danawhitaker
Space...The Final Frontier
Premium
join:2002-03-02
Urbandale, IA
 ·MSN
 ·Mediacom
| reply to Bill5309
Re: Heads up on EUP
The problem is, your attitude is just as poor as Comcast's in this regard. You refuse to tell anyone what "serious" traffic is, or give people any idea of how much they should cut back. I haven't gotten a letter. If I ever do get one, I'd like to be told exactly what limits I should be staying within. Your response is akin to the police pulling people over and warning them not to speed but not having any speed limit signs posted telling them what the maximum speed is. It's rude to your customers not to provide a specific limit or guideline within which they should stay. I dislike the methods of some of Qwest's third-party ISPs in terms of bandwidth caps, but at least they explicitly state them.
Having read the EUP again as a refresher, I can say that the 1-3 GB per month Qwest states as average use is mostly BS. When I went on vacation for two months several years ago, I left my computer on the entire time, but I didn't do any downloading of any large files or patches during that duration. Just between e-mail, and mIRC, my average daily usage was in the 300-500 meg range. I still have the logs.
We aren't telling you not to have any kind of policy in regards to absue, or not to enforce it, but we'd just like to know more concrete criteria than "serious" traffic.
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Bill5309
join:2007-06-02
Boise, ID
| God love your passion on this issue. Unfortunately, I can't get you the figures you seem to need to satisfy your curiosity. I have yet to see any ISP set down hard numbers on this, as of yet.
As far as you and your DSL circuit go, I guess that as long as you do not get an EUP warning letter, we can assume you are ok? If you should ever get one, I guess we will be looking at it then. I wish I could do more for you ...and My attitude is just fine.
My purpose of posting this, originally, was to let the board folks know that this issue is alive and active. Whether or not I agree with a bandwidth limitation or not is moot, as I am not allowed to make these decisions. This post was to cause self-reflection on any single person's usage and make adjustments if they felt it necessary. And to NOT ignore warning letters from your ISP about bandwidth usage. It has consequences. |
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danawhitaker
Space...The Final Frontier
Premium
join:2002-03-02
Urbandale, IA
·MSN
·Mediacom
| "I have yet to see any ISP set down hard numbers on this, as of yet."
Rogers, Bell Sympatico, Shaw, and I believe several other Canadian ISPs have specific bandwidth caps that they inform users of. Cox sets down a specific amount too, although they rarely enforce their policy. I have several friends on Belgian ISPs that have specific caps enforced by their ISPs. Xmission, which is a 3rd party Qwest ISP, has a specific cap.
I don't have time at the moment to dig up the specific caps for these ISPs (I know that several are around 100 gigs) but I will try to find the time later. I know that Bell in Canada has an overage policy where users can go over basically as much as they want as long as they pay more, and the overage fee is capped.
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woodward
XMission Broadband
VIP
join:2000-12-28
Salt Lake City, UT
1 edit | said by danawhitaker  : Xmission, which is a 3rd party Qwest ISP, has a specific cap. Actually, we quietly removed the cap on DSL traffic about a year ago. It used to be a 100 GB limit that was only monitored during business hours (nights and weekends were free sailing).
We still have a cap on our basic FTTH service on UTOPIA, though. That is a bidirectional 50MBps/50 Mbps line that includes 500 GB/mo, with a 1 TB tier upgrade available. We have to limit that because on fiber a single user can rack up thousands of dollars in overages on our 95th percentile upstream costs. |
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danawhitaker
Space...The Final Frontier
Premium
join:2002-03-02
Urbandale, IA | Thanks for clearing that up, woodward.  It's been a while since I've taken a close look at you guys.
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cfossy
join:2007-04-05
Ottumwa, IA | reply to Bill5309
Seriously guys, leave Bill alone. He was just trying to protect you guys from having your service shut off. |
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danawhitaker
Space...The Final Frontier
Premium
join:2002-03-02
Urbandale, IA
·MSN
·Mediacom
| "Seriously guys, leave Bill alone. He was just trying to protect you guys from having your service shut off."
Do you think that's not what we're trying to do as well by asking for more specific details? I'm trying to take proactive measures to make sure that I never get one of those letters by finding out what the limits are, approximately. If and when more specific limits are given, then I will either go on my merry way or modify my usage accordingly. I don't like the idea that one random day I may get a letter in the mail saying "Oh, you used too much, cut back." and have no idea how much I would need to cut back by.
Would you like to live in a city where there were no speed limit signs, and the cops just pulled people over at random and told them they were going "too fast" and that they should "slow down" and that if it happened three times their drivers license would be taken away permanently? All we're asking from Qwest (and not specifically from Bill even, though he's taken the brunt of this because he created this thread and posted the warning) is to have a SPECIFIC policy in place. If we, as consumers, refuse to demand this from the companies we do business with, we're just asking for trouble in the future. Maybe if my connection were actually working properly, and Qwest's only solution to my speed not running at what it should be wasn't to downgrade me to 256/256, I might not be so disgruntled and outspoken right now. Now I'm starting to wonder if there's a correlation between Qwest's apathy at fixing connections that are only getting half the speed they're supposed to and their enforcement of their EUP.
Yes, I am passionate about this issue. I have been passionate about this issue when it wasn't even my ISP doing this - I railed about Comcast and Rogers and even tangled with woodward over Xmission's former policy a few times. Now that it's my own ISP, I definitely will stand up and take notice, unlike the majority of consumers who get blindsided by this stuff, or who take an apathetic stance. I apologize if I did lash out personally at Bill, because I know it's not his fault, but it's difficult and frustrating when you're asking questions and someone offers half-answers in return.
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