Companies like Verizon that are operating in an oligopoly environment have no reason for not coming up with new ways to gouge the customer. Before any ISP is permitted to introduce metered billing the service provider should be required to prove that their metering system is accurate.
Every ISP should immediately be required to put in place a tool that the customer can use to determine their usage during their billing period. Furthermore the tool should include a feature that allows a customer to download a comma delimited file that lists every IP address downloading data, the number of packets downloaded and a who is report on the address that is the source of the packets. The report would be just like a long distance telephone bill.
If metered billing is ever allowed to be put in place, ISP's should be regulated as to what type of packets are billable. Packets from IP addresses that are used to update computer security such as anti-virus, patches or service packs should be exempt from being counted against a customers monthly allocation. Otherwise customers might be induced to block security downloads to avoid exceeding their monthly allocation. The cost for packets that are inserted in a data stream from an advertisers website should be paid for by the advertiser not the customer. You advertisers out there don't whine about having to pay, after all I do not have to pay for junk mail sent by you and delivered by the USPS. Advertising by sending junk faxes has already been declared illegal and sets a precedent.
Metered billing can never be perfect unless they install software on your computer to track how much you actually download.
The issue is someone can send garbage data to your IP which will make it all the way to your modem before being dropped. The ISPs software will view all of that as you were downloading. They have no way to verify what data being sent to your modem is legit.
If you know someones IP address you could easily cause them to get a lot of overage and the customer will have no way to prove they did not download anything and the ISP will blame P2P or a virus on their computer. -- Democrats are not Socialists any more than Republicans are.
Thank You r81984. I am pleased to see someone gets my point. That is why I want to be able to download a list of IP addresses that downloaded data to my modem during the billing period.
I used to work for a college internet tech support. We had 5GB daily caps. We found that one IP was doing DOS attacks on some IPs of people he gamed with or something stupid like that. Downloading was tracked in the switch so if someone sent garbage data it would count against the user. The only way to get around inaccurate data is to force people to run a program on their computer that tracks downloading at the application layer of the OSI model. It would have be ran on every computer/device on their network.
There is no way to get around this and there is no way they will be able to force people to run some stupid ISP program on their computers especially since people will have gaming systems and non-mainstream OSes.
There just is no legit way to do metered billings on a TCP/IP network. -- Democrats are not Socialists any more than Republicans are.
Are you going to go through the monthly logs with a customer no matter how long that takes when they dispute the overages and the higher bill? Then try to determine what legit and what was not?
An lets not forget virus and spyware traffic and that the customer is computer illiterate and has no idea what a GB is. -- Democrats are not Socialists any more than Republicans are.
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Companies like Verizon that are operating in an oligopoly environment have no reason for not coming up with new ways to gouge the customer. Before any ISP is permitted to introduce metered billing the service provider should be required to prove that their metering system is accurate.
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Thank You r81984. I am pleased to see someone gets my point. That is why I want to be able to download a list of IP addresses that downloaded data to my modem during the billing period.