 | | Bah Humbug Like they are interested in creating a usage meter or warning you when they can rape you for $4.50 a gig... | |
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 | Reviews:
 ·magicjack.com
| Re: Bah Humbug said by Hellrazor:Like they are interested in creating a usage meter or warning you when they can rape you for $4.50 a gig...
I think this is a proper role for government to require monthly plans to cut off service at the plan's limit unless the customer has requested a higher limit.
IMO, this is a form of credit. It's usurious or predatory to let customers fall into a usage they didn't affirmatively consent to, and have no reasonable way of knowing they're entering into it. | |
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| | | You can install a software for monitoring your videotron internet usage.
Like CIV »civ.codexmundus.com
The website is in french, but the software is multilangual. | |
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| | Lazlow
join:2006-08-07
Saint Louis, MO | Re: Bah Humbug It requires you to run windows. What if you are running multiple computers? | |
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| | | | | Re: Bah Humbug Each installation is independent. The software will simply read the information on videotron website. | |
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| |  VarlikWithout Honor You Will Never Be FreePremium
join:2002-01-06
Anderson, SC | said by PatteDePoule:You can install a software for monitoring your videotron internet usage.
Like CIV »civ.codexmundus.com
The website is in french, but the software is multilangual.
Yep and software doesn't have conflicts with other programs. And it doesn't have glitches. And that person’s computer could never become infected with a Trojan. And a bad guy will never figure out how to turn off said monitoring program or alter things so that it always displays low figures. It's only a matter of time before the lawsuits show up two three years tops.
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"Sir SIR! We don't use DHCP servers. We only use IBM & Microsoft servers." From there my call to tech support went steadily downhill.
--Turn the lights down in your soul cut the power to your heart see the carcass in its dying rages. | |
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| | | | | Re: Bah Humbug You forgot the protection against fire and earthquakes. | |
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| | | Reminds me of when I used AOL through a long-distance when I was kid.
850$ telephone bill and they cut the service because they noticed it was getting crazy.
My parents freaked out and it was brought down to around 180$ I think. But it was really my fault in that case despite their understanding. In his case, he was HACKED.
He shouldn't be paying ANYTHING if he's been protecting his router. It's not that hard for anyone knowing how to hack to do it to pretty much to anyone. I hide my SSID for that exact reason. Bring them to court since you can easily prove it's not your usage through router logs. And watch how they'll suddenly want to settle out of court because they know they don't have a case. | |
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| | | | Re: Bah Humbug The customer was hacked, not the ISP. Why should the ISP be responsible for the customer's poorly secured router? The customer should be paying 100% of this as it is 100% their fault and their problem.
On a side note a properly secured router is almost impossible to hack. Hiding your SSID is meaningless and does nothing to help if your router is properly secured. Now if you are using WEP then yah hiding your SSID might be a good idea because it will help keep the 15 year old that knows nothing about hacking and is just folling some directions he read on the internet from even knowing your router exists. | |
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| | | Reviews:
·magicjack.com
| Re: Bah Humbug said by charles0000 :The customer should be paying 100% of this as it is 100% their fault and their problem.
They charge about $1 per gig for the plan, up to 30gig. It seems like the ISP could charge the overage at $1 per gig instead of $4.50.
When you look at how the cost-per-gig drops as plans/caps increase, it seems like they could have charged her .60 per gig.
I agree users should be responsible for securing their networks. But, charging normal overage fees as if the user misjudged their requirements (and is persuaded to move up) seems unjust.
Edit: Also, the article says the ISP plans to implement a monitoring and alert system within 12 months. That indicates they realize they have some responsibility to confirm abnormal activity. I think that's another reason for them to charge the user only true cost. Not punitive overage charges designed to "persuade" people to move up. | |
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| | | | nitzanPremium,VIP
join:2008-02-27
kudos:2 | Re: Bah Humbug said by amigo_boy:They charge about $1 per gig for the plan, up to 30gig. It seems like the ISP could charge the overage at $1 per gig instead of $4.50.
When you look at how the cost-per-gig drops as plans/caps increase, it seems like they could have charged her .60 per gig. What is this pricing based on though? wholesale internet bandwidth is dirt cheap - we're talking 1 Mbps for something like $1-2/mo. 1 Mbps equals over 300GB a month. I know the last mile costs a bit more, congestion, etc. - but come on. This couldn't have cost Videotron more than a few bucks. They could have reduced the overage fee to $50 and still make a profit on the whole thing.
Per-GB billing is just another scheme to suck more money out of consumers. Instead of raising prices they just put overage fees and lower caps, and voila you end up paying $200 for the same service you got before for $50. It's not about congestion or fair pricing - it's about sucking consumers dry. $4.5/GB? a GB costs them more like 4.5 *cents* to deliver. | |
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| | | Mike_343I Need Speed.
join:2001-07-05
Dyer, IN | This is a very ignorant statement.
Anything that involves software and was written by a human will be hacked eventually. You would be surprised how many more really smart people there then you  | |
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| | | | | said by charles0000 :The customer was hacked, not the ISP. Why should the ISP be responsible for the customer's poorly secured router? The customer should be paying 100% of this as it is 100% their fault and their problem.
On a side note a properly secured router is almost impossible to hack. Hiding your SSID is meaningless and does nothing to help if your router is properly secured. Now if you are using WEP then yah hiding your SSID might be a good idea because it will help keep the 15 year old that knows nothing about hacking and is just folling some directions he read on the internet from even knowing your router exists.
so if the intruder was dealing in kiddy porn this guy should go to jail for it?
thats basically what your arguing here. this could have been avoided if the company just cut off service at the cap and gave um a call "hey your usage has hit your cap, would you like a higher tier?" that would have alerted said user to a problem.
and your forgetting that not all wireless hardware supports WPA. even stuff that says it works with wpa some times doesnt. | |
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| | | | | The customer is not responsible. Not even for one bit.
It's like saying that a car owner is responsible for being jacked despite taking normal cautionary measures. Too bad for the insurance company, it's their loss. They can always sue the thief if they catch him.
So in this situation, the ISP can't charge the costumer for something that was used by a hacker/bandwidth thief. It's their liability to either take the loss or pursue the hacker in court if they catch him. | |
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| | | | Reviews:
·magicjack.com
| Re: Bah Humbug said by Ncrdrg :The customer is not responsible. Not even for one bit.
It's like saying that a car owner is responsible for being jacked despite taking normal cautionary measures.
Read the videotron forum. I was a little more on your side before taking the time to read it.
She's evidentally a very dim-witted person who was paying overages for 4-5 months, didn't investigate, then moved to a higher plan which inadvertently allowed the hijacker to consume even more, and reach even higher overage levels.
That's like being told for months that you're car's being stolen, and doing nothing about it. Then buying a tractor-trailer and claiming you weren't responsible when it was stolen. | |
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| | | | | yea a proper secured router can be hacked fairly quickly of course not everyone is smart enough to use linux and sniff packets, of course there are youtube videos that teach this in less then 10 minutes. | |
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| | | | | "Hiding" your SSID does nothing to hide it from those that actually know how to hack a wireless connection. There are numerous utilities available that will display "hidden" SSIDs, with little to no knowledge required by the user of said utilities. One such utility that springs to mind at this time is eWIFI, an iPod/iPhone App that's made by a company called, eFUSION (www.efusion.co.jp).
So, the next time that anybody thinks that they got one up on the crooks out there because they have their SSID hidden ... think again. You're never as secure as you think you are. | |
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| | | i haven't read all this subject but i would like to point out that here in Australia the biggest isp Telstra has in the past (and I don't know about today as I have changed ISP) charged 15 cents per megabyte excess usage fee. So say 1000 megs to a gig and ...
Yes that works out to $150 per gig.
Who is the thief?
So glad I am now on a throttle plan, I go over, I get dial up speeds.
No shocks to my cash flow. | |
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 KrisnatharokCaveat EmptorPremium
join:2009-02-11
Earth Orbit
kudos:3 | Or... 3GB per month is:
25% of a full Steam game.
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Will WWIII start today? | |
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|  FBGuyyippee ki yayPremium
join:2005-03-19 | Re: Or... don't mention any updates to said game. they can be just as bad. | |
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| | | | Re: Or... Or DLC, which, if it's a VALVe game, will be required to play. | |
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| | | FBGuyyippee ki yayPremium
join:2005-03-19 | Re: Or... DLC isnt a problem if it is done right and valve usually has it right. | |
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| | | If your a gamer you are probably not on that 3GB/mo plan. | |
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 TigerLordResident pentaxianPremium,Mod
join:2002-06-09
Montreal
kudos:6 | Well-renowned? No you're not... LOL at the PR lady spinning everything beautifully. Their tech support is on par with everything else in this World. It is neither worse or better than Bell's or Rogers. | |
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| | | Re: Well-renowned? What the hell just happened? I was just looking at this and all the sudden your alien avatar xmas lights just disappeared! | |
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| | wow So, glad I do not live in Canada. I alone use about 200 - 300GB a month. | |
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| | | | | Re: wow I love it!  | |
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| | | | So ? Would be HD movies of religious gospel better ? | |
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| | | | | Re: wow Depends on your religion.  | |
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| | | | DesdinovaPremium
join:2003-01-26
Gaithersburg, MD | Re: wow Religion IS porn. Spiritual porn. | |
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| | | I'm in Canada.
For the month of December, I put over 700 gigs through my DSL connection. ISP doesn't seem to care.
Not all Canadian ISP's are as bad as some. | |
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| | | | Re: wow But the problem is 98 percent of the population lives in Ontario and British Columbia. In small rural towns in the middle of nowhere the isp's know it's far cheaper to run unlimited due to the low cost of bandwidth rather than lose the few subscribers they have | |
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Lazlow
join:2006-08-07
Saint Louis, MO | Everyday occurance Once caps and overages are the norm(within 2yrs?) people will find out how often their routers are being broken into (WEP, WPA, and WPA2) and on the Docsis side how many modems are being cloned. | |
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| | | Re: Everyday occurance and hopefully for the unlearned there will be plenty of help to enable us to rip off the asses who impose the caps on us. | |
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| | Agreed: Shared Responsibility I would have to agree with her. At some point you have to share responsibility. Their marketing department, billing department and technology department should all share the responsibility being piss poor and return every bit of her overage charges.
Her router was secured. Linksys does not implement any weaker of a WEP/WPA connection then any other maker so this ISP trying to off load this on to them is silly at best. | |
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See 15 replies to this post |
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| | Cappage I have several friends who are far more tech-savvy than I am, but they're clueless when it comes to the idea of broadband caps.
One such friend was telling me about the new internet TV they got for Christmas, and how they set it up to stream HD Netflix movies. In addition to the TV they both are power computer-users and own a small company. Since they have Comcast, I asked them if they were concerned about blowing the cap.
Someone cue the "deer in the headlights" look, please..."Cap? What cap?"
I warned 'em. That 250 is hard to reach for *most* people, but these two are the types who could feasibly get a Nastygram.
The harder the cloud is pushed, the uglier this capping nonsense is going to get. Google, Netflix and gamers pulling on one end, ISP's kicking and screaming on the other. | |
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| KearnstdElf WizardPremium
join:2002-01-22
Mullica Hill, NJ | Re: Cappage these are the primary targets of overage charges. they know most tech people are capable of watching their usage with things like DD-WRT.
but the typical home users get their PS3 remote and download the Netflix software and start watching HD streams. and then get slammed at the end of the month.
Usage Based Billing will never work because the prices will not be fair. the ISPs even with full usage based billing would charge far more per gig than you pay per Therm of a gas, or Kilowatt Hour for power or cubic foot of water that is for sure.
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[65 Arcanist]Filan(High Elf) Zone: Broadband Reports | |
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| | | And when the rope breaks......both sides fall on their asses. | |
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 winsyrstrifeRiver City BouncePremium
join:2002-04-30
Brooklyn, NY | 1 Whole year of sweet overage loot! | |
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| | Malware Botnets have no respect for Videotron's puny caps either. | |
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Reviews:
 ·Comcast
| This is ridiculous Considering that the "overage" probably didn't cost the ISP anything, they'd being overly greedy by not offering a complete refund.
They don't have to share the responsibility, because this DIDN'T COST THEM ANYTHING. ISPs pay for capacity, not data transferred. This is an outrage and a good reason to avoid this provider. | |
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| | | Re: This is ridiculous said by SpottedCat:They don't have to share the responsibility, because this DIDN'T COST THEM ANYTHING. ISPs pay for capacity, not data transferred. Yup, 95th percentile billing is just a figment of our imagination and no one actually uses it
</sarcasm>
/mackey | |
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| |  gerglesGregPremium
join:2003-05-30
South San Francisco, CA | Re: This is ridiculous The point of "you get 50 GB" is that it does completely ignore 95th percentile billing, because most of the use that they'll need to worry about happens during peak hours. You can use a lot more in absolute GBs transferred and not touch the 95th percentile use if you're using it opposite everyone else. | |
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| | | | | Re: This is ridiculous The feeling I get from most of the posts here is that the people who will be most affected by the cap are the ones who are streaming Netflix/Hulu/etc and gaming during the peak hours. While it would be nice if they could make off-peak times unmetered, just having flat caps is already too confusing for consumers even without having to worry about what time of day it is.
/mackey | |
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| | | | | | Re: This is ridiculous Not quite...I'm sensitive to caps because we're a family of four who had to deal with Wildblue's FAP, including a 25% usage reduction because they oversold. 7.5G doesn't go very far when you have two teens taking college courses.
I have a grandfathered Alltel wireless account with no cap. I got in before the Verizon shark ate them so I don't have to deal with usage meters. I can't think of too many tasks more onerous, obnoxious or aggravating than babysitting a cap, even if you're just throttled rather than hit with overcharges. | |
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| quatrixPremium
join:2005-02-11
Davie, FL
kudos:2 | Without caps, a lot of people would use more bandwidth, and the ISP would need more capacity. So maybe this guy's overage didn't directly cost them, but that's an oversimplified way of looking at it. | |
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| | montly caps Monthly caps and today's internet habits do not work. | |
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|  pnh102Reptiles Are Cuddly And PrettyPremium
join:2002-05-02
Mount Airy, MD | Re: it's Canada eh? Hmm... I think this is more to the point.
»www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3YElLVMjEs
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"Net Neutrality" zealots - the people you can thank for your capped Internet service. | |
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 DryvlyneFar Beyond DrivenPremium
join:2004-08-30
Newark, OH | Two problems... 1) The customer was never notified upon exceeding her cap.
2) The customer was not given a tool, provided by - free of charge and with explicit instructions - on how to monitor their bandwidth usage.
It's completely inexcusable for the ISP to try and cast any blame on the customer here, notwithstanding the fact the user's router was also secured. If I were the customer I'd file a lawsuit against the ISP. | |
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| | | Re: Two problems... To be fair, it's very easy to monitor usage through Vidéotron. Here's an example :
»img41.imageshack.us/img41/922/vi···ncap.jpg
But it's not very advertised and most users probably don't even know it exists. Especially since it was mentioned it was a 30GB cap. So it's likely to be a typical high speed connection that is likely used by around 60-70% of the users. Those who aren't tech-savvy at all.
Since there was absolutely no effort to warn her, it's obvious the fault lies on the ISP who purposely let it run up to cash in. | |
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| | | | Re: Two problems... The warning kicked in when she called after the first month because of overcharge. She let it go for a full year. She's an idiot. | |
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 thenderScreen tycoonPremium
join:2009-01-01
Brooklyn, NY
kudos:1 | Do you report to a credit bureau? If so... you should be regulated against nonsense fees.
If you're a regular company that can print up an invoice with $1800 or $15000 in overages, but that can't do much to enforce it or ruin someone's life over it, then don't bother.
If you can report to Experian & Equifax and have made countless mistakes in the past(a la Verizon), the government should be allowed to step in and say "this is ridiculous."
--
The Rossmann Group. | |
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Warez_ZealotRural land of the rising sun
join:2006-04-19
Hamilton, ON |  Bahahahahaha
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mwa423
join:2008-12-14
Cincinnati, OH | And people disagreed with me... When I said on a UBB post about a month ago when I said that this was GOING to happen and I was mocked that people should take care of their security. I'll make my point again.
Usage based billing/caps and overages cannot be billed like other utilities (natural gas, water, electric) because those are very easy to secure and it's very obvious to a property owner when those utilities are being stolen (gee, I wonder why there's an extension cord going from my porch to my neighbor's house). Further, I challenge anybody to find a way to use my water from 5000 miles away. On the internet, I can use your bandwidth from anywhere in the world without any obvious signs that it's being done.
I know a few of you idiots think that you're so special and have enterprise level security on your home network connection. More power to you, however it's categorically unreasonable to assume that every internet user will have the ability, time or inclination to go to the same measures and expense.
For all of you folks who think that every internet user should be responsible for anything that happens on their connection (whether they caused it or not), what's an acceptable level of security for the average person? Automatic updates on all PC's, wifi router with WPA2 and a sworn promise not to open emails that have the subject "I love you"? Because even in that case, what happens when there is an OS glitch that downloads a trojan ad from a legitimate website (see: AMD Forums, Doubleclick, etc.)?
Where I see this going is we'll see the same story here five times a week that we see on international data plans, where somebody runs up a $10,000 bill and this time it'll be through relatively no fault of their own. Because there are far more broadband users than heavy mobile data users, I think this will be such a common occurrence that the government will get involved on some level, creating some insane "to protect the children from the big bad ISP" law, which will have unintended consequences I don't even want to begin to ponder. | |
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| | | Re: And people disagreed with me... When this user based billing really takes hold hundreds will be seen with laptops sitting outside apartment buildings in the summer months looking for unsecured routers. | |
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 Simba7I Void Warranties
join:2003-03-24
Billings, MT | End of the year, eh? quote:
Videotron insists a real-time monitoring and alert tool will be implemented before the end of the year.
Let's wait an entire year and see how much we can steal from our sheep.. ehm.. customers.. before we implement measures that'll prevent them from going over their cap and lower our profit margin. | |
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| |  Things that make you go hmmmm...
That being said, the following makes me go hmm...
Hunter, who doesn't download movie
When her roommate moved out in July, Hunter upgraded to an Internet package with a download limit of 100 gigabytes but wasn't told there would no longer be a maximum charge. Hunter said. "I didn't really know what a gigabyte was until my boyfriend looked at my account and told me there was no way I could have been using that much data."
C'mon... | |
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| | Usage cap This is how it SHOULD be... not the most profitable, but the most sense for 90% of the users.
If you reach the CAP, they suspend the service. Then you phone them, they tell you why, and THEN they re-activate it after explaining it to you. (Quite easy... They have no problem doing it if you miss a payment, that is for sure, it's quite EASY for them then!) And charge a re-activation fee too i'm sure.
I had a SPRINT USA AirCard in Canada(Unlim in USA / 300MB in Canada)... as soon as it hit 300MB it wouldn't even connect anymore, came up with an ERROR. | |
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| jh2010
join:2009-09-03
Brooklyn, NY
1 edit | Re: Usage cap Why not just limit the bandwidth when the cap is reached? This is how it is done in Australia and it keeps almost everyone happy. The Badnwidth limits were originally 64Kb/s until the next billing cycle. They are now better at 128Kb/s or 256Kb/s depending on the plan. The GB/month plans are reasonable(in my opinion) and they do have unmetered sites for VOD and other content.
Also, for this story, in Australia it is also illegal for a Company to profit from a crime. If the Router was hacked(and it had reasonable security) then the ISP can only charge their actual costs(at most) they cannot charge Retail rates(Profit from a crime). | |
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