more than enough for another.
The real issue is how they're marketing it; If there is a 5GB limit, then that is a limit... period - hence it is not "unlimited."
I'm sure that it is easier for them to sell it as "unlimited," just like it would make my life a hell of a lot easier if I tell the IRS that I didn't make any money last year and refuse to let them commence their annual financial colonoscopy.
They need to find another name - calling it unlimited is, basically a straight up lie.
A point that is irrelevant (Score:3, Insightful)
The point is that they advertise the service as unlimited. If it's not unlimited, then that is simply false advertising. We need to hold companies accountable to what they say. And they don't need any help twisting their words to mean the complete opposite of what they say. That have armies of lawyers to do that for them. It is not unreasonable to demand accountability and honesty in the marketplace. Don't let them convince you that it is.
Re:.ca (Score:4, Insightful)
Again, with IPTV, there's a realistic limit on how much you're going to watch in a given month. In other words, there is a clear definition of what "unlimited" means in that context. And there's also no way in hell that someone can possibly watch TV 24/7 for an entire month, so that alone is evidence enough to justify that someone is abusing their connection. And let's not forget that the cable company can easily throttle back your general Internet bandwidth in the case that you're using excessive IPTV bandwidth.
Now as far as the people in the article, they are CLEARLY using their cellphones as a general Internet connection for their computers. This is FORBIDDEN by the cellphone TOS unless you sign up for a different plan. I just flat out don't believe that someone used 5GB of bandwidth in a month by checking email and surfing web pages using ONLY their cellphone.
Re:What the hell? (Score:3, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is 2007. (Score:4, Insightful)
You are dumber than toast. Downloading a movie makes a copy of it. If you're not authorised to make that copy, you're infringing the owner's rights. Just because the MPAA are only choosing to sue uploaders doesn't make downloading legal.
Re:What the hell? (Score:3, Insightful)
That said, throttling it to a fixed cap is bad, but I would not care if an ISP made BT traffic low-priority, as long as they were clear that they did so.
I hate hidden caps (such Cablevision OptimumOffline's "we'll permanently drop your cap down to 150 KB/sec without warning or notification if you use too much upstream" policy.
Re:What?! (Score:3, Insightful)
Wired usage habits on wireless are antisocial. (Score:4, Insightful)
What they are not addressing is that most people would be using wired bandwidth for these tasks. Wired bandwidth is relatively plentiful, even with the bottlenecks in the local loop. The capacity in the backbones is mostly restricted by the amount of routing, not the capacity of the fibers, which isn't anywhere near full (hear about all that "dark fiber"? New multiplexers? Hmm?)
On the other hand, if you use wireless bandwidth, you're consuming it from a relatively small pool allocated to a cell. There's only so much you can squeeze out of radio bandwidth, which is why it's such a big deal to the cellular networks when the government auction off another slice of spectrum.
Yes, this is false advertising by Verizon. But the real issue is a minority of idiots spoiling the party for everyone else ; you just can't support those usage patterns over current wireless technologies, not for everyone in the cell. They are quite reasonably ticked off with a minority of the customers degrading their service and making them look bad to the rest.
If you want industrial quantities of bandwidth, you should be using a landline, and paying for it.
In an ideal world, marketing would make it very clear what service you were getting, and people would be more respectful of limited common resources, like radio spectrum.
Re:What the hell? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What the hell? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What the hell? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Whoa! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:This is 2007. (Score:2, Insightful)
The reason I say it's muddy is that the federal and state governments are testing how far the federal government's power goes in regulating products that appear to be regulated for political reasons only (the medicinal use vs 0 tolerance).
Personally, I like the Netherlands take on it. Imagine what would happen if it became legal, widely available, and cheap. An entire class of criminal would almost instantly disappear overnight. School children would no longer be approached to get them hooked early. Paper products could be made cheaply from quickly renewable resources. The list goes on, but apparently the "War on Drugs" to profit both the law enforcement and prison industries directly and chemical and timber companies indirectly sells better than economic common sense.
Truth-in-advertising (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, we do. It's called "Truth in Advertising," and it's part of the Federal Trade Commission's job to enforce that business don't lie about their services. We also have the Better Business Buerue as a watch group to identify unfair and unethical business practices.
Anyone who's had their service dropped by verizon for the 5GB limit, and isn't hosting a pirating service, should be suing verizon under truth in advertising. When you use the word "Unlimited" in big bold letters on the cover of the plan, you can't lie about it in the fine print.
Re:What the hell? (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:This is 2007. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's no "unlimited" in any real sense of the word. I don't think anyone would reasonably fault Verizon for putting a 5GB limit on their plan. To call it unlimited though is disingenuous, no matter what the fine print says, and to not offer any other more expensive options for those who do go over the limit is just stupid.
Re:What the hell? (Score:5, Insightful)
I have 2 computers at work, a laptop and a desktop at home, Blackberry, and I occasionally find the need to check my e-mail on a friend's computer. With my e-mail stored on a remote (GMail) server I can get to my current mail from anywhere.
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WP
http://www.wperry.net/ [wperry.net]
Re:What the hell? (Score:3, Insightful)
If a service is unlimited then there should be no limits to it other than the laws of physics, and you all know we canna defy the laws of physics. If you have a fair use clause which allows a supplier to terminate your account if you breach it, then it's not an unlimited account and I'm really surprised it can be advertised as such.
Call it a 1GB plan or whatever, as others have suggested, but not unlimited when it clearly has limits.
Re:Whoa! (Score:3, Insightful)
However, if someone's advertising campaign gives me a free widget and then later tries to bill me for said widget, we're suddenly in very different legal waters than if my "free" widget came with an expensive service plan that I agreed to (or whatever the hook is). I don't care how jaded you are - there are limits to what companies and their advertisers can do or claim. Its not hard to find examples that comes right up to the edge of that line. But there is still a limit.
The history of marketing is full of examples where marketing was too clever for its own good. The parent brought put forward a rather dubious example of "all you can eat." No individual is going to eat a literal ton of food. But there have been examples where individuals with appetites have surprised marketers. Red Lobster's all-you-can-eat crab promotion resulted in a $3 million dollar hit on their 2003 3rd quarter earnings.
Value of EMail (Score:1, Insightful)
"just simply?" (Score:4, Insightful)
How is this simpler than "www.gmail.com?"
Dynamic DNS, fer Pete's sake. The average
Re:What the hell? (Score:3, Insightful)
We even have requirements for companies to explicitly tell how much you have to pay in total if the service is with a minimum sign up period.
Re:What the hell? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:What the hell? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The Stupid Country (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah... it sucks. When I said 14kbps, I didn't actually look it up (sorry if I sounded more authorative than I am... someone above said it's actually 64kbps). All I know is that it really isn't usable. Just doing basic web browsing is a major pain. I have to wait for text to gradually appear on the screen.
I can't remember if this is better or worse than what dialup used to be. But I certainly don't remember dialup being this crappy.