Verizon 'Clarifies' Comments, Says No Plans to Cap FiOS

Cable is many magnitudes more bandwidth sensitive than Fiber.

Yet, I can still max my small business connection without a peep.

Please do explain!!!

Your grammar escapes me. :PAnd it's still a shared connection that can't support that user running at that bitrate or even a sizable fraction thereof 24/7/365. That's the part of this that you all refuse to grasp.

I worked for a WISP clear back in the late 90s/early 2000s. We sold connections that promised 256kbit/s but were actually capable of speeds up to 5mbit/s to 6mbit/s. We only promised 256kbit/s because we didn't want to oversell, but we never artificially limited people to that speed or otherwise interfered with them.

Guess what happened? Kazaa and Limewire came out, and we now had a handful (less than 10) of script kiddies eating more peak hour bandwidth than the rest of our userbase, numbering in the hundreds. Accounts paying us $40/mo were now sucking down the entirety of our internet links, which cost thousands of dollars a month, degrading service for EVERYBODY, from our dial-up customers to their fellow wireless users.

The economics today are different, as is the driver of bandwidth consumption (video vs. p2p), but the underlying problem remains the same. Residential accounts are not sold with 1:1 contention, nor are the last mile networks engineered to support such usage. 5% of the user base consumes an inordinate amount of bandwidth compared to the other 95%, yet gets up in arms if they're asked to pay more for the privilege.

Keep tilting at windmills. The ISPs are going to deal with this problem no matter how much people around here bitch about it. The death of cable television is only going to increase costs further, as the MSOs lose a source of revenue that helped pay for the HFC network. You'll get what you all want, a pure IP based video delivery system, but you're going to pay for the privilege.

You could have easily just shaped the P2P traffic at peak times. Even the cheapest enterprise gear can do this in real time.

Problem solved.

Verizon wouldn't have cut those users off unless they were losing money on them. Which is their prerogative. I don't blame them one point.

No, they felt they had a chance to further monetize them.

Which is fine. Put the caps in print.

Instead they choose to be slimy crap filled commodes.

*sigh.. When has ANYONE EVER advocated 1:1 contention for $20.00 per month. What we ARE advocating is what almost EVERY OTHER COUNTRY in the world is providing. The US is #32 in speeds now, and apart from 3rd world countries (and sorry, Australia), NO-ONE has byte caps.
Is it TOO HARD to ask that our country, which USED to be #1 in the world, can work it's way back up from #32?
Is it too much to ask for comcast to provide a service that #188 (Afghanistan-LAST PLACE @ .95/mb/sec) can provide MORE BYTES PER MONTH than COMCAST?
Why is the REST of the world FASTER/CHEAPER/UNCAPPED? That's the question we are asking

You find me a traffic shaping solution that could do that for an affordable price in 2001.

I'll be waiting.

We solved the problem by capping them to 256kbit/s. Which was all they were promised to begin with. Later we got a more sophisticated edge router that was able to implement the speed cap while also allowing bursts for 10-15 seconds at full speed. That was a win-win for us, because their parents (you know, the ones actually PAYING the bill) could surf without issue if the kids weren't running p2p and knew exactly whom to blame when the connection slowed to a crawl.

Sure, but this isn't 2001

Also the economies of bandwidth are totally different on Fiber than copper or other mediums.

There is really no technical reason to cap fiber products that have speed tiers. With the speed tiers we are talking, getting close to 1:1 is not a pipe dream anymore.

Thus rendering your one-liner completely moot.

You're right of course, it isn't 2001. Now you've got people sucking down massive amounts of bandwidth with interactive protocols like streaming video. Nobody notices if their Kazaa download takes an extra 20 minutes. They sure as hell notice when Netflix drops to SD and/or starts to pause and buffer.

Traffic shaping is an interesting solution, one that I would personally find less offensive than brute bandwidth caps, but I'm not at all convinced that people wouldn't whine and sue over it.

Think about what your saying for a minute. Verizon offers a 75/35 package over fiber.

The speed tier is already a sort of permanent throttle when dealing with the scales of fiber.

I don't see any needs for caps, perhaps temporary throttles. But its not really needed. 1:1 over a GPON split is doable.

But we are not even asking for dedicated. Just no blunt caps.

Everybody around here wants less for more. Very few of them have any grasp of economics, have ever run a business, or even worked for a business that moves data from Point A to point B. It gets tiresome sometimes.

This whole argument started over Karl whining about Verizon cutting people off at 10 terabytes. I shouldn't have let myself get sucked into it, but I did, and here we are. Apparently you all think it's perfectly reasonable to use T3 levels of speed 24/7/365 at residential/small business pricing.

Best of luck tilting at that windmill.Canada has them too, but your point is moot even if it was accurate. The US will never be #1 when compared against densely populated countries like South Korea and especially against city-states like Singapore. The comparison is useless for anything other than bragging rights. A lot of those countries also have levels of governmental intervention in the marketplace that would never be accepted here, for better or worse.

It's still going to be a shared connection sooner or later. Verizon doesn't have the backbone or peering arrangements to support 1:1 contention at FIOS pricing. Most of the bandwidth usage of those excessive cases was on the upstream too if I recall correctly, at levels that would start to have an impact on settlement free peering arrangements if allowed to continue unabated. Those customers were losing Verizon money and no for-profit business is obligated to provide service at a loss.

Verizon doesn't owe you a dedicated T3 at FIOS pricing levels, no matter how much you might want it.Verizon doesn't have a 'blunt' cap. They do reserve the right to terminate unprofitable users and/or users that adversely impact other customers. Every business in every industry reserves that right, from the proverbial all-you-can-eat buffet to Fortune 100 companies.

What I find funny is that you're whining about something that doesn't and won't impact you.

I get that with paying a couple bucks more a month and telling the tier one person that answers my call to escalate me immediately upon taking my call.

They have special mice running those wheels that keep the business class network running more smoothly.

LOL, you are quite entertaining sometimes.

Thanks for the hyperbole with added drama there. That was AWESOME!

What's to explain? Verizon doesn't want people using more than 10 TB per month on their FiOS network. The amount of people affected by it is so few it's not even worth mentioning.

From the Verizon Online Terms of Service, emphasis mine:

quote:

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Restrictions on Use. The Service is a consumer grade service and is not designed for or intended to be used for any commercial purpose. You may not resell, re-provision or rent the Service, (either for a fee or without charge) or allow third parties to use the Service via wired, wireless or other means. For example, you may not provide Internet access to third parties through a wired or wireless connection or use the Service to facilitate public Internet access (such as through a Wi-Fi hotspot), use it for high volume purposes, or engage in similar activities that constitute such use (commercial or non-commercial). If you subscribe to a Broadband Service, you may connect multiple computers/devices within a single home to your modem and/or router to access the Service, but only through a single Verizon-issued IP address. You also may not exceed the bandwidth usage limitations that Verizon may establish from time to time for the Service, or use the Service to host any type of server. Violation of this section may result in bandwidth restrictions on your Service or suspension or termination of your Service.

---

The people who were terminated were using their FIOS service as a video delivery system for their extended friends and family, so they were in violation of the first highlighted provisions. Even if they weren't, there's the second and third highlighted provisions. Oh, and the bit about not running servers, that's relevant too.

It's there, in plain English, in the customer agreement.

You are talking about wireless and wireless is crap. Sure it is a good second hand connection for when you are on the go, but it is nothing more.

Running a medical enterprise on a consumer grade DOCSIS connection is malpractice. Plain and simple. You don't run life essential services on circuits with no redundancy and/or SLA.

If the medical practice is accredited by JCAHO it's also likely to be a violation of their accreditation standards, and the practice will get dinged on it, sooner or later, when the auditors show up and ask to look at the IT infrastructure.

FTTH is, in most cases, a last-mile improvement. It does not in any way improve the middle-mile and transit capacities.

Just because a provider drops fiber at your home, does not mean that bandwidth costs beyond your home become non-existent.

And most users don't know the difference, the small portion that do, generally don't like throttles.

However MOST broadband buyers do understand, "get it fast" high speeds and will pay for that.
So you are fighting not just the tradition of higher residential contention rates (basically the only way faster speeds became widely available to the general public) but the viable marketing plan that attracts the 99.9% that never think terabyte or even 300GB.
recognize that you are part of a specialty market that MAY need to pay more for that specialty product (think coffee connoisseur, before peet's and starbucks franchised every other corner)

Yeah, because downloading x-ray images is soooooooo life essential.

I am a libertarian and a strong believer in the free market but, frankly, perhaps we need the equivalent of the Interstate Highway System in the form of a nationwide Internet backbone with no peering restrictions or limits. As it is, it appears we are in for a reaming in the next few years that will make electric and water rates look quaint.

Vague limits.......

Sometimes a cap, really is, just a cap, by definition. That was a period there

FU marketing DBs.

The Joint Commission doesn't regulate tele-medicine. They regulate Hospitals One of their members is actually very well known at works at CWRU in Cleveland Also served with Blue Cross Blue Shield (aka Medical Mutual of Ohio) before they hit some bumps in the road. But that's another topic.