My ISP has placed a bandwidth cap on my connection. What should I do?

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I seem to find those kinds of limitations to only be guidelines. You probably can stream video, play games, etc, without that much worry but you cant do it 24/7....

For example, if your ISP sees you get to 8GB 1 month, they probably wont care... 11GB, maybe still no..... I wouldn't really worry about it for just regular use.. Not unless they explicitly charge you for every MB you go over...

ISPs like Optimum Online actually cap things like your upload speed to 15KB/s if they see you uploading too much. Nowhere do they say how much their target is, but they do say its prohibited to use your connection in this type of way and its still their right to cap you.

It's pretty funny, but I tend to dump those types of ISPs although they "say" they are unlimited and promote a certain speed, yet go back and end up capping you if you use it too much. It's not worth it... There are plenty of real Unlimited ISPs in the US (not so much in European countries I believe, but still some).

I would be very careful about ignoring bandwidth caps as merely guidelines. Your ISP could cancel your service, or as in the case of some, charge you an exorbitant rate for the amount you go over your limit.

08-Aug-2009

I've little sympathy for DSL providers for the following reasons

1. In the past they have vastly oversold their networks, in effect selling capacity they didn't have, while at the same time putting off needed network maintenance and improvements. Caps are one way of avoiding the day of reckoning. In my state, the Public Regulatory Commission sued the largest DSL provider and won, resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars in fines and mandated improvements. Last year the top DSL download speed in my neighborhood went from 3.5Mb/sec to 20Mb/sec and uptime improved as a result.

2. Their afraid alright - afraid of competition. I'd be willing to bet that the cap doesn't apply to premium services sold by your by DSL provider, like VOIP and streaming video. They simply don't want to have to compete with similar services available for free or fee on the Internet. And finally they don't want to have to compete with you as they increasingly use a share of the available bandwidth for dedicated service like subscriber and on-demand video.

3. Let see, in some places in my city the DSL provider advertises 50Mb/sec download speeds. If I had a 5GB cap, that would be 13.7 minutes of download at full speed (34.1 minutes at the rate I can get at my home) per month. See anything wrong here?

4. Those Terms of Service limitations are common, virtually every carrier has them. There a legal fail-safe, rarely invoked but useful to "wack" a customer as needed.

So what can you do? Here's my top three:

1. In most locations, the DSL provider is a publicly regulated private telecommunications company. Complain in writing to your local PRC and commissioners.

2. DSL providers by law are required to sell at cost part of their bandwidth to third-party resellers. Depending on your local, you may be able to find a DSL reseller with no cap and pay less than your paying now. BroadbandReports.com is a good source of information on what's available nearby.

3. At 5GB/month, your in the realm of a cell phone with a good 3G connection. If you can live with 5GB and already have a cell plane and data plan, tethering may be an option.

WatchWan will monitor your internet traffic even if you are on a local network. It can exclude local traffic between machines from the tally. To get the total internet traffic you must install it on all the machines on the LAN and add the traffic from each machine's. And it's free

http://download.cnet.com/WatchWAN/3000-2381_4-10520334.html

Check your router settings. Newer routers provide traffic or bandwidth monitoring. My new router provided by ISP does provide bandwidth usage over a period of time whereas the older one doesn't.
Since it is in the router it will sum up the entire LAN's usage of the bandwidth.

My ISP is a satellite internet provider...and I knew going in that there was a bandwidth cap of a gigabyte a week. Didn't know what that meant until it bit me and they slowed my connection speed from 512 kpbs to 28 kpbs until the 'rolling total' was under the weekly minimum. One day I called Netflix to find out what one of their streaming 1-hour shows was in bandwidth and it was 1 gigabyte an HOUR, so I passed. But in rural areas, our ISP options are much more limited, especially when you have to buy the equipment.

Firefox and Download Helper provide an excellent way to save youtube or similar videos. If you use Windows, you might need Gomplayer to view the saved video.

Depending on your needs for speed/volume of moving data, getting a business account with a static IP address is another alternative. I'm a small businessman doing a lot of remote work, I also have a server running a private FTP site for access when I'm away, and several pc's in the office browsing for information for various reasons. It was a good solution for me.

Let's see. R.I.A.A. announces they are going to slow down taking individuals to court and start taking ISPs to court (read deeper pockets). Download caps start appearing. Liability Issues? Did they offer to lower your rates as well?

My ISP, Comcast, recently capped my bandwidth as well but sent a letter assuring subscribers of the thousands of music files and dozens of movies that could still be downloaded without using but a fraction of the cap. It sounded like so much BS to me. What is so disturbing about the caps is I have never been able to get a clear, straight forward answer whether certain types of legit downloads affect the cap. For example, I have a TiVo and TiVo has a feature that allows movies to be downloaded to the unit from Amazon. Does doing so go against the cap? I can't get a straight answer. TiVo offers a lot of other content, some of which I would use, but won't because I don't trust Comcast not to play "Gotcha!" with me and hit me with outrageous over limit fees. I am also a NetFlix subscriber and have avoided using their Watch it Now feature that sends video to my PC for the same reason. I use Steam, an online service from which I buy and download PC games to my computer. If I replace my computer or a drive, I log into my Steam account and re-download the games. At this time I have maybe 10 games which size-wise exceed the 5 GB cap alluded to. I have avoided buying new products from them because of the cap. I use an online backup service for my computer and store a fairly large amount of data with the. Does that count against me? I don't know and neither does Comcast customer service, but I am thinking of cancelling my subscription just in case it does. And what happens if I have to do a full restore? I have a pair of 500 GB hard drives, the main one being about 70% full and the slave being about 50% full. The cap creates another problem for me because online backup services won't allow backup of any executable files. I use Mozy because once they did and allowed external drives to be backed up while Carbonite allowed neither. I buy 80% of my software as a download and with restrictions against backing up such files I am looking into renting online storage that charges for storage space and doesn't restrict file types. I don't know how doing that will affect my cap either. I use VOIP from a competing service and tried to find out if that usage would affect the cap, and again, no straight answer. Comcast was already charged with degrading the quality of VOIP services that competed with their own and throttling the connections of any subscribers using Bit Comet, both actions they have sad they stopped doing. With the push for net neutrality and the successful effort that stopped the telecoms from flat seizing control of the Internet, I see the caps as another way they are going to squeeze every cent from the consumer they can. The utility and importance of the Internet and it's initial reasonable cost and wide open ways got millions of us to make it a vital part of our lives. Now that we can't imagine doing without it, we are susceptible to the whims and fancies of those who administer it. It's important to join and support the groups and organizations who fight to keep the Internet fair, open, and affordable. We certainly can't expect the ISPs to have anything but their bottom lines at heart.

A bandwidth cap has always been in place on internet connections as measured in bits/second for a given modem and facility. Now we have a second type of "bandwidth" cap measured in bits/month. It would be less confusing to use a term that distinguishes the second from the first, e.g monthly usage cap, download cap or whatever, rather than bandwidth.

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