My ISP just sent me an email stating that they would appreciate it if I used my internet less, because it degrades the service for other customers. FYI cable service, 10Mb down 1Mb up. The email specifically states that if I run a newsgroup, server, or website off of my PC that they would like me to stop because in a vaguely written statement in their agreement, anything that may hog the internet and possibly degrades other customers performance is against the rules. Ever heard of anything like this? They will definitely get a call tomorrow, but for now I am dumbfounded. What kind of shit ISP, or any company, says "Hey we know you pay for this and all, but please use it less."? I cant wait to hear their explanation.

My ISP just sent me an email stating that they would appreciate it if I used my internet less, because it degrades the service for other customers. FYI cable service, 10Mb down 1Mb up. The email specifically states that if I run a newsgroup, server, or website off of my PC that they would like me to stop because in a vaguely written statement in their agreement, anything that may hog the internet and possibly degrades other customers performance is against the rules. Ever heard of anything like this? They will definitely get a call tomorrow, but for now I am dumbfounded. What kind of shit ISP, or any company, says "Hey we know you pay for this and all, but please use it less."? I cant wait to hear their explanation.

First of all are you sure it is real and not a scam? Second I don't see how they have a great leg to stand on here if you are operating within the stated 10 mb down 1 mb up, if somehow your website managed to steal more power they would have argument. Third what does it matter if you are spending your time downloading porn or up loading data to a business/personal site?The bandwidth is used either way why should it matter how. Fourth I know companies like comcast offer up business service but they won't give out business service (T1 or T3) service to small business run out of residential areas (or at least they didn't the last time I checked) because they worry about a person selling their signal to neighbors. So I think this is a matter of a company not being able to deliver on its promises and looking for scapegoats.

Do you happen to know what attracted their attention? You don't have some compromised PC engaged in DDoS attacks or anything like that? Did the email actually come from the ISP, and does it provide a specific point of contact?

The ISP's technical problem is that ISPs can't readily provision service in a way that makes your Internet actions truly independent of the others around you. Most of that involves oversold capacity. But, some flavors of network capacity aren't as "simple" as spending infinite amounts of money (e.g. IP space allocation from the numbering authorities, route table manipulation capability in current edge routers, AS#s capacity for that matter, etc.).

Besides technical constraints, there's the "stupid human tricks" issue. End users are generally not all that sophisticated. Most of their users don't know how much bandwidth they use, where it goes, how or why. In fact, most ISP employees have much the same limitations, having been born and raised on the same planet as the end users. There's only a small subset of people at any given ISP who know how things 'really' work. You will often see "blind leading the stupid"-type situations. To whatever extent you are a clueful user, you might be disgusted at just how hard you have to work before you get someone with clue to discuss your vague piece of email.

Just got off the phone. Chewed through three supervisors, the first rep and first supervisor were not even aware that the company sends these emails. Got absolutely nowhere. They just kept repeating that they were sorry I received the email, but it is against their policy to use my bandwidth too much. This kind of sucks because my only other option is to go satellite, there is nothing else in my area. From the email:

Excessive sustained bandwidth usage places a burden on the network and is in violation of the Insightbb.com Acceptable Use Policy (see sections vii and viii. ) which explains that you may not:
viii. restrict, inhibit, interfere with or otherwise disrupt or cause a performance degradation or manipulation, regardless of intent, purpose or knowledge, to the Service or any Insight (or Insight supplier) host, server, backbone network, node or service, or otherwise cause a performance degradation or manipulation to any Insight (or Insight supplier) facilities used to deliver the Service.

I told them that yes I do host some files on my PC which are completely legal musical recordings done by myself and this does utilize my upload bandwidth and is why I pay for broadband internet. Sometimes I just hate life, this is one of those days.

They are probably just sending out those emails trying to strong arm anybody that is willing to listen so they can free up bandwidth.

I doubt they would ever take action or even look at your account.

I wouldn't be surprised if they sent it to all of their clients, regardless of level of usage.

Actually Im the only person of about five Ive asked so far that got that email, and even the people at the company I talked to said I was the first person to ever call about it. Oh yeah, as to what JS said I dont even use the whole bandwidth let alone more. I limit it to 90K so roommates can surf the web without it being slow.

If there's no specific point of contact and the generic customer support contact doesn't know anything about it, I'd ignore it and assume it was some new kind of spam.

Its not spam, the company acknowledged that the email was real. They didnt know of anybody ever calling about it before me though.

Its not spam, the company acknowledged that the email was real. They didnt know of anybody ever calling about it before me though.

What is the company? Is it a major cable company or small comapny trying to compete with the big dogs?

Insight. I dont think they are one of the really big companies, but they have this area monopolized until you get closer to Chicago. They bought the area about five years ago from Cablevision, and initially they kicked ass. They ripped up every cable wire in the county and put fibre optic lines in, and provided cheaper packages with better performance. Just a month or two ago they more than doubled the internet pipe, apparantly they werent prepared for the load.

Its not spam, the company acknowledged that the email was real. They didnt know of anybody ever calling about it before me though.
Ahhh... I was confused. Reading:

Just got off the phone. Chewed through three supervisors, the first rep and first supervisor were not even aware that the company sends these emails.
it sounded like you crawled up the chain to get to the bottom of this. I just wouldn't have bothered if the initial guy didn't know about it (and didn't want to get to the bottom of it). Just take down the name and note the date, but that's true for any tech support call. If they don't provide a specific contact, and can't even communicate how to handle this to their call center folks, then I'd just keep on doing what I'm doing. :)

I read Comcast will shut off your account if you use to much bandwidth. How much downloading are you doing per month?

Its the upload they are mad about, not download. I dont download much of anything, about ten ringtones today for my cell. Sometimes a new linux distro or some music from my friends, legal music that they made. My upload is not consistent though, 0-6 gigs a day I guess.

http://64.111.216.18/ul/1808-jb.JPG

I just talked to a friend last night who works for Comcast and is decently informed. She said the fight that companies are taking up is the wrong one.

She said that the biggest problem is sites like You Tube (streaming video) and places that provide RSS feeds (My Space types), and the use of search robots (google). Everytime a consumer checks out those sites it puts a drain on bandwidth. However those are the most popular sites and Cable companies have no ability to attack them so they try to bully consumers. But the fact is even if they limited their biggest bandwidth users on the consumer level it wouldn't even dent the issue.

The bottomline is the consumer base is not generally informed about DSL vs. Cable (or higher connections). People see that DSL can be as much as half the price and expect cable to be competitive price wise but it can't. So cable companies instead of educating the public on the differences try to push speed which is important but not the only difference. Thus when Speed slows consumers feel ripped off and call in to complain or threaten to quit. So if they would just explain "twisted pair" vs. the 21st century technology they could calm their angry mobs and show the real justification in price difference.

Its the upload they are mad about, not download. I dont download much of anything, about ten ringtones today for my cell. Sometimes a new linux distro or some music from my friends, legal music that they made. My upload is not consistent though, 0-6 gigs a day I guess.
1 Mbit/sec = ~450 MBytes/hour, so a peak of 6 GBytes/day may make them think you're running a dedicated server. By making a lot of noise, you may have attracted more attention to your usage than would otherwise be the case. Looking at:

http://www.insightbb.com/terms_conditions/default.aspx

They have typical overreaching T&Cs that deny essentially everything. They can almost always come up with some lame reason to cancel you if you're too much of a PITA. Be careful if you're mostly ok with them and don't feel like shopping around for alternatives just yet. You may want to check out:

http://www.broadbandreports.com/forum/insight and specifically
http://www.broadbandreports.com/forum/remark,17676817

and see what others have had to say.

Comcast's bandwidth policy leaves subscribers in the dark
By Matthew Fordahl, The Associated Press

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- By all accounts, George Nussbaum demands a lot from his Internet connection. He streams video and transfers large files from his office. His family downloads movie trailers and his stepson listens to and buys music online.
Nussbaum subscribes to his cable TV provider's high-speed Internet service, which, he thought, was built for such high-bandwidth activities. Then, in November, he got a letter from the provider, Comcast Corp., ordering him to dial down his usage or face service termination.

Until last summer, the service was advertised as "unlimited."

But Comcast, citing a fuzzy "acceptable use" policy, is now cracking down on the heaviest users on the premise that their consumption could degrade neighbors' service.

A number of broadband providers are beginning to offer different tiers of service, charging high-volume users more. Some, particularly wireless providers, charge extra for heavy use.

Comcast, critics say, is trying to impose limits without telling consumers that the service is limited.

Nussbaum, who at first had no idea how many gigabytes he consumed, was willing to cut back. He called to find out by how much, but customer service had no answer. Then he asked how much he used. Again, Comcast wouldn't provide a number.

In December, Nussbaum got a second letter threatening suspension or termination, so he decided to sign up for a digital subscriber line offered by his phone company, Verizon Communications.

"How am I supposed to know what my limits are?" said Nussbaum, an engineer from Plaistow, N.H. "It was actually kind of ridiculous."

Comcast's letters have been a hot topic of discussion on BroadbandReports.com, a popular online forum. More than 5,000 messages have been posted since the warnings started arriving last summer. Most offer comments, though some are reports of having received a warning.

"They have the right to control their service and offer different services to different people," said David Willis, an analyst at the Meta Group. "The problem is you can't keep changing the rules all the time."

Most broadband companies have vague policies, but Comcast's appears to be the most aggressively enforced. It provides no tools for monitoring bandwidth, and does not give any specific guidance.

Comcast says the few people who receive the warning letters typically consume 100 times more than the average user.

"The total number of customers who have had their service disconnected is well below one one-hundredth of one percent of our overall Internet customer base," spokeswoman Dana Ryan said, reading from a prepared statement.

But the nation's largest cable company refused to reveal the average consumption among its 4.8 million high-speed Internet subscribers. Ryan also would not say how many received warnings or exactly how many have had their accounts suspended or terminated.

A senior Comcast technician, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of losing his job, said letter-triggering usage is typically about 100 gigabytes a month, though it varies from city to city.

A hundred gigabytes of usage a month may not strain the system but some abusers, he said, consume more than a terabyte of data each month -- equal to about 1,000 gigabytes, or 1,000 copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Many run Web servers or offer copyright music or videos. Thirty minutes of high-quality video can consume up to a gigabyte.

Excessive use is a problem for Comcast and other providers because they must predict bandwidth use and buy the capacity. If too much is consumed, not only can the local network bog down; it also could affect Comcast's profit margin.

The enforcement comes as cable companies are trying to maintain their lead over DSL, which offers high-speed access over phone lines. Comcast and several other cable firms are doubling their top download speeds to 3 megabits per second, which makes it easier for users to consume more bandwidth and cross any limits.

DSL providers are fighting back by dropping prices -- as low as $27 a month, compared to Comcast's $43. The phone companies stress that they don't restrict usage.

They're less likely to do so because digital subscriber lines are not shared until they reach the phone company's facility. Cable users share the same data pipe with their neighbors.

"I am not aware of any DSL provider that limits the number of bytes available or charges more if a circuit is used more," said Verizon spokesman Eric Rabe.

But cable companies have a history of limiting use. Until recently, for example, Comcast specifically barred its residential customers from using virtual private networking software, which creates secure connections for telecommuters, unless they upgraded to the business plan.

"The cable companies in the U.S. have this history of trying to engineer multiple, tiers, multiple grades of service," Willis said. "So far they've been highly unsuccessful in doing that."

People who received Comcast's bandwidth abuse letters and were willing to discuss their usage patterns publicly were shocked at the "Twilight Zone" experiences they had with customer support.

Randy Jackson of Colonia, N.J. received form letters with blank date fields. Longtime subscriber Tallon Nishihata of suburban Tacoma, Wash., said his letters referred him to a pricey business-grade service that's not available in his area.

One man, a British expatriate in Philadelphia who used to transfer home movies to family in Europe, asked for anonymity because he feared Comcast would unplug him, leaving him with nothing but a dial-up connection because he doesn't qualify for DSL.

"They play the card that I've been causing problems for people in the neighborhood," he said. "If that's the case, that's fair enough, but show me some evidence."
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/04033/268244.stm

She said that the biggest problem is sites like You Tube (streaming video) and places that provide RSS feeds (My Space types), and the use of search robots (google). Everytime a consumer checks out those sites it puts a drain on bandwidth. However those are the most popular sites and Cable companies have no ability to attack them so they try to bully consumers. But the fact is even if they limited their biggest bandwidth users on the consumer level it wouldn't even dent issue.
They're not a problem. Access to them is the reason customers buy high speed broadband services. Providers like YouTube/Google buy and provision tons of bandwidth to facilitate all this at their end.


The bottomline is the consumer base is not generally informed about DSL vs. Cable (or higher connections). People see that DSL can be as much as half the price and expect cable to be competitive price wise but it can't. So cable companies instead of educating the public on the differences try to push speed which is important but not the only difference. Thus when Speed slows consumers feel ripped off and call in to complain or threaten to quit. So if they would just explain "twisted pair" vs. the 21st century technology they could calm their angry mobs and show the real justification in price difference.
If you're referring to cable's deployments of optical fibre to the home, it's definitely a 20th century technology, though there's still a whole llot of even-older 20th-century coax around for that last mile. If you want 21st century transports, think stuff like WiMAX and friends. And, keep in mind that one can get a -lot- more out of good ol' twisted pair than what has thus far been generally deployed within the U.S. You certainly don't need fibre to the home for just 10 Mbit/sec.

Do you happen to know what attracted their attention? You don't have some compromised PC engaged in DDoS attacks or anything like that? Did the email actually come from the ISP, and does it provide a specific point of contact?

The ISP's technical problem is that ISPs can't readily provision service in a way that makes your Internet actions truly independent of the others around you. Most of that involves oversold capacity. But, some flavors of network capacity aren't as "simple" as spending infinite amounts of money (e.g. IP space allocation from the numbering authorities, route table manipulation capability in current edge routers, AS#s capacity for that matter, etc.).

Besides technical constraints, there's the "stupid human tricks" issue. End users are generally not all that sophisticated. Most of their users don't know how much bandwidth they use, where it goes, how or why. In fact, most ISP employees have much the same limitations, having been born and raised on the same planet as the end users. There's only a small subset of people at any given ISP who know how things 'really' work. You will often see "blind leading the stupid"-type situations. To whatever extent you are a clueful user, you might be disgusted at just how hard you have to work before you get someone with clue to discuss your vague piece of email.

You sound very knowledgeable in the area of computers

Everyone oversells their bandwidth in a lot of contexts. No one expects or provisions for 100% end-to-end utilization. That's not a problem particular to ISPs by any means. It's just a fact of life. Computers continue to enable good and bad usage patterns in ways that people just haven't fathomed.

Trying to account for and ration bandwidth intelligently is a hard problem. Besides the issue of multiple customers sharing the same last mile (where cable companies end up imposing more management on the CPE, but CPE management is hard), there's all sorts of other challenges. If you are too restrictive, retransmits and re-requests can suck upmore bandwidth and require more buffers and more expensive hardware than if you'd just let the request go through unfettered. That's just the tip of the "queueing theory can be a bitch" iceberg. Blocking every behavior that you don't know on a widespread basis just stifles the next new innovation and screws the golden pooch. And you don't even want to get into the technical and social issues with accounting and pricing.

If you think about all the complexities too hard, you'd never get to market. Designing and deploying a network is an exercise in "build it as best you can, hope it works out for you, and work out unplanned kinks and details later".

Mxy, you violated the agreement by directly linking to their user agreement lol. That is the most fucked set of policies I have ever read. If they terminate your account and you sign up again they will charge you $500 for signing back up, and terminate your new account. It is against policy to receive spam emails. It is against policy to post the same message on more than five forums. It is against policy to change the topic in a forum. It is against policy for somebody who doesnt live here to use the internet on my PC. It is against policy to use obscene language in forums or IMs.

Im going to switch service sometime soon. Aside from this, a couple months ago they didnt send me a bill or I somehow didnt get it. I realized 'hey, its been a while I should call them.' I called, I did miss a bill, I told them I was mailing a check that day and they said that was fine. The next day they shut off my service, and over a week later I got a notice in the mail saying that I was past due and my service would be cancelled a week after that if I hadnt paid yet. When I talked to them on the phone, they just said that is their policy. Since I had already mailed a check for two months, but had to pay by credit card over the phone to get my service back, they actually got a couple hundred bucks extra from me.

Mxy my point was really basic, most people don't understand why DSL is limited. I simply saying DSL is cheaper because of the limited range. DSL's technology is great if you live close to the sub station or whatever they call it but the farther you live away, the more chance for interference and loss of integrity due to distance issues.

My other point was that companies have a tendancy of over promising, then when they under deliver they look for scapegoats like Uxka. just because they Bushed the whole deal we suffer.

I agree twisted pair is still a highly useful technology and is hardly the problem, it's a matter of using it properly. Plus based on the fact that the general infrastructure in the country outlived its usefulness 30 or more years ago, I doubt there is a rush to fix the last mile of the computer industry first.

Mxy my point was really basic, most people don't understand why DSL is limited. I simply saying DSL is cheaper because of the limited range. DSL's technology is great if you live close to the sub station or whatever they call it but the farther you live away, the more chance for interference and loss of integrity due to distance issues.
Yeah, but the range constraints with twisted pair deployment become less of an issue all the time, relative to cable or other wired services. I get irritated seeing talking heads for various fibre products (e.g. AT&T U-verse) claiming that they -had- to build a new fibre network to get, say, 6 Mbit/sec to your door, when you could generally get that with VDSL2 and not subsidize a new network to your door.


I agree twisted pair is still a highly useful technology and is hardly the problem, it's a matter of using it properly. Plus based on the fact that the general infrastructure in the country outlived its usefulness 30 or more years ago, I doubt there is a rush to fix the last mile of the computer industry first.
Very true, though I suspect the last mile of the computer industry is a simpler problem because of wireless. The last time they tried to beam the water and sewage system over the airwaves, all they got was rain. :)