Several users say that Clearwire is terminating their accounts for excessive usage, despite the fact they've used only around 5 GB, and pay for unlimited accounts. Several different Twitter users say they were surprised to receive the notices this week, informing them that they would no longer be wanted as customers. Almost every ISP in existence has some kind of language in their terms of service allowing them to disconnect heavy users, though the majority of them don't exercise those rights -- given they'd like to retain paying customers.

"One user excessively running heavy bandwidth applications can adversely affect the speeds and service quality for their neighbors," Clearwire tells Broadband Reports. "It is rare that we take this step and when we do it affects an extremely small percentage of our total user base. We typically contact users to notify them of this type of situation first in order to provide an opportunity to make necessary changes."

On Twitter the company is simply directing those users to the company's acceptable use policy, which has this to say about heavy use:

quote:

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If you are unavailable or do not respond to Clearwire’s attempt to contact you regarding excessive use, or if excessive use is ongoing or recurring and repeatedly having negative effects on other subscribers of the Service, then Clearwire reserves the right to immediately restrict, suspend or terminate your Service without further notice in order to protect the network and minimize congestion caused by the excessive use. While the determination of what constitutes excessive use depends on the specific state of the network at any given time, excessive use is determined by resource consumption relative to that of a typical individual user of the Service and not by the use of any particular application.

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While the AUP says Clearwire attempts to contact users before severing their accounts, and the warning e-mail sent to these users claims contact was attempted (see above, click to enlarge), both of the users say they did not receive previous warnings before being told they'd be disconnected. How much usage was considered too much? Clearwire won't get specific, but one of the users tells Broadband Reports Clearwire informed him he'd breached 5 GB three months in a row -- which frankly doesn't sound excessive for a modern wireless network. Some users have crossed 100 GB and don't get so much as a warning.

Clear began throttling heavy users on unlimited accounts to around 256kbps back in 2010. They've never really been specific about what triggers the throttled state for users, given it appears to be calculated on the fly based on local tower congestion -- so what triggers throttling may be different in different markets. It's not entirely clear why throttling these users back to 256 kbps wasn't substantial enough of a punishment for these "fired" customers.