| Verizon cancelled my service and almost got me fired The limit isn't 10G/month, it's 5G/month. See PBS investogator robert X cringely's article:
»www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulp···928.html
If you go over that amount, they terminate your
service. And when you call tech support to find out
why you can't connect, they immediately transfer you
to their rude security/fraud operation. Among other
things, they said "you were terminated because you
were caught abusing and damaging our network".
I was assured by one sympathetic verizon employee I found that there is no analysis of URLs, protocols or port
addresses. It's strictly a bandwidth cap, and that
the "unacceptable use" cover-story is just a facility
to implement the cap.
Note that because Verizon wants to sell this as
"unlimited" and change the secret limit whenever it
wants, they can’t actually admit that there IS a fixed
limit. Thus, their terms of service only prohibit
certain USE of the system. This implies that they
MUST threat you like a criminal in order to be
consistent with the contract.
So when I suddenly couldn't do my job, my boss called
Verizon to see what this was all about. He bought
their line that they caught me using the service for
"prohibited video" and massive downloads.
What he DIDN'T get, and wouldn't listen to, is that
this was an inference. All Verizon really did was
group me as one of the top X percent of users of the
system.
What to Verizon was a cynical excuse to cherrypick out
just the low-cost users became, to him, a accusation
of guilt by professional computer forensic detectives.
He thinks that I, specificaly, had been
"investigated" by verizon for downloading illegal
content.
Adding his own assumptions, he was red in the face
when he came into my ofice and accused me, in front of
someone else, of using a company laptop to download
pornography and getting the company in trouble with
the ISP.
I will probably be diciplined for this, and it's
verizon's fault. All I actually did was help my
customers, which sometimes involved downloading their
database files via my "unlimited" internet access.
=========
Now, I do understand the phenomenon called ‘tragedy of
the commons”; I know that finite resources must be
allocated. I would be happy to buy service in
gigabyte blocks. Nor would I even object to being
billed at a usurious rate for usage over a
prespecified threshold.
My objections are:
1) In their advertising, “unlimited” is the big
selling point. Nowhere do they reveal the daily usage
quota or a limit of any kind. in fact, and I did this
earlier, if you call their sales people, they flatly
deny it. Call them yourself, and don't let on that
your're tech-savvy.
2) Even the fine print near the bottom of the contract
gives no mention of a bandwidth limit. It only
prohibits certain unsavory activities like music
sharing. The official explanation their goon squad
gives is that "because you use so much bandwidth, we
know you were using the service for a prohibited
activity" -- unquote.
3) They provide no way to tell how much you've used
this month. (The dialer software should display this
when it connects and tell if you’re over-budget).
4) They won't tell you what the limit is (or
even acknowledge it exists) unless you really, really
get angry about it and refuse to hang up unless they
confess. Presumably that's so they can lower the
cutoff when more customers sign up.
5) Because Verizon pretends that the service is
unlimited as a marketing scam, there can be no option
to pay for extra bandwidth. If their "business
decision" to cut your throat leaves your clients
screaming at you, too bad. It’s what you get for
running a kiddie-porn web server, and you probably
deserve worse.
6) If the intent is to cut off non-business use, 166M
per day is WAY too low. That's only about 20 minutes
of continuous data transfer -- way down in the realm
of legitimate business use.
Because of all this, I ran a bandwidth tracker on my
PC and found that ordinary usage, if you use the
internet all day, is about 90M. See for yourself,
it's free:
»codebox.no-ip.net/controller?page=bitmeter
File sharing could easily be detected at a gigabyte
per day threshold, and that's only two hours'
transmission time. Even then, the service wouldn't be
unlimited, it would be a 1G/day service.
7) Except for a single easy-to-miss letter, there is
no warning at all. No phone call or on-screen
messages. You find out when you call tech support
because you can’t connect.
8) No apology or expression of regret is ever given.
Their attitude is: “you’re being fined for abusing and
damaging our network. Now hang up, or we’ll call the
police”. |
