Question for the ISP employees

[wildcatgrrl]

There is another message board I go to, not customer-related. One of the posters there, let's call her "D", was complaining about her internet company "I". She said they told her that she was using too much bandwidth and affecting her neighbors' service with all her downloads. I asked hubby about this, since we go through the same company. He said as far as he knew, we had unlimited downloads-at least we've never exceeded our limit if there is one.

D then goes on to say they download so much because her hubby is a pirate (put in teeny tiny letters like no one's going to see it). Not the best thing to admit online, eh?

Anyway, I guess my question is 2-part: 1. Do ISPs usually have download limits, and 2. Is it common for people to exceed them if so, and if not, just how frickin frackin much do you have to download for your ISP to CALL YOU about it? That seems unreal to me.

[Raerlynn]

They have bandwidth caps, which are hard coded and cannot be exceeded.

There are some services where bandwidth is shared throughout an area, like cable internet, and some wireless bands.

[stormtreader]

Even the unlimited providers reserve the right to say youre downloading too much - i think it can affect everyone elses performance by tying up the line, and they also dont want you running a business on a home-use contract.
Theyd have to be downloading a LOT though :S

[Apallo]

What might have happened (depending on the method he was using to download) is the ISP saw a lot of upstream bandwidth being used. This is usually associated with running a website (a server sitting on the connection serving up pages) and is against the terms of service for most if not all residential cable/dsl intenet plans. The problem is that there are actually 2 different definitions for bandwidth:

<1> The maximum speed at which you can down/upoad (which cannot be exceeded because of limits hard coded into the modem's software)

<2> The maximum ammount of data a person can down/upload in a given ammount of time. This definition applies mostly to web hosting. You pay $X/month for a maximum amount of data to be served. ie $10/month for 30gigs of bandwidth/month. When this limit is exceeded, you'll see the "this site has exceeded their bandwidth" error.

I have never actually heard of a cable/dsl company capping bandwidth in the second sense, but if there is a lot of out-going traffic on his line, they could be suspisous of him running a server of some kind. I know for a fact that the most popular ways to download (bittorrent and kazaa/bearshare/limewire) also allow others to download from him (and in bittorrent's case, they pretty much force him to). I personally have never had this problem, and i tend to download between 50-80gb every 2-4 days. The method i use for downloading, however, does not use my upload bandwidth.

[Forgreatjustice]

most isp 's i have looked at have some monthly download limit.
the one i use is 60gb a month. (cable)
there competitor is 2gb for the same level of service ... (dsl)

so it really depends on the isp.

[HalloranElder]

She said they told her that she was using too much bandwidth and affecting her neighbors' service with all her downloads.

It is a potential problem, depending on what technology they are using.

Any of the DSL varieties don't have this problem, because you effectively have a private connection between you and the exchange.

Cable however can have this issue. A cable connection usually connects a number of people living in the neighbourhood together to a central point, and then that central point is connected to the backbone. As a result, if one person is saturating the connection then everyone else will suffer from a serious slowdown of their upload/download speeds because they are all going through a single bottleneck.

Just your friendly neighbourhood geek.

[Max]

Unlimited bandwidth is total fiction

ISPs absolutely have bandwidth caps. This is necessary for cable networks, which would be impossibly slow (if not completely overloaded) if every customer was a hardcore pirate or was running a high traffic website. This isn't normally a problem, as the caps are set so high that very few people are even aware of them. (I don't know anything about DSL, though. Hopefully someone else can weigh in?)

But why do ISPs then claim bandwidth is unlimited for their residential service? This is out and out LYING. Would it really be such a big deal to call it "high usage" bandwidth instead of unlimited bandwidth (or something suitably markety)? If the caps are so high, it's not like anyone is going to care. If they do, they'll just get a business account instead.

I read a horror story about a Comcast customer getting cut off because they exceeded their bandwidth cap on their supposedly "unlimited" account. The only way Comcast would reconnect them was if they run a line directly to their house, for the LOW LOW price of $1000 per month! The sick thing is, Comcast stubbornly refused to admit the amount of their bandwidth cap. So...if you exceed it, you get cut off, but you can't tell whether or not you're going to exceed it because you have NO IDEA what it is! Anyways, give it a read: http://tinyurl.com/243j39

[trunks2k]

While your total bandwidth usage for the month may be unlimited, that is not going to prevent the ISP from taking action if your usage is really hurting the performance of other customer's service.

I may be able to download/upload as much as I want over the course of the month, but let's say I'm trying to download ten huge files at once and upload another 3 all at the same time. At that moment, I could be seriously slowing down the rest of the network, which will probably automatically trigger action by the ISP to cut off some of the transfers or limit the speed at which they are done. But if I was to do this at, say 3AM, where I'm the only one on the network, then it might not be a problem. If this happens a lot, the ISP is likely within its rights to cancel the service if they feel that your usage is hindering overall performance too much too often.

That said, most ISPs that I know of have an inherent bandwidth cap that is supposed to be a number that will keep the network running smoothly under normal usage. As mentioned before, this is necessary for most networks. In this type of scenario, no one person is goin to slow down the network. So what might be happening is that the person is trying to upload/download a bunch of stuff and is hitting that bandwidth cap so each transfer is automatically being throttled down to keep within that bandwidth cap.

[trunks2k]

But why do ISPs then claim bandwidth is unlimited for their residential service? This is out and out LYING. Would it really be such a big deal to call it "high usage" bandwidth instead of unlimited bandwidth (or something suitably markety)? If the caps are so high, it's not like anyone is going to care. If they do, they'll just get a business account instead.

They're using a different definition of bandwidth when talkin about that. As someone mentioned earlier there are two commonly used definition for bandwidth.

1. The max amount of traffic on a given connection at a point in time (i.e. 56k).
2. The overall amount of traffic over a period of time.

The first is really the accurate term, but the second is used often. When an ISP says something like unlimited bandwidth, they are talking about the latter. Which is often true, I can download or upload as much as I want over the course of a month. However bandwidth limits of the former type will keep me from reaching huge amounts of transfers. It's just marketing.

Edit: After reading your link, it seems that Comcast was actually enforcing a limit on an "unlimited" plan. That's just false advertising then.

[wildcatgrrl]

OK, thanks for all your replies. I knew that they had to downloading/uploading a MASSIVE amount for the ISP to get involved. Still strikes me as funny that she went on the internet on a public message board to complain that her ISP wasn't making it easy for them to continue illegal downloading. DUH!!! I mean, I'm not the illegal download police, but if you're going to do it, be discreet, for goodness' sake!!

But then, she also said that it was her hubby's right to download as much as he wanted, since they paid for the service, and that if one wasn't meant to download so much, computers wouldn't be made with so much RAM. Well, cars can go WAY over 65, but it's still illegal in most places.

[trunks2k]

But then, she also said that it was her hubby's right to download as much as he wanted, since they paid for the service, and that if one wasn't meant to download so much, computers wouldn't be made with so much RAM.

That doesn't even make any sense, even on a technological level. RAM has little to do with how much you can download. If she's using what they are capable of doing as a benchmark of what she should be allowed to do, then nobody better tell her how fast her DSL/Cable is capable of transferring data.

[Apallo]

...nobody better tell her how fast her DSL/Cable is capable of transferring data.

I really really really want the ISP that offers downloads that will saturate the max bandwidth my hard drive is capable of, that woulld be simply awesome! 133 megabytes/second here i come!

[trunks2k]

I really really really want the ISP that offers downloads that will saturate the max bandwidth my hard drive is capable of, that woulld be simply awesome! 133 megabytes/second here i come!

It was awesome when I first got to college. At the time my school had one of, if not THE, fastest networks of any university in the US. It was BLAZING fast. I had little problem getting 700+KB/s from places outside the network, and within the network... well let's just say I could transfer MP3s over as fast as I could click on them. I think the max speed I saw was about 5 MB/s.

[TNT]

But why do ISPs then claim bandwidth is unlimited for their residential service?

They don't.

[Rapscallion]

Mine does. It also has software caps - if you do download a metric craptonne, you will suddenly find that your download speed halves, then halves again, and again. Eventually, it will wait until you stop downloading for a while before allowing your speed up again.

It's quite a sales point over here for ISPs - very few are limited download these days.

Rapscallion