US Telco Support > CenturyLink > CL to start capping

reply to dondude

Re: CL to start capping

reply to ispepi
Called and cancelled my DSL today, phone is on hold until my schedule and Charter's scheduling work out, probably around Christmas. The CSR I spoke with new nothing about the future download cap policy. I emailed her both links in the article from the front page, lets just say she was shocked.

Received my Charter modem last Wednesday, signed up for 30/4 with phone service. Here is a recent speedtest, influenced by Charter's Powerboost, on large downloads it settles in @ 30 Mb/s.

reply to ispepi
Today I had to call because they are terminating qwest residential voip service. They managed to keep me around with an offer for $45/month for unlimited home phone with 12mbps internet. If I could have got a deal close to that from comcast I would be long gone.

I don't like the cap but according to a chat online with tech support I used 80.5GB over the past 30 days so it won't impact me so much. But I do expect that cap to grow as time goes on. I only see my data usage going up.

Re: CL to start capping

reply to ispepi
No reason to cap DSL ever.

DSL's self limiting potential in capacity should be enough, but if not then upgrades in a CO are usually cheap and easy.

No excuse for a Telco not to have fiber in every CO they own.

reply to ispepi
Wow... just wow. And for those telling us to 'love it or leave it', we're denied the 'leave it' option unless we want to leave cyber civilization behind. CenturyLink has a monopoly in some areas, and a duopoly with Comcast in others. This is why they can afford to be slow with service or outright ignore some of the problem areas. What are you gonna do? Start your own ISP? You'd still be dependent on their lines.

This really does create interesting problems on the customer side for streaming users. And thus for streaming providers. I'd say it's high time for those people to start looking at legal options. And for us 'ordinary people' to make contact with state and federal agencies with questions about this, in the context of not having other options much of the time. We currently have a 'business friendly' Tea Party congress, but the individuals congress-critters within sometimes remember that they have voting constituents and so it might be useful to direct a *civil*, informative email to them as well. (Ranting, the fastest way to shut the information recipient's mind)

reply to Drex5000
You will never pay for a bandwidth hog in your life. And, again: this is NOT 2004-06, before the advent of digital distribution.

Congestion is not caused because a teenager up the street has uTorrent running 24/7. It's caused because his sister wants to use iTunes and Netflix Instant at the same time everybody else on the block does.

Why is this hard to comprehend?

reply to billaustin

Re: CL to start capping

reply to Drex5000
Reasonable? Maybe if the cap only applied to the hours of high usage... these people that are downloading terrabytes of torrents, well, they'd be downloading near 24/7, wouldn't they?

The vast majority of their downloads would be during off-peak hours.

ed: oh, the 150GB for people with 1.5Mb/s connection seems overly generous, when compared to the 250GB catch-all for higher speeds. you'd have to download at max speed 24/7 for about 10 days to hit that. on a 25Mb/s connection, you could reach 250GB after 25 hours of maxing connection

and you can get a dedicated server with 100Mbit/100Mbit unmetered bandwidth from OVH for $50 or less (kimsufi)

reply to ispepi
For the people who are furthering the "torrents" thing, I'll drop some truth.

Looking at my Steam games list, here's a few games I don't currently have installed. Fallout 3 w/ DLC is 13GBs. L4D2 is also 13GBs. Both Mass Effect games clock in at over 12GBs each, so we'll say 24GBs for the sake of brevity. RAGE is 25GBs. Episodes from Liberty City is 17GBs. So, if I were to download all these legally purchased games while not affecting the network at all, that's almost a hundred gigs gone.

On top of that, my grandfather watches a lot of documentaries on Netflix. My cousin who lives here downloads reams of songs for her iPod each month - from iTunes.

So, while I'm the only one you could reasonably call a "power user", the less technically savvy of the house are using a lot of bandwidth too.

None of what I use is illegal and it absolutely doesn't affect the network.

reply to ispepi
When they sell you a phone, you can use it 24/7 if you wanted. When enough users called out of area, you could get all trunks busy and try again. Usually, the company would notice this happening and add more trunks so calls would go thru. To me, this is the same as what is going on with internet except now they don't want to add more "trunks" bandwidth.
They sell you in bold advertising UNLIMITED internet, but they don't really want you to use it unlimited and now seem to want to blame you for using it as UNLIMITED.
Fine, they are changing to CAPS. I feel they should have to change all advertising to LIMITED and it should be in bold. This goes for all other ISP's that are going this way also.
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This posting is of my own opinion and in no way connected to any employer.

reply to ispepi
I hope that CL will at least give us some tool to monitor our bandwidth usage, if they're serious on enforcing the policy. Then someone can go through and find out how much the tool is off.

i period dont like caps. mostly due to greedy telco that dont want to upgrade to current standards etc. i use alot of bw but mostly due to watching hd content of tv shows and playing games.

reply to ispepi
all these caps are is this, they don't want to upgrade their equipment to handle the new higher b/w usage. streaming hd and gaming now uses a lot more b/w then before. capping is how they plan to control b/w. it would be nice if there was an isp e.g. verizon fios, everywhere. so we could all avoid any caps by changing isps.