Verizon Cracks Down on 'Excessive' FiOS Users

Wasnt the user told to explore Verizon business options, NOT Verizon SMALL business options like he did? At least from the most recent linked thread, there is a huge difference.

fixed that.

He admits, he was on business FiOS previously, but made a valid point that "when Fios 300 came out for residential, the price drop didn't come to similar for business users"...

Since he runs servers, no brainer for FiOS to flag him... I would have tried that too!

I don't think I even get close to a TB/month... wait make that 300MB/month...

Many years ago Sprint got in trouble for "firing" customers.
But they were right.

While I admire Houkouonchi's technical setup and application, it is a business, and he should not expect to operate at those volumes with impunity, and have the other 5 million ratepayers subsidize him. (Her?) How much would a Colo facility charge for this use?

Those who repeatedly, deliberately and conspicuously push the limits of a consumer agreement, eventually, ruin it for everyone else.

Verizon has actually been very generous, to date, but eventually, they could just shrug and apply Comcast-inspired caps - and believe me, theirs would actually be accurate and stick. Lets hope they remain happy with a 10TB soft cap.

How about clearly listing the max bandwidth you're willing to tolerate with the service in clear text? They're playing advertising tricks and then complaining when people actually exceed some imaginary line. While this guys use was clearly excessive and he knows he was wrong 110%, it should have been clearly stated to begin with, not some hidden fine print that eludes to some artificial non-specified limit.

Running servers is prohibited by the TOS. What about that is hard to understand? The fact that Verizon doesn't boot every user running a server( which for most people is little or no extra traffic) isn't a defense.

You've failed to get the point, since he says he moved to FIOS business which does allow servers...it's all about bandwidth.

...a limit, or too surprised the account sales people mumble a bit, during that part of the terms of service.
They are sales people directly or indirectly getting paid to sell.
Too bad in the pursuit of market share, that verizon fails to CLEARLY disclose those limits in their ads and sales docs.

....FiOS was the "Godsend" of ISPs, and was going to change the industry? Now, they are on the verge of capping users?

I honestly think that Google Fiber will do the same thing. Caps, and required ads.

Small business (which is just residential w/ a better ONT and mildly better SLA), is STILL not able to run servers.

Now retransmitting ATSC content is in fact a copyright violation (not that I agree), so outside of the legality of the environment, he will need to get a VBS account which of course charges much differently.

Once he gets the bill for thousands, maybe his relatives will buy their own cable subscription.

With that said, however just like anything else that is "unlimited", it's only unlimited unless you are the top 5% of users and in that case nebulous TOS violations come into play to regulate. For all we know that 5% may use 50% of the bandwidth for Verizon.

Vendors can expect in a service there will be on occasion unprofitable customers, but 70+TB may cover the usage of 500 people or more... And if they have to transit this data(relatives are not in Verizon's net), now that get's somewhat expensive. Some vendors (like American Movil) just kick them off and keep the $, others are nicer (Verizon).

It all gets "cloudy" in the cloud, since they want us to use the cloud, just not "use" the cloud.

Verizon _should_ explicitly state their caps, and not really care what those bytes are used for. This way everything is clear, and they can guarantee themselves a profit.

I don't see how Verizon explicitly stating a 5TB cap ruins it for the rest of us. I'm not saying they go out and pay for some new hardware to implement the cap, simply change the language they use to match the reality of the situation.

like his setup..... need that rack setup for all my servers in my closet...

Where does it say you can't run servers?

My FiOS small business TOS or AUP doesn't say that, at least I can't find it.

»business.verizon.com/MyB ··· &uOt=use

»business.verizon.com/MyB ··· ness_tos

It does say you can't generate excessive traffic but obviously doesn't define "excessive".

Uh, 77 TB in one month is more than a little excessive for a residential account. It's flat out ludicrous.

Forcing Verizon to state a hard-cap, because of the actions of an infinitesimally small minority of customers, takes away their ability to dynamically apply management techniques that benefit the vast majority of customers.

It won't be 5TB.

He must have a very large family to need so many servers and HDD arrays.

So says you. What about 30TB? 10TB? 500GB? 100GB? Everyones definition of "excessive" varies. Thats why companies started to implement a hard cap.

Based on just this article, it sounds like he's running a big DVR like setup for his family. I think his family needs to setup their own DVR, HTPC, and/or start streaming the shows from the content providers, Hulu, or Aereo. Nice of him to set all that up, but he's either going to have to spend even more money on a different business class service like Metro-E or cut them off. I can't imagine how crazy his electric bill must be.

I don't know, maybe if you could bring that down to 150MB/month, that sounds a little excessive in my opinion.

i suspect something quite different with a setup like that.

I agree stfu, I don't want a hard cap because they are going after 45 people who use an incredibly excessive amounts of data. I myself use 1 - 1.5 TB/month and I know my usage might be considered somewhat excessive compared to a normal user, but they don't bother me because it's not too awful. Force them to state a cap and I will undoubtedly be over that amount. Forcing companies to put in hard caps in situations like this is not a win for users, when they start flagging users at .5 to 1 TB then maybe we need to understand the cap.

For all but the smallest minority of users on FiOS the service is completely unlimited, you have to really try to use the service in a manner for which it's not intended to get into this fraction of a fraction of a fraction of users who are being targeted.

Since Verizon wants houkouonchi to reduce his usage by 80% to 90%, in my opinion Verizon might be over selling FiOS bandwidth and then they penalize customers who continually use 100% of what the customer is paying for. FiOS used to be advertized as unlimited and no slow downs.

Later
Bob W.

I'd draw the line at 10TB, for now, even on gigabit fiber. If you can't colo a box somewhere and get that kind of bandwidth speed, on a good quality network, with that kind of transfer cap, you're probably losing the ISP money and it's abuse.

The number of customers on Verizon's entire network who are classified as abusers (less than 0.001%) shows you just how out of line their usage is with everyone else. If it was 0.1%, or even 0.05%, I can see your point. But when someone is six deviations off the bell curve you've got issues.

Yeah. It's telling when you realize that collocating all of that equipment in a data center would run him, at minimum, $500 per month. Probably closer to $1000.

This

He's discussed end-to-end VPN connectivity to offshore links with the setup as well.

But one can only speculate....

And that's exactly it.

77TB is insanely outside of what the average user consumes. Even 10TB stands out by quite a bit. My average sub on a 100mbps/100mbps connection consumes somewhere between 20GB-100GB/month. I can take a sample size of around 150 users (each having access to a congestion-free 100mbps connection) and the total downstream consumption in a month is around 6-8TB, of which 10% is all tied to one user (largest consumer).

Obviously average consumption will increase over time, but when you're consuming more than 100x what the average user consumes, it stands out as abuse.

My Grandma averages 9b/mo (at least when Comcast had the measuring stick). That means and that does just 900GB uses 100x more than her.

My point is, its all relative (pun on the grandma too). YOU consider 10TB a lot, but apparently this is regular for 45 or so people.

That being said, I agree that it is excessive. I realize though, I am not the ruler of the internet, and everyone uses their service for different reasons; some use it a lot, some just a little. I personally average about 150gb/mo, so I cant really fathom how one household even uses 1TB

hahaha. Or a family that consists of many, many "cousins" all hoping to watch streaming US television that they can't get in their home country. It's not just birthday party videos, for sure.

Verizon Business is a Tier 1 ISP, they don't pay for bandwidth, people pay them.(applies to most cases)

Bandwidth prices drop 50% year over year. If the cap is 4TB this year, then it should be 6TB next year.

Internet backbone bandwidth is out-pacing Moore's law. It is actually outpacing demand.

No, I was explaining that real-world statistics of average consumption is what helps highlight excessive use. Which is what iansltx was also pointing out.

45 users from Verizon's total FiOS subscribers. That's an extremely small percentage of users when you're taking into consideration an entire portfolio of subscribers from a Tier 1 provider.

"Unlimited" means no limit ever for any reasons.

We need someone to set a legal precedent and wtfpwn this false advertisement.