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  • #16
    Well I paid $16,000 for my van, so I should be able to do 110MPH no matter the speed limit or road conditions!
    The ISP I work for can see your cablemodem's upload and download consumption, so expect a letter or some kind of notice if your upload is 1GB or more for a weeks timespan. We have a customer who always called and complained about slow speeds this and that, then we got the tool to check his consumption, and lets just say that the MPAA and the music industry people are "talking" to him. We can also check the consumption for people on the same connection as yours, and see if someone is hogging the bandwidth.

    That said, your speed is always an "upto" speed, not guaranteed for residential service. And some people confuse the "download/transfer" speed that Internet Explorer reports versus their bandwidth speed. And never forget, that you are downloading from someone else, or a server on the net, so its always point to point, thus if their connection is slow, your download speed will suffer.

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    • #17
      Man I loved when we first got cable internet at the condo about 6 years ago. At the time there was only 2 other people on the same node so we got lightning fast speeds. But yeah as others have said you would have to be down/up loading a metric crapton of stuff to get capped normally. In the days of Napster and Morphius I would spend hours straight just downloading thousands of songs with no problem, I don't do it anymore (don't wanna tango with the dang RIAA). But to boldly admit that they are doing naughty things like that is just asking for a suit from the RIAA or MPAA since i'm sure they search tons of boards as well.
      My Karma ran over your dogma.

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      • #18
        I too have heard that horror story about a Comcast customer exceeding the bandwidth limit, and getting the complete runaround when asking simple questions like "What is the maximum allowed bandwidth?" and "Why does your service say 'unlimited' when it obviously isn't?"

        The thing is, I believe that it's all in context. In the not-so-good ol' days, when AOL hit the scene and non-techies were entering the internet for the first time, AOL and other ISPs would impose "hour limits", basically limiting the amount of time you could use their service each month. And I think that to this day, what ISPs expect their customers to assume is that "unlimited" means "unlimited time", not "unlimited bandwidth". And it would be fairly easy to argue that if the need to do so ever arised.
        Desk-On: Apply directly to the forehead.
        Desk-On: Apply directly to the forehead.
        Desk-On: Apply directly to the forehead.

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        • #19
          Quoth cpux View Post
          And I think that to this day, what ISPs expect their customers to assume is that "unlimited" means "unlimited time", not "unlimited bandwidth". And it would be fairly easy to argue that if the need to do so ever arised.
          It could also be unlimited bandwidth.*

          *provided you are not using so much traffic that you are being a constant nuisance to the rest of the network.

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          • #20
            Most of the radio adverts I hear nowdays (I hardly watch TV) say that you have 'unlimited bandwidth' but are subject to a 'fair usage policy'.

            Whilst this may seem a rather arbitrary redefinition of the word 'unlimited' most customers will never hit the "You've downloaded too much" cap IMO so for them the term unlimited is accurate. The only people it should affect consistently are the people who are constantly downloading dodgy music, movies and games.
            Lady, people aren't chocolates. D'you know what they are mostly? Bastards. Bastard-coated bastards with bastard filling. Dr Cox - Scrubs

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            • #21
              True, but the ISPs could be honest as to what that cap is, and many are.. just Comcast isn't. They claim their cap is a trade secret, and don't let customers know they're over until it's too late, which is what happened to that family in the link. Comcast could at least have told said family when they were getting close to the limit.

              Personally, I pay the $120+ for a business class Comcast account (I have had the account for quite some time, dating back to when Time Warner owned our cable lines), but it's because I run my own website at home, so it's good to be prepared. I would absolutely hate to be in that family's situation.
              DJ Particle

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              • #22
                Got me curious, Emi. How much bandwidth do you use a week? We're up to about 11Gb a week on this server. It's been going up slowly, but steadily, for a while.

                Rapscallion

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                • #23
                  Scratch that. I just checked and we apparently did 30.55Gb of bandwidth this last week...

                  Wowsers.

                  Over four thousand views of the comic strip... Must have been the link Jennie put on her front page for us.

                  Rapscallion
                  Last edited by Rapscallion; 03-11-2007, 04:24 PM.

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                  • #24
                    Quoth wildcatgrrl View Post
                    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.
                    1) Yes on cable, -usually- no on ADSL.

                    2) Yes, it is common on cable. There is no way for you to know what the limit is - it's usually not posted. However, breaching 100GB a month is a good way to do it.

                    Simple explanation: Cable suffers from the cable loop problem. Say you have 20 houses in your neighborhood and all of them are on your cable loop. There is a set amount of bandwidth assigned to the loop. If you have 2 houses using cable internet, the bandwidth is divided between those 2. If you have 20 houses, it's divided 20 ways. If you have one dude leeching huge amounts of data via torrent, he's making everyone else run slow by hogging the bandwidth.

                    ADSL does not have this problem, being a direct connect to the telco CO, but it suffers from distance issues. If you have crappy speed, you will ALWAYS have crappy speed. Makes ADSL a crap shoot. Cable is often the more reliable....unless everyone is on the cable loop.

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                    • #25
                      A "hard cap" is besides the point and I would be suspicious of any company that announces one. When someone is abusing the network -- that is, doing things far beyond what a cheap residential account was designed to do -- you can't reasonably draw a line between 300 gigabytes and 299.9.

                      It's a matter of conduct, not bandwidth.
                      I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. -- Raymond Chandler

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                      • #26
                        Quoth Naaman View Post
                        The only people it should affect consistently are the people who are constantly downloading dodgy music, movies and games.
                        Okay, I kind of resent that, since in Canada, it's perfectly legal to download music from the internet, as long as you don't provide any for upload. Seriously. It's legal (even though my mom doesn't believe that). My bandwidth keeps getting capped, and I download MAYBE a dozen songs a week, if that. I haven't been able to download ANYTHING for almost a month.
                        GK/Kara/Jester fangirl.

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                        • #27
                          Quoth tollbaby View Post
                          Okay, I kind of resent that, since in Canada, it's perfectly legal to download music from the internet, as long as you don't provide any for upload. Seriously. It's legal (even though my mom doesn't believe that)
                          IIRC it's legal in the US to download as well, you just can't distribute it.

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                          • #28
                            no... as far as my understanding of copyright law in the US, it's not legal to download unauthorized copies either (thus the PITA new disclaimers with Morpheus every single freaking time you try to download something, and then it disables the download *grumble*)
                            GK/Kara/Jester fangirl.

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                            • #29
                              Sorry tollbaby - didn't mean to insult anyone

                              Perhaps a better phrasing would be "People who illegally and consistently download large amounts of movies, music and cracked software from non-legitimate sources because in most countries downloading copyrighted media through an unauthorised site is considered piracy"
                              Lady, people aren't chocolates. D'you know what they are mostly? Bastards. Bastard-coated bastards with bastard filling. Dr Cox - Scrubs

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                              • #30
                                sorry about that... tollbaby had a bad day. I can get bitchy when things snowball on me, and I didn't mean to take it out on anyone.
                                GK/Kara/Jester fangirl.

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