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ISP is ok-ish, Mobile ISP is bad (Score:3)
I am using German Telekom for my mobile ISP. They cap after 300MB. Way, way too low. After that it's 64kbit/s!
My DSL ISP is ok. No caps, but the uplink is tiny. I've got 6 MBit downlink, but only 512kbit uplink. Terrible for uploading photos or other stuff.
Re:ISP is ok-ish, Mobile ISP is bad (Score:3)
Re:ISP is ok-ish, Mobile ISP is bad (Score:2)
I used to wonder why people disliked the French. I think I finally understand. :P
Re:ISP is ok-ish, Mobile ISP is bad (Score:2)
Cable, 50Mbit downlink.
I'll see what my uplink speed is when the next opensuse level comes out and I torrent it.
Re:ISP is ok-ish, Mobile ISP is bad (Score:2)
Wow, for once the US is better than Europe in mobile, my wife is on Virgin Mobile USA (a Sprint MVNO) and their throttle doesn't kick in until 2.5GB and it's only $25/month for 300 minutes/"unlimited" data/unlimited sms. If they didn't want to raise our rates by $10/month when she gets a new phone I'd be sticking with them.
Re:ISP is ok-ish, Mobile ISP is bad (Score:2)
Wow, for once the US is better than Europe in mobile
Well, you've found one service that's worse... although he didn't tell you how much (or little) the service cost.
My German's a bit patchy, but it looks like the deal is you get the data allowance on a pre-pay tariff for the next month whenever you add €9.95 credit to the account.
It's not a very good deal. I have a German SIM for when I travel there, and €10 gives me something like 1GB data, and I didn't really look for the best deal.
Re:ISP is ok-ish, Mobile ISP is bad (Score:2)
Wow, for once the US is better than Europe in mobile, my wife is on Virgin Mobile USA (a Sprint MVNO) and their throttle doesn't kick in until 2.5GB and it's only $25/month for 300 minutes/"unlimited" data/unlimited sms. If they didn't want to raise our rates by $10/month when she gets a new phone I'd be sticking with them.
Well, it sounds like you're almost level. My phone costs me less than euro20/month for 21Mbps with no limit, and a couple of hundred calls/SMS. And here, unlimited means really unlimited, not some weird species of "unlimited" which has a 2.5GB cap.
FWIW, our home connection is symmetric 100/100Mbps on fiber, also unlimited (no capacity limits, no blocked ports, we can and do run a web server and a mail server, etc.). It's pricey, as it costs us euro45/month, but then we're in the countryside. A similar service can apparently be had much cheaper for those who live in Helsinki, 400km south of here.
Re:ISP is ok-ish, Mobile ISP is bad (Score:2)
I've got a virgin mobile phone...where I am the network is so lousy that I cannot see anyone hitting the 2.5 GB "cap" without going insane.
Re:ISP is ok-ish, Mobile ISP is bad (Score:2)
As other points out, you have found one of a very few with worse service.
In Denmark you get 1GB with the cheapest subscriptions and most get you somewhere between 3 and 10GB.
My current provider charges 159 DKR ($28) for 1 GB data, unlimited minutes and unlimited text/SMS, 179 DKR ($32) for 5 GB data, unlimited minutes and unlimited text/SMS, 199 DKR ($35) for 10GB data unlimited etc. and finally 299 DKR ($54) for 100GB data (they call it unlimited, but it aint). (All subscriptions are on LTE where available).
If you exceed your limit you get throttled, no additional charges.
Re:ISP is ok-ish, Mobile ISP is bad (Score:2)
I am using German Telekom for my mobile ISP. They cap after 300MB. Way, way too low. After that it's 64kbit/s!
My DSL ISP is ok. No caps, but the uplink is tiny. I've got 6 MBit downlink, but only 512kbit uplink. Terrible for uploading photos or other stuff.
That's interesting, since T-Mobile US, which is now partially spun off from DT, offers an unlimited data plan prepaid or postpaid at $70/month (truly unlimited for the phone itself, 500 MB tethering per month), as well as less-expensive options of 2.5 GB ($60) and 500 MB ($50), all with unlimited talk and text. There's also a prepaid $30 plan with 5 GB data/100 minutes talk (not sure about SMS), but that's only for new activations; you can't switch to it from another plan. On the plans with limits, it's at least a soft cap, throttled down to (I think) 128 kbit/s.
On the other hand, their high speed coverage vanishes outside of cities, dropping you to EDGE or GPRS. GPRS shouldn't even exist in 2013, and even EDGE is showing its age. Prepaid plans get no data roaming, and postpaid plans get very little. Part of the problem was that T-Mobile neglected their network when they were trying to merge with AT&T. Now they're playing catch-up and rolling out LTE in the large cities to match their HSPA+ footprint, but their high-speed data doesn't cover highways well. Good luck streaming Pandora or Slacker on the road.
Retiring Old Mobile Phone Protocols (Score:2)
Believe me, your wireless companies would like to retire the old protocols as fast as they can scrape up the capital budget, at least in the cities and medium-large suburbs, though less so out in the boonies.
The issue isn't just selling you an iPhone N+1 to replace your iPhone N-2 or have your tablet hit your monthly bandwidth cap in 2 days instead of 5, it's mostly that the newer protocols use their radio bandwidth a lot more efficiently, so if they can migrate the 2G and 2.5G users over to LTE or at least 3G, they can reuse the spectrum that's tied up handling older-protocol users.
They'd also be happy to migrate HSPA+ users to LTE, partly because of spectrum efficiency but almost as much because everybody's marketing says that "4G is Much Better Than 3G", so they're stuck scrounging up bandwidth to reallocate to LTE without messing up the HSPA+ users who haven't migrated yet and who might change carriers if their service degrades.
(Disclaimer: I work for AT&T, but not in the cell phone part of the company, this is my own opinion and not the company's, blah blah blah, and as far as I can tell, all the major carriers are roughly in the same bind on this issue, though the non-GSM carriers have extra incentives to move to LTE.)
No cap but they do block thepiratebay. (Score:3)
No bandwidth cap (adsl line connects at 8m down and 800k up, so there are probably people here with capped connections who can actually transfer more data per month than I can)
Not close (Score:2)
8 Mbps down is 1 MB/sec, so 86.4GB/day, so you could hit a 250 GB monthly data cap by about Wednesday the first week. (I'm running 3 Mbps DSL, but since Comcast keeps talking about data caps, and won't let you run servers at home, I've got no respect for their claims to be 10x faster...) Of course, if they're blocking The Pirate Bay, that cuts way back on their total bandwidth needs :-)
What ISP (Score:3)
My ISP for
- Home
- Mobile Phone
- Tablet
- Work
?
Everyone has different rules.
Two different ISPs at work (Score:2)
Until recently, when we started doing some new cloud projects that have their own connectivity, I had two different ISP-equivalents at work. One was the Corporate IT department network, which connects to my desktop, the corporate email, internal web servers, and firewalled access to the public internet, doesn't have any bandwidth limits other than the 100 Mbps wire to my desk, but has a lot of access filtering to cut out NSFW material, including Dangerous Evil Hacker Sites (I do computer security research - that blocks most places that have useful security tools as well as malware and Tumblr/Instagram/Facebook/Dropbox :-) The other's my lab, which has an unfiltered T3 and a couple of fractional T1s we use for testing, and we want to have occasional access to dangerous evil sites, though most of the malware we get is from our test load generator throwing Gbps of ugly stuff at security tools to see when they fall over.
US-Centric question... no? (Score:2)
In Europe YOU cap your ISP!
vnstat -m reports 74.04Gib on my home Linux server for this month only. I have had months with a lot more traffic than that.
Re:US-Centric question... no? (Score:2)
In Europe YOU cap your ISP!
vnstat -m reports 74.04Gib on my home Linux server for this month only. I have had months with a lot more traffic than that.
I dunno if it's a US-only thing, because the only place I've actually paid an ongoing monthly ISP bill is the US. I guess you're saying you're not capped, right? I'm not either, as far as I know, but my data speed is effectively a cap. I can't even achieve the advertised download rates, especially evenings and weekends when the neighbors are all online. Capping me would be pointless. If I can't get the 15Mb/sec they advertise, why bother, right?
So maybe the poll is more meaningful for people who've got especially high-speed data service relative to the technology they're using. That would be the case for me if I answered the poll as if my mobile carrier were my only "ISP". They've got a(n unofficial) soft-ish cap at somewhere around 2-3GB/month. They don't admit to it, and I don't come close to hitting it, but other customers have found data rates throttled and data service even disconnected -- apparently for over-usage.
Wee hours (Score:2)
If I can't get the 15Mb/sec they advertise, why bother, right?
Have you tried downloading big files between midnight and 6 AM local time to narrow down where the congestion might be? Some satellite ISPs even turn the meter off during those hours to encourage customers to shift their big downloads to the wee hours when their bandwidth is underused.
Unbalance of caps vs. bandwidth (Score:2)
If you're downloading a steady 1 MB/sec (so 8 Mbps, ~half of your 15 Mb/sec "official" cable speed), you'd blow through that 74 GiB in less than an 86400-second day, and hit your 250GB monthly cap in 3 days or so. At 1 Mbps (so FAR less than your 15 Mbps), you'd still hit your monthly cap (though maybe you wouldn't hit 300 GB.) You're probably not going to do that watching TV or downloading movies for yourself, unless you're really watching two full-4.7GB movies a night, but if you're running a good bittorrent connection you probably wouldn't have trouble hitting that.
Hollywood produces about 600 movies/year, so that's a bit under 2 movies/day; you could watch ALL of them on a 1 Mbps download if you didn't mind waiting a couple of days during busy release weeks. (I think that's studio movies, not counting indies that haven't gotten past film festival distribution.) Bollywood produces about twice that many, and the world output is something like 2500 feature films/year. (That's not counting pr0n, or non-studio movies that don't get into theaters, or home movies on YouTube, or whatever... That's a lot larger than Hollywood+Bollywood+Europe+HongKong, and most of it will only get watched on DVD or the Internets.)
No not really (Score:2)
There are plenty of countries that do caps of various kinds. Just because your particular ISP in your particular country doesn't don't assume that there aren't others that do it.
Bell Canada (Score:3)
Bell makes sure that I will never reach their 30gb cap by having so much down time that it's just not possible. Between that and the 1/2km of untwisted, unshielded, 60 year old phone lines between my house and their nearest switch I never have to worry about going over my cap.
Re:Bell Canada (Score:2)
Re:Bell Canada (Score:2)
Re:Bell Canada (Score:2)
It doesn't matter if you are will teksavvy bell or rogers, they will never do the expensive fix. Bell and rogers have the GTA by the balls and they will squeeze every penny they can in maintaining their monopoly of crap. Every time I lose service bell's first answer is to check all my physical connections and re-set the modem/router. I haven't touched the hardware on my end for years, the problems start at the service pole and end at the bloody CEO.
Getting telcos to do the expensive fix (Score:2)
Back in the 1980s, I had two phone lines at home, one for talking, one for a modem for work. The modem line started having trouble, and wouldn't sync up at 2400 baud any more, just 1200, and the telco had trouble with my explanation about the problem ("What's it sound like?" "It sounds like }}}iii}}i}}}") so they told me it wasn't a data-rated business line anyway and blew me off. Eventually it reached the point that it sounded like "KKXKKTHKKHKKSSHHHKKXKK" on voice calls, so they came out and fixed the drop line that was rubbing against a tree trunk and after that it was fine. Another friend who did computer connectivity for a university in Utah had to explain to some of the non-big-city telcos what "phase jitter" sounded like.
I've had a bit of dealing with Bell Canada, mostly when customers wanted to put call centers into old fishing villages where anybody still in town would be happy to take a call center job and spoke good English. Most of the problems were just getting cable diversity into places where it had never been needed before and the geography might not support it, but we also had trouble getting T3 lines into some places, because we wanted an actual whole T3 for data, not just a bundle of voice T1s, and there was mux equipment left over from the early days when T1s were bundled into 6 Mbps T2s which were bundled into T3s, so you really couldn't get all the bits for yourself.
I have many ISP's (Score:5, Funny)
But the fastest one so far is called "NETGEAR", I'm not sure which apartment it belongs to either...
I had to stop using them :-) (Score:2)
For a few years I tended to use "linksys" as my mobile data ISP, and from my apartment I can usually see 5-10 other wifi nodes, so if my DSL was down or my wifi router was hosed, I could borrow from a neighbor, and vice versa. But when 802.11g came out, and especially by the time 802.11n came out, most of the wifi modems started strongly encouraging users to set up authentication; I don't think I can connect to any of my neighbors' networks any more. (And I eventually had to get 802.11n because the signals seem to be enough stronger that my laptop connections would drop if I was in the dining room where my neighbors' routers would drown out my 802.11g.)
Since then coffee shops have become much more reliable sources of connectivity than random linksys boxes ever were, and I've got data on my phone so I can check email if I have to.
No cap, but 1.5 megabit (Score:2)
DSL, I live far enough out that I can't get faster than 1.5 megabit. But at least it's unlimited.
Who the F*** Voted for #4? (Score:3)
"4. Has a cap that is about right"
I think we have some corporate shill infiltrators.
Re:Who the F*** Voted for #4? (Score:3)
Re:Who the F*** Voted for #4? (Score:3)
Re:Who the F*** Voted for #4? (Score:2)
I was on unlimited but for a free speed upgrade we got a cap as part of the 'deal'. It was cheaper than the slow 512k thing and i kept our ip config. I have usage records and very rarely do we go over what the cap was adjusted down to.
Saved money, i can increase the limit but paying for wasted stuff appears pointless.
I would recommend my isp, they are local, i don't have issues with them, and i have a choice of other isp's.
Ummm (Score:3)
It is perfectly possible to have a reasonable cap. If you find that you use a reasonable amount of your bandwidth cap, but still have a good bit left over, that is just about right. It isn't more than you could ever use, but it is more than you do use under normal usage, with some space for unexpected overages.
Re:Who the F*** Voted for #4? (Score:3)
"4. Has a cap that is about right"
I think we have some corporate shill infiltrators.
That was my vote. I pay for a 50GB cap, which is the plan I selected because it is about right. I think i've hit the 50GB once in the school holidays when all 4 kids were downloading stuff, but that was within a few days of the end of the billing period anyway so I didn't worry about it.
The only time I would vote for "too low" is if I needed more bandwidth but the higher cap was more expensive than I could afford, but if that was the case I'd go for an ISP that can give me Unlimited* Bandwidth at a low low price and then complain about them when they enforced the *=Subject to reasonable use policy which I failed to read, but that would make be a fool.
I don't really know what i'd do with that much bandwidth anyway... apart from maybe download movies and games that I hadn't paid for but felt entitled to because information should be free
Things in the 10 GB or more range (Score:2)
I don't really know what i'd do with that much bandwidth anyway... apart from maybe download movies and games that I hadn't paid for
Or for streaming high-definition movies that you have paid for. Or for downloading Blu-ray-sized PS3 games from PlayStation Store.
Re:Things in the 10 GB or more range (Score:2)
I don't really know what i'd do with that much bandwidth anyway... apart from maybe download movies and games that I hadn't paid for
Or for streaming high-definition movies that you have paid for. Or for downloading Blu-ray-sized PS3 games from PlayStation Store.
They don't count towards the monthly total.
I'm confused about your ISP's metering policy (Score:2)
Re:I'm confused about your ISP's metering policy (Score:2)
Some ISPs have made deals with major services like Netflix where traffic to their servers is not counted against quota, in exchange for the service paying a shedload of cash.
These types of deals are one reason for the concern over net neutrality, as they give a big advantage to established players with the benefits of good business relations, effectively making it impossible for newcomers to compete fairly.
SaskTel doesn't cap (Score:2)
SaskTel sells you tiered bandwidth over DSL. Period. No bullshit caps.
Bandwidth? Or traffic? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a poorly phrased question, given that 'bandwidth' in a networking context usually refers to speed (i.e. quantity of data able to be downloaded or uploaded per second on the connection, in kbps or Mbps etc.). Obviously ~every~ connection to the Internet has some maximum speed it can attain. This maximum is either a hard limitation of the technology being used (e.g. ADSL2+ tops out at 24 Mbps), or an artificial cap imposed by the ISP (a 3 Mbps DSL connection on a line physically capable of faster speeds).
The prevalence of artificial speed caps in a market largely depends on the pricing model. In some countries, ISPs generally distinguish the various plans they offer by their speed - e.g. AT&T has 768 kbps/1.5/3.0/6.0 Mbps speed tiers for their DSL product, with prices increasing as you increase speed. Most cable companies and FiOS also have speed-based tiers. In some other places, plans are usually distinguished instead by the quantity of data you are permitted to transfer in a month (traffic caps or transfer limits). So an ISP will offer plans allowing 30/60/100/200/500/etc. GB per month transfer, with prices increasing as you go, but do not distinguish the plans by speed. The speed you get (regardless of the download limit you choose) will generally be 'as fast as the technology will allow' (for xDSL, this means people with short lines in good condition will get better speed than others).
In some ways you could argue that the two type of caps are comparable (because an artificially capped speed will also, obviously, limit the amount you can download in a month). However few people use their connection in a way that saturates the available bandwidth 24/7, so from the end-user's perspective the two are quite different.
I assume this question is referring to traffic caps, not caps on speed. In which case my situation is as follows (I have homes in the US and Australia so have two quite different situations actually):
USA:
Home connection: Cable (Charter), 30 Mbps downstream/4 Mbps upstream; a 300 GB/month transfer cap (but apparently not enforced unless you exceed it by a large amount on a regular basis, and does not attract additional fees)
Mobile connection: LTE, 'fast as the tech will allow'; a 5 GB/month transfer cap (enforced, with extra fees if you exceed it)
Australia:
Home connection: VDSL2 (TransACT), 60 Mbps downstream/15 Mbps upstream; a 200 GB/month transfer cap (enforced, connection will be slowed to 256 kbps once you exceed the cap, however no extra fees are incurred)
Mobile connection: 3G/DC-HSDPA (which is sold as '4G in the US, but isn't), 'fast as the tech will allow', 2 GB/month transfer cap (enforced, with extra fees if you exceed it)
I typically only use 80-100 GB per month on my home connection so neither the 300 GB cap on my US plan or the 200 GB cap on my Australian plan worry me. The Australian plan is slightly cheaper than the US one (and twice the speed). Also, if I were a heavy user I would have options in Australia, as the same ISP offers 400 GB and 1 TB plans I could move to. In the US though my cable provider is the only option available and I'm on their top tier plan already. So if I needed more data then I'd just have to hope they didn't enforce the cap.
The Australian mobile plan is obviously slower and with a lower limit than the US plan. But it's WAY cheaper ($20/month vs $70+), and still meets my needs.
Re:Bandwidth? Or traffic? (Score:2)
Re:Bandwidth? Or traffic? (Score:2)
Yeah generally the word 'cap' isn't used by Australian ISPs to refer to the amount you can download in a month. They tend to use "download limit" "download allowance" etc. "Cap" is a word which, as you say, is misused by (mostly) mobile phone companies and refers to an amount of money (e.g. $39 cap plan ... which is a horrid misuse of the term as $39 is the minimum you can pay, not the maximum!)
Re:Bandwidth? Or traffic? (Score:2)
True, but they are distinguishable in that one is an artificial limitation (limiting the amount that can be downloaded in a month when the technology could actually allow for more) whereas one is a limitation of the technology (hardware and software) itself. They are quite different in how they affect usage and traffic patterns on the ISP's network.
Someone on a speed-uncapped but downloads-per-month capped plan might be fine with it because, although they don't need to download much, when they DO want to download something, they want it fast. OTOH those that are heavy downloaders or don't like monitoring their usage might be happy with a slightly slower speed (imposed artificially or otherwise) provided they don't have to worry about how much in total they download for the month without attracting extra fees.
TLDR: you're technically right (the best kind of right), but in the real world they are quite different from the end user's perspective.
Alaska sucks for internet (Score:2)
Here in Anchorage Alaska, we have basically two options:
1. DSL for about 10Mbps *if* you live in one of the few parts of Anchorage that supports it, or 3.5Mbps for everyone else. There are still entire blocks of the city that can't get higher than 768kbps through this service. Oh, and it's about $100 a month. No cap though.
2. Cable for up to 22Mbps with a 200 GB monthly cap. It's about $115 a month. That's just the internet, and doesn't include actual TV service or anything.
Re:Alaska sucks for internet (Score:2)
Erm. It's Alaska? It's not that bad even - in the Sahara you have to point a tiny antenna towards the open blue sky and hope you get a ping back in about an hour.
Re:Alaska sucks for internet (Score:2)
Capped and on the watch list (Score:2)
Virgin in the UK have a 300GB/month soft limit. If you hit it they start sending you letters literally begging you to use less bandwidth. They can't drop you or have any kind of hard cap because they want to advertise as being "unlimited". All they do is halve your speed after a certain amount downloaded during peak times (which are most of the day and evening).
I asked them to stop sending letters and they did.
Cablevision Ultra101 (Score:2)
No cap.
120Mbps down / 37 Mbps up
$45 / month
nowhere near (Score:2)
I'm not a gamer or p1r4t3 [snicker!] so I'd say I use 10gb of the 150gb I get on USWest/Qwest/CenturyLink/whatever:
http://www.centurylink.com/Pages/AboutUs/Legal/InternetServiceManagement/
My issue is this: 1.5gb down is $45 a month, 7gb down is $50 a month, but since I'm using that "price for life" plan grandfathered from Qwest ($25 a month) it does NOT pencil for me to bump up my plan where a new customer would benefit.
Ireland - pretty good options for me anyway.. (Score:2)
At home I have a Magnet DSL connection, with the line rental bundled. It's fiber to the estate I live in, and have 4Mb down/ 1Mb up. It's a grandfathered connection in the current offerings - i.e. not available. I was chatting with the techs in the company as I know a few of them personally, and they don't have any metering in place on that offering. I regularly saturate both up and down for weeks at a time without problems. Pretty cool for tv shows (that I have already paid for through a sky subscription and a TV license fee).
I would like to have a faster unmetered connection, but at least the one I have is very stable with fantastically low latencies to my common internet places, as monitored by my smokeping installation...
Has a cap I will never meet (Score:2)
And that probably applies to most of the people who answered "Does not cap my bandwidth".
Re:Has a cap I will never meet (Score:2)
Not in Germany. In Europe , they are required by law to keep connections advertised as "Unlimited" to actually be "unlimited".
Hutchison 3G (Score:2)
assuming you get near-perfect coverage (I do), is easily the best mobile ISP in England at the minute. I use a tethered phone and get 24/7 3G through which I pull down at least 300GB/mo. For that, I pay £15. On top of which, I get 3,000 texts (which I hardly ever use) and 300 call minutes (which I never use). I called Three a couple years ago after the local tower fried itself, they fixed it within 24 hours and while I was on the call I asked them what might cause a tower to fry. They told me it would most likely be oversaturation, to which I asked if my downloading 10GB on a quiet day might have something to do with that, and was I breaking any ToU doing that? Their response: "No, you paid for unlimited internet, use as much bandwidth as you want."
Like I said, find a good coverage spot, if you have it in your home, great - Three don't cap and they don't charge for going over.
Re:Hutchison 3G (Score:2)
Addendum: if you're considering a high-traffic mobile connection, Three still offer PAYG voice SIMs, those are what you want. Stick it in a phone, tether it to your computer and when you top up, get the All-In-One 15 package.
Comment removed (Score:2)
My ISP does not cap my bandwidth ... (Score:3)
... but the router I got from them does.
It is a standard Ethernet router. No malice here. It is just crappy, and I am too cheap and lazy to buy a new one. I don't do anything where I would need over 40 Mb/s anyway.
They used to (Score:2)
Comcrap used to cap my account at 250 gigs. They even put me on probation for 6 months for going over. "Can I pay more money to move more data?" "NO!!!" Morons. I wanted to buy what they had to sell and they wouldn't sell it to me. Morons is too good. Idiots. So I consistently ran up 245-249 gigs per month every month. I'd torrent linux distributions to make sure I hit the mark. Then this note popped up on my account: "Note: Enforcement of the 250GB data consumption threshold is currently suspended." So now I just move what I want. Been like that for a while now.
The stupid thing about their old policy is that I would have gladly paid a reasonable amount of money to move more data. If they'd told me I could have had an uncapped account for twice the price, I would have taken it. If they'd put a higher cap on higher speed service, I would have gone that route. But why would I pay for 100mbit service (which they offer in my area) if it has a 250 gig cap?
Re:They used to (Score:2)
Yay for Australia! (Score:2)
We have this NBN nonsense rolling out atm, promising 100mbit speeds but if I look on the plan, nearly all of Perth's surrounding suburbs (including mine) are not listed *at all* up to the end of 2017.
So if we ever get the thing, which is incredibly unlikely, it will be obsolete by the time we get it.
Meanwhile I can get over 30mbit on my 4G on my phone - but that has a 3GB cap. So I lose either way.
"Effectively caps me" (Score:2)
This is the best poll option EVER. I would click on it repeatedly for days if I weren't so neurotypical.
Just switched due to caps (Score:2)
TOR hasn't gotten me throttled yet (Score:2)
Cap (Score:2)
My ISP used to have an actual capped plan. You could elect to go for 500MB of monthly download for $50/month or whatever it was back at the dawn of widespread ADSL availability in Australia, and if you went over that you got charged an additional $something/MB, but it was capped at $100. An actual unlimited plan cost $75/month. (I'm probably way off with those figures as it was a long time ago, but you get the idea)
These days my mobile provider sells me a plan with a ~$70 cap, but instead of the cap referring to the maximum possible spend per month, it refers to the minimum. Marketing department is getting creative with words.
Business account... (Score:2)
No caps. For real. No BS. No filtering either.
Why cap internet usage? (Score:4, Interesting)
Imagine if the power companies decided to cap its users. "Sorry but only 200kw/hr per month. Any higher and we either turn you off or throttle your usage by opening a circuit breaker if you use more than 2kw." People would form lynch mobs. And its no secret that power grids are already taxed in many parts of the US. How about if gas companies told you: you have 1000 cubic feet of gas for this month. its either heat your home or cook or have hot water, you cant have all three. The ISP's can happily cry about how their infrastructure is overloaded by file sharing and Netflix yet do nothing to actually invest in more capacity. They instead pander to the share holders to make sure this quarters profits are up, customer be dammed. Yes people can happily survive without the internet but people could also survive without gas and electric and have done so for thousands of years. We have gotten to a point where the internet is starting to become very important in our lives and one day it may be difficult to live without it.
Just a tidbit about power throttling:
Back in high school shop class (I took commercial/residential electrical installation). there was this metal collar that fit onto a meter pan between the pan and meter. It had two 20 amp circuit breakers sticking out of it (the push to reset type). The idea was if someone was on a social assistance program and couldn't afford power, this collar was installed and gave just enough power to run some lights, TV, refrigerator, a fan and *maybe* a single AC unit. This way the person received free subsidized power that they couldn't abuse without modifying any building wiring. If they used too much and tripped the breaker all they needed to do was go to the meter and reset the breaker.
Re:Why cap internet usage? (Score:2)
Now that I think about it, I believe the power throttle collar was for people who had their power cut and couldn't afford to have it turned back on yet depended on electric for medical conditions. e.g. if they were diabetic, insulin must be kept refrigerated so it was enough for a refrigerator. Maybe it was for both. I forget.
Sonic.net FTW! (Score:2)
Support your local 'independent' ISPs if you have one. Start one if you haven't.
Hi, Dane.
No cap.... now (Score:2)
Luckily for me my ISP, as of mid June, dropped their caps (which were pitiful by modern standards), so I'm now unlimited.
It hasn't been long enough for me to assume that's really going to stay that way.
Was on 18/2m cable modem but only had 50 GB usage (and both directions counted). I was supplementing it with an additional 100 GB of usage for an additional $25/month.
Will be saving a good chunk of money yearly now with this new plan.
Re:Missing option (Score:3)
Re:Missing option (Score:2)
I was going to respond and say the exact same thing. Comcast keeps claiming that they have a 250 GB/month cap, but I am going well over this every single month (sometimes double) and I have never once gotten an extra charge or even a notice that I have broken the cap.
You're lucky!
I'm not so sure that my Comcast connection can handle 250 GB/month. I never seem to get the bandwidth I paid for. I miss FIOS :(
Re:Missing option (Score:2)
I've never had FIOS and I'm not likely to ever get it at this rate. When they announced that there would be FIOS coming to Seattle, it turns out that I live literally 2 blocks outside of one of the areas that they're doing their test in. So, while people 2 blocks away will likely have FIOS access available next year, I might never get it.
I personally blame the duopoly of Comcast and Centurylink for holding it up. But, in Centurylink's defense, they are improving the situation here and I see their trucks all over the place working on their infrastructure, so I suspect that the connection speeds should be improving. Additionally, they're making Seattle the location of their regional headquarters, so that should serve as some impetus to improve the quality locally, if for no other reason than to not embarrass themselves.
Re:Missing option (Score:2)
Every month they send me junk mail announcing how awesome FIOS is, and I should sign up for it. Every few months I check it out only to learn FIOS is not available in my area. This has been going on for years.
Re:Missing option (Score:2)
A few years ago, Verizon was advertising the future availability of FiOS in Kent, and the ads indicated that we should call in to register our interest. When I called, they refused to record my interest because my address was not in their database. By the time I moved into my house, they were no longer planning to offer FiOS in Kent.
Last month, a pair of CenturyLink reps stopped by my house to tell me that they had recently run fiber to the junction box in front of my house, and that as a result they could now offer me 15Mbps DSL (less than half the speed I get from Comcast). I asked if they would sell me fiber, and indicated that I'd be willing to pay them to run fiber the rest of the way to my house or even buy the materials and do the installation myself; they said no.
This is why Comcast has no incentive to offer good service, and why I stay with them anyway.
What cool stuff do you do with 15Mbps ? (Score:2)
I've got 3 Mbps DSL, and it's enough to watch TV on occasion and to watch YouTube at high-res. If 15 Mbps isn't enough for you, you must be doing some Really Cool Stuff with that extra bandwidth, and I'd be interested to find out what it is.
Watching multiple TV programs at once isn't something I count as cool... I suppose "Downloading DVD Linux Distros Instantly" is sort of cool, but I don't do that very often. Not getting enough upstream bandwidth from one service or the other is something I can see making a difference in stuff you can do. The questions I'd have been asking CenturyLink would have been about monthly download caps, and whether I could get a static IP address, and whether they had any stupid limits on running "servers" at home, i.e. whether they're selling a real Internet connection I can do cool stuff with, or just a consumer media consumption delivery service.
Re:What cool stuff do you do with 15Mbps ? (Score:2)
If 15 Mbps isn't enough for you, you must be doing some Really Cool Stuff with that extra bandwidth, and I'd be interested to find out what it is.
Watching multiple TV programs at once isn't something I count as cool...
3Mbps may meet the needs of you and whoever else you live with, but my family needs more than 15Mbps to support our normal internet use. My wife complains enough about long video buffering times as it is; I can't imagine going to slower service.
Get the internet service that suits your needs, just don't pretend that other people's needs should not exceed your own, and don't pretend that they should only exceed your own needs if they're doing something "cool".
I suppose "Downloading DVD Linux Distros Instantly" is sort of cool
A far more frequent need is game downloads. I don't want to have to wait overnight to play a game I've purchased on Steam. If we assume that you can get a constant 3Mbps at all times, it would still take you an entire month to download my Steam library (approximately 1TB), doing nothing other than downloading from Steam for the entire month. Even if I were willing to do that, I could not monopolize our internet connection like that without my wife making me sleep on the couch. (It's not so far-fetched to need to re-download my Steam library; e.g. my hard drive could die, or get reformatted intentionally, or get stolen, or whatever.)
monthly download caps, and whether I could get a static IP address, and whether they had any stupid limits on running "servers" at home, i.e. whether they're selling a real Internet connection I can do cool stuff with
I used to run a server at home; a Comcast guy I talked to said they didn't really care so long as I wasn't uploading a lot. I ran irssi in a screen session, and Minecraft, and I traded backup space with someone in Canada. The problem is, my office gets warm enough between my desktop and my wife's desktop without another machine running, so between the cost of power for the server and the cost of extra cooling required, I determined it would be cheaper to use a VPS. Since then I haven't needed or even wanted any of the things you mention.
I don't run a Minecraft server anymore, and my irssi session is running on an EC2 t1.micro that costs me $5/month and has had much better uptime than my home server ever did. In general it has been much easier for me to do "cool stuff" (experiment with new software, test new configurations, whatever) using EC2 instances (which I only need to run for an hour or two) than it was to do those same kinds of experiments on the physical server I was running in my house.
I guess that was just a long-winded explanation for why I don't really care these days whether my ISP gives me a static IP or prohibits running servers. I certainly care about a monthly download cap, but if the ISP can't meet my download speed needs, why should I bother asking about that?
Re:Missing option (Score:2)
It took five seconds of confusion trying to recall when Verizon set up in the UK before I realised that your Kent is not my Kent.
Re:Missing option (Score:2)
Re:Missing option (Score:3, Funny)
I wonder how many other people interpreted "bandwidth" as a monthly data limit. I suppose the units are technically accurate, but the concept of bandwidth should be like how fast you can get water through a pipe (aka how big the pipe is), not how much you are rationed.
(Is there a data drought)?
Re:Missing option (Score:2)
Re:Missing option (Score:5, Interesting)
If I use well known speed testers, I get about what comcast says I should.
On the other hand, if I use more obscure testers, the speeds are a LOT lower, but are consistent between different tests.
So I tried the more well known tests again, but I obfuscated them so comcast wouldn't know what I was doing.
Guess what. The speeds went way down to the same thing the more obscure tests were saying.
That seems to indicate that comcast is actually giving you a much lower speed than advertised, but try to protect themselves from law suits by saying 'up to' on their rates, but will temporarily boost you to what you paid for if they detect you trying to run a test on them. (That's pretty much standard practice for a con man trying to prevent you from learning about the con.)
Re:Missing option (Score:4, Interesting)
It's pretty well established that Comcast cheats on speed tests. They have that feature where they boost the first bit of a download to a much higher rate, and that tends to have bandwidth testers showing an unreasonably rosy picture of the situation. I guess that might not technically be cheating, but it's something that people should realize, you need a longer test to determine what you're really getting as the first bit will always be substantially faster.
Re:Missing option (Score:5, Interesting)
A great example I have of that on my ISP is that a friend of mine had a large file he wanted to download from his webserver. His transfer was taking forever, so I jokingly suggested that he copy it to a directory called speedtest and download it with HTTP. He does and BAM the file screams down. At the same time with the same file, just with different paths and file names (he just shortened it to save the effort in typing the name), he had the original transfer at 50 KB/s or so and the new one at 2 MB/s! I've done that many times to great success.
Re:Missing option (Score:3)
I'm never sure if it is the actual site bottlenecking, just Comcast's connection bottlenecking to that site, or Comcast throttling bandwidth for certain traffic.
"up to" (Score:2)
Well with cable being a shared resource, they cant guarantee it anyway.
Re:Missing option (Score:2)
What I would give for a 50 Mbps connection. Around here the best I can get is 5mbps in the middle of a major city.
Re:Missing option (Score:2)
Anybody who did, should turn in his /. account.
Re:Missing option (Score:2)
I think that may be the reason Comcast and maybe some others have a bandwidth cap they don't enforce. If they started adding charges on your bill, it might prompt you to switch service and as long as they're getting paid and can't get paid more by another customer for the capacity you use, they want to avoid that. If they became constrained because too many users and they then couldn't serve new customers, they'd probably charge you. If the only effect is a degree of slowness sometimes (but never intolerable) they'd be anxious to charge you more even if it meant pushing you off the service to be replaced by two or more less data-hungry customers.
A lot of people think their service is slow because it takes a long time to download a file. That's not necessarily true. I find that the time it takes to download a file depends mostly on the site I'm downloading from. Some of them have slow or overloaded servers, or they may have for shit connections that are dropping a lot of packets. The way to know if it's your service choking you is to download a bunch of stuff at the same time. Say movies to two or three different TVs on your network. If it's a lot better when you are just doing one, it's either your feed or in your house. (Maybe your cheap-ass router can't handle it.)
Switch to whom? (Score:2)
If [Comcast] started adding charges on your bill, it might prompt you to switch service
To whom? Dial-up? Satellite and cellular have caps and strictly enforce them.
Re:Switch to whom? (Score:2)
What are you doing with your bandwidth? (Score:2)
I'm still running 3 Mbps because I haven't seen a good reason to switch up to 6, even though my wife now has a faster laptop. I can watch TV on it (though watching TV on my actual TV via Tivo and cable works better because they're not breaking the show into little bits and keeping you from skipping over commercials), and I can watch YouTube at high-res, and that's all the media-consumption that I've wanted. Occasionally I want to download Linux distros or something, but I mostly do that at work (where it's admittedly nicer to be on the shared T3 than on the 10 Mbps segment at my desk), and usually I'm only doing incremental updates anyway, so the computer's more of a bottleneck than the download.
So what really cool stuff are you doing that needs more than 25 Mbps?
Re:Missing option (Score:2)
Agreed. People now confuse bandwidth as a data limit. Ironically it has displaced the previous confused interpretation, "the amount of data that can be carried from one point to another in a given time period." Bandwidth, in regards to transmitting data, is the range of frequencies within a given band.
Re:Missing option (Score:2)
Bandwidth to electronics engineers is the useable range of frequencies.
Bandwidth in computing is simply the rate of transfer of information. Generally the computing people don't need to worry about just how the physical side of communications works. Frames just go in one end of the mysterious cable and come out the other.
Comment removed (Score:2)
Re:Missing option (Score:4, Interesting)
Yep... clearly there's a some confusion about bandwidth v. usage.
My understanding was that Comcast capped my usage (I have a "Blast Plus" account) at 250GB/month. Seems to reset every month at 0000Z on the first.
I monitor my own usage fairly carefully, I think last month I was a bit over 300GB. But: Comcast announced [comcast.com] that they are temporarily suspending enforcement of their cap - as of May, 2012. They have indicated that they are going to replace the cap with "new approaches", but there doesn't seem to be any mention of this since that date.
There's clearly tension between the cost of the plant necessary to support large users of data and the profit of the corporation. Without diving into that debate, I will relate what I've heard in discussions with a few other technically-oriented customers: they really didn't engineer their network to support any significant level of symmetric usage (it's designed for some multiples of download traffic over upload traffic), and the whole question of traffic shaping was a response to an actual "fear" that their network would be trashed by BitTorrent users.
I don't know whether that's actually true. But I do know that ultimately, all resources on the Internet are shared, and that without sufficient bandwidth there is lots of potential that won't be attained. I have some level of sympathy for the idea that someone may have to be throttled to keep costs for usage roughly equal for all customers of a particular class, or that pricing might have to be "reasonably" adjusted based on usage - especially peak usage (I do offsite vaulting exclusively between 0100 and 0500 local time).
I'd hope that Comcast and the other ISPs realize that the only way they are going to be able to make their business case to their customers if they operate transparently - and I know that's not the initial strategy for any large corporation. I don't think most people have an issue with paying "reasonable" fees - but, again, in the telecomm/service industry in general, that's generally how things are priced.
They are going to have to figure out how to make some profits on what anyone reading this already considers a "utility" - they sure aren't getting revenue from my pageviews of the ads on their home page. However, I've heard too many stories of how Internet connectivity delivered as a pure utility (especially by non-profits such as municipal governments) provides better service, higher bandwidth (sic) and lower costs than investor-owned corporations; if I could vote (if it were practical in my section of Boston) for that, as a public good, it'd make this discussion go away.
Re:Missing option (Score:2)
I have the opposite situation. Until some time last year, Comcast had a cap of 250GB on my account, but they removed it and simultaneously bumped me up from 12Mbps to roughly 20Mbps. I've had a few more bumps since then, and right now I average 30Mbps, while my plan still says "12Mbps". When I was still subject to the cap I only went over it one time by a couple of GBs, and I never got a nasty letter or email about it; in fact I only knew about it because I checked the usage meter on my account page.
I still don't know why they keep bumping up my speed (and I'm not complaining!), but whenever I try to sign up for the 50Mbps plan I'm told it is not available in my area. I asked a tech about that when my modem was replaced recently and he said there's no technical reason I can't get 50 or even 100Mbps. Apparently there are businesses near me with those speeds, using the same modem I now have. He suggested I just let them keep bumping me up and continue to charge me for the 12Mbps plan.
Re:Missing option (Score:2)
You're lucky not to live in Canada! My ISP (Rogers) was charging me $50/mo for internet service, but there'd be an added $100/mo fee if I went over the cap. (yes, the fee scaled up to $100, but typically hit $100 pretty fast). This was ludicrous.
I've switched to a competitive ISP (Thank goodness they exist) that Rogers techs try to continuously dislodge by disconnecting customers locally, but though the data rate is 1/3 that Rogers provided for the same price, there is no cap. Good.
Re:Missing option (Score:2)
Here in Norway ISP's doing crap like that loose customers fast.
Re:Missing option (Score:2)
Re:No cap on main line, but mobile is capped at 5G (Score:3)
Please add tag "whiner", I don't have any cap either. 10/100 Mbps up/down for me.
They'd be much better off with BitTorrent (Score:2)
Comcast would be much better off encouraging everybody to run BitTorrent so they weren't downloading new material from the outside world as much. It's not like your neighbors weren't all also downloading the latest Breaking Bad episodes...