Internet metering - Page 2 - Guild Wars Forums

gremlin · Jun 04, 2008, 08:15 AM // 08:15

While having no actual download limit my isp does cap speed

The Virgin service is pretty open about its capping policy, it has changed over time.

At first it was a variable download amount depending on your service but the top was 6000 mb in a day and you could expect a cap.

Then it changed to if you were in the top 3% of users during peak hours you could have your speed capped to 50% for 5 hours

Now I am told its changed again but I have yet to confirm this with virgin

stale · Jun 04, 2008, 02:03 PM // 14:03

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Meth

(snip) I have a friend in Canada whose getting 5Mbit downstream 1 Mbit upstream completely uncapped, which is scary considering the best I can get in my area is 512kbit downstream and 128kbit upstream, in the country the Internet started in.

that's about what i run too - wanna be my friend? seriously, my provider asked if i would be willing to pay for a fibre line to the house from the street, and expressed that it would be equivelant to having a T1 line coming in.

i passed, mostly because i'm out of work, and $200 for ~25 feet of line seems, well, extortionate. that and i've no clue what (if any) change i would see in preformance. everything runs fast now - almost instant for most sites. what more could i want?

i did ask them about possible caps or metering fees, and the tech dude i was talking to was actually offended at the idea.

Crowley155 · Jun 04, 2008, 03:09 PM // 15:09

I work for an ISP local to Kansas City and it's certainly a matter of companies not wanting to upgrade equipment. We've built a fiber ring around the city with smaller rings inside and even with over 90,000 customers we've only utilized approx. 2% of our fiber capacity. We've started building fiber directly to homes in our new expansion areas as opposed to the HFC template that every other home provider in the country uses. We have certain customers on 50 meg symmetrical fiber connections although the average is our 10 meg product. We don't meter on customers using too much bandwidth but we will shut certain customers off if the bandwidth usage is severely above normal. All that means is that if your connection is pulling consistent 10 meg for the majority of the day or week we assume you have a virus or are running a some sort of data mining operation from your home and will shut it off until the problem is resolved.

Typically however we don't care what people are using because from a capacity standpoint there is almost no limit on what fiber can provide.

*EDIT*

The 50 meg symmetrical and 10 meg symmetrical products may seem a bit excessive for home customers but the big thing that made us decide to move towards this technology is the ability to send out a traditional broadcast Cable TV signal over the internet connection. AT&T has a new product that is similar called U-verse they run the cable TV over a basic twisted copper pair (same as a regular analog phone line or DSL). With the move towards HD we need the extra bandwidth for HD on-demand movies that can easily take longer to download than to actually watch over the traditional HFC products.

IslandHermet · Jun 04, 2008, 04:30 PM // 16:30

This is old news. The provider I use has a cap after 20 gigs dl 5$ extra per gig over (which is crap I can DL 20 gigs a day).

Had a nice suprise on my bill the first month (this was 4 to 5 years ago)

Most ISP providers will not tell you this when you sign up because if you do go over its more money for them.

It is pure crap they the can do this anyway (considering the price of high speed cable or dsl)

The Meth · Jun 04, 2008, 05:07 PM // 17:07

Quote:

Originally Posted by IslandHermet

This is old news. The provider I use has a cap after 20 gigs dl 5$ extra per gig over (which is crap I can DL 20 gigs a day).

Had a nice suprise on my bill the first month (this was 4 to 5 years ago)

Most ISP providers will not tell you this when you sign up because if you do go over its more money for them.

It is pure crap they the can do this anyway (considering the price of high speed cable or dsl)

Holy crap, $5 charge per gig? Christ, I download movies over netflix usually once a week. That would make it more expensive to download a movie then to actually go out and buy it. You should seriously consider trying to change your ISP. Knowing America though, the vast majority of people are practically caught in a monopoly where the only other option is going back to dial up or something.

Crowley155 · Jun 04, 2008, 06:57 PM // 18:57

It is crap. Our margin is so high on coax / fiber customers. Personally I know our margins are as high as 88 cents on the dollar on coax. Fiber is the same but we have to overcome the original buildout cost so when that's factored in our margins are much lower at least until that is paid off. On-going (after buildout costs are paid) the margins on fiber are much much higher because we don't have the need to supply an amplifier every 2000 feet, breaks are easier to repair, monitoring takes less time among a dozen other reasons. That's why traditional HFC is being phased out. There are only a handful (and I mean literally 5 or less) companies in the US and less than 10 in the world that currently deliver fiber directly to the home of consumers. Everything is moving towards this direction though. Companies like AT&T, Comcast, and Time Warner will continue to bleed the market dry trying to get as much money as possible from this old technology. AT&T still delivers service over the same lines that have been around for a hundred years.. traditional copper wire. They even recently released the new U-Verse product in an attempt to get into the "triple-play" home market. Don't be confused.. this is still a technology delivered over a twisted copper pair the same way their technology has been delivered for years.

Since the FCC regulations back in 1996 changed and allowed CLECs to come into existence they have had to build entirely new networks for themselves (unless they were one of those that just re-sold AT&T IE: Birch Telecom) which means they built networks with their own fiber backbones and delivered fiber to the node in each neighborhood then coax cable to the home from there. This was the only technology available at the time because the cost of the equipment for fiber is so expensive it just wasn't viable to deliver it to every single customer. Now there is plenty of equipment allowing us to split out separate single strands of fiber and putting smaller pieces of equipment on each end.

Now, you may be able to get 20, 30 or even 35 meg from local providers but your upload speed will forever be capped at ~1 meg on a coax connection. Coax simply cannot provide that kind of upload speed. For a lot of residential consumers they care mostly about the download speed but you don't want to forget that torrent programs rely mostly on upload speed from the opposite end of the connection. If you're trying to download from someone on a coax connection you won't ever get more than their upload speed will allow no matter how fast your download speed is. I have fiber directly to my house and I know that anytime my buddies download from my file server they are maxing our their download speeds which at 10 meg gives them approx. 1250 kb/s.

*EDIT*

I just wanted to note that the vast majority of download programs are moving towards this torrent-style technology. It's a great way for game companies to reduce their overhead by not having to host servers for customers to download updates. Setting it up so you can download from everyone else connected to the network saves costs and is overall better for the consumer and the company.

Our 10 meg product with unlimited LD, top 3 phone features, Caller ID on TV, Digital Cable (all channels except HD), VOD, HD Digital DVR only runs 114.95.

Basic 5 meg with unlimited LD and basic cable with phone only runs 99.95.

IslandHermet · Jun 04, 2008, 07:09 PM // 19:09

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Meth

Holy crap, $5 charge per gig? Christ, I download movies over netflix usually once a week. That would make it more expensive to download a movie then to actually go out and buy it. You should seriously consider trying to change your ISP. Knowing America though, the vast majority of people are practically caught in a monopoly where the only other option is going back to dial up or something.

Yep 5$ per gig you should have seen the bill. Since I was a new customer and it was the first month of use my bill should have been 35$ but when I got the bill it was around 400$ (should have seem my reaction), but since they did not tell me about the charge and cable was still newish in my area they removed most of the extra charges still had to pay to much. again this was 4-5 years ago mind you.
since then I make sure I do not go over the limit but I have cut back on dLing alot.

I would love to switch my ISP but as you stated I am cought im between the choice of DSL (which is half the speed of the cable provider where I live) or Cable and dial up is out of the question I will not even soil my hands on a dial up computer.

Crowley155 · Jun 04, 2008, 07:12 PM // 19:12

Quote:

Originally Posted by IslandHermet

Yep 5$ per gig you should have seen the bill. Since I was a new customer and it was the first month of use my bill should have been 35$ but when I got the bill it was around 400$ (should have seem my reaction), but because they did not tell me about the charge and cable was still newish in my area they removed most of the extra charges still had to pay to much.

I would love to switch my ISP but as you stated I am cought im between the choice of DSL (which is half the speed of the cable provider where I live) or Cable and dial up is out of the question I will not even soil my hands on a dial up computer.

Where do you live?

IslandHermet · Jun 04, 2008, 07:28 PM // 19:28

Quote:

Originally Posted by stale

that's about what i run too - wanna be my friend? seriously, my provider asked if i would be willing to pay for a fibre line to the house from the street, and expressed that it would be equivelant to having a T1 line coming in.

i passed, mostly because i'm out of work, and $200 for ~25 feet of line seems, well, extortionate. that and i've no clue what (if any) change i would see in preformance. everything runs fast now - almost instant for most sites. what more could i want?

i did ask them about possible caps or metering fees, and the tech dude i was talking to was actually offended at the idea.

Fiber is worth the money it costs but is still to fragile. you can break a fiber and not even know you did it.

fiber uses light to send data while cable sends a electrical signal along a copper wire. Wire has a resistance so over longer distances the signal loses strength which requires a transformer to boost the signal.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Crowley155

Where do you live?

ohio

Quote:

Originally Posted by Crowley155

I work for an ISP local to Kansas City and it's certainly a matter of companies not wanting to upgrade equipment. We've built a fiber ring around the city with smaller rings inside and even with over 90,000 customers we've only utilized approx. 2% of our fiber capacity. We've started building fiber directly to homes in our new expansion areas as opposed to the HFC template that every other home provider in the country uses. We have certain customers on 50 meg symmetrical fiber connections although the average is our 10 meg product. We don't meter on customers using too much bandwidth but we will shut certain customers off if the bandwidth usage is severely above normal. All that means is that if your connection is pulling consistent 10 meg for the majority of the day or week we assume you have a virus or are running a some sort of data mining operation from your home and will shut it off until the problem is resolved.

Typically however we don't care what people are using because from a capacity standpoint there is almost no limit on what fiber can provide.

*EDIT*

The 50 meg symmetrical and 10 meg symmetrical products may seem a bit excessive for home customers but the big thing that made us decide to move towards this technology is the ability to send out a traditional broadcast Cable TV signal over the internet connection. AT&T has a new product that is similar called U-verse they run the cable TV over a basic twisted copper pair (same as a regular analog phone line or DSL). With the move towards HD we need the extra bandwidth for HD on-demand movies that can easily take longer to download than to actually watch over the traditional HFC products.

what does the company you work for consider to be normal internet usage?

Crowley155 · Jun 04, 2008, 07:34 PM // 19:34

Quote:

Originally Posted by IslandHermet

Fiber is worth the money it costs but is still to fragile. you can break a fiber and not even know you did it.

fiber uses light to send data while cable sends a electrical signal along a copper wire. Wire has a resistance so over longer distances the signal loses strength which requires a transformer to boost the signal.

We put this nasty gel substance around the fiber inside the casing which cushions it. It is very easy to break but we never have problems with fiber breaks. And if we do it's much easier to repair and diagnose since there isn't signal degradation to track down we immediately know where the break is. Coax does run over copper which can get a high heat buildup as well as the fact you have to have an amplifier to boost the signal every 2000 feet. I already stated both those facts in my above posts.

All backbones currently consist of fiber it is a great direction to move because the capacity of a fiber line is infinitely higher than coax.

Crowley155 · Jun 04, 2008, 08:07 PM // 20:07

We don't even monitor customer bandwidth usage. It requires purchasing an automated system to check each IP for their current bandwidth usage. The only way we ever shut customers off is if they have e-mail viruses and it may affect us for example we got blacklisted by Time Warner Cable and SBC Global over the past 2 weeks because of several viruses on customer computers but we just blocked internet traffic from those IPs and changed our own to get around the blacklists.

The reason companies do meter charging is because they haven't purchased enough internet transport from one of the tier 1 providers. For example we have 2 internet drains from Cojent and AT&T which connect directly to the internet. If we don't gauge the amount of transport we need then we may end up purchasing 6 gigs of transport but customers actually use 10 gigs. We're billed for the 10 gigs of transport and our prices to customers are based on 6 gigs of transport. This is why some of those companies are moving towards metering.

This really is just a matter of those companies not wanting to lower their margins and purchase more internet transport so they forward the cost over to the customer.

*EDIT*

Which is really silly.. the cost of internet transport is always going down. We could add another 4 gigs of transport and put that many more customers on it without lowering our margins at all which leaves no reason to charge the customer for it. Plus we could fit a ton more customers on the extra 4 gig of transport which in turn would actually raise our margins that much more. The more people you can fit on the same pipe the better.

Jun 04, 2008, 03:09 PM // 15:09	#23
Crowley155 Ascalonian Squire Join Date: Jun 2008	I work for an ISP local to Kansas City and it's certainly a matter of companies not wanting to upgrade equipment. We've built a fiber ring around the city with smaller rings inside and even with over 90,000 customers we've only utilized approx. 2% of our fiber capacity. We've started building fiber directly to homes in our new expansion areas as opposed to the HFC template that every other home provider in the country uses. We have certain customers on 50 meg symmetrical fiber connections although the average is our 10 meg product. We don't meter on customers using too much bandwidth but we will shut certain customers off if the bandwidth usage is severely above normal. All that means is that if your connection is pulling consistent 10 meg for the majority of the day or week we assume you have a virus or are running a some sort of data mining operation from your home and will shut it off until the problem is resolved. Typically however we don't care what people are using because from a capacity standpoint there is almost no limit on what fiber can provide. EDIT The 50 meg symmetrical and 10 meg symmetrical products may seem a bit excessive for home customers but the big thing that made us decide to move towards this technology is the ability to send out a traditional broadcast Cable TV signal over the internet connection. AT&T has a new product that is similar called U-verse they run the cable TV over a basic twisted copper pair (same as a regular analog phone line or DSL). With the move towards HD we need the extra bandwidth for HD on-demand movies that can easily take longer to download than to actually watch over the traditional HFC products. Last edited by Crowley155; Jun 04, 2008 at 03:15 PM // 15:15..

Jun 04, 2008, 06:57 PM // 18:57	#26
Crowley155 Ascalonian Squire Join Date: Jun 2008	It is crap. Our margin is so high on coax / fiber customers. Personally I know our margins are as high as 88 cents on the dollar on coax. Fiber is the same but we have to overcome the original buildout cost so when that's factored in our margins are much lower at least until that is paid off. On-going (after buildout costs are paid) the margins on fiber are much much higher because we don't have the need to supply an amplifier every 2000 feet, breaks are easier to repair, monitoring takes less time among a dozen other reasons. That's why traditional HFC is being phased out. There are only a handful (and I mean literally 5 or less) companies in the US and less than 10 in the world that currently deliver fiber directly to the home of consumers. Everything is moving towards this direction though. Companies like AT&T, Comcast, and Time Warner will continue to bleed the market dry trying to get as much money as possible from this old technology. AT&T still delivers service over the same lines that have been around for a hundred years.. traditional copper wire. They even recently released the new U-Verse product in an attempt to get into the "triple-play" home market. Don't be confused.. this is still a technology delivered over a twisted copper pair the same way their technology has been delivered for years. Since the FCC regulations back in 1996 changed and allowed CLECs to come into existence they have had to build entirely new networks for themselves (unless they were one of those that just re-sold AT&T IE: Birch Telecom) which means they built networks with their own fiber backbones and delivered fiber to the node in each neighborhood then coax cable to the home from there. This was the only technology available at the time because the cost of the equipment for fiber is so expensive it just wasn't viable to deliver it to every single customer. Now there is plenty of equipment allowing us to split out separate single strands of fiber and putting smaller pieces of equipment on each end. Now, you may be able to get 20, 30 or even 35 meg from local providers but your upload speed will forever be capped at ~1 meg on a coax connection. Coax simply cannot provide that kind of upload speed. For a lot of residential consumers they care mostly about the download speed but you don't want to forget that torrent programs rely mostly on upload speed from the opposite end of the connection. If you're trying to download from someone on a coax connection you won't ever get more than their upload speed will allow no matter how fast your download speed is. I have fiber directly to my house and I know that anytime my buddies download from my file server they are maxing our their download speeds which at 10 meg gives them approx. 1250 kb/s. EDIT I just wanted to note that the vast majority of download programs are moving towards this torrent-style technology. It's a great way for game companies to reduce their overhead by not having to host servers for customers to download updates. Setting it up so you can download from everyone else connected to the network saves costs and is overall better for the consumer and the company. Our 10 meg product with unlimited LD, top 3 phone features, Caller ID on TV, Digital Cable (all channels except HD), VOD, HD Digital DVR only runs 114.95. Basic 5 meg with unlimited LD and basic cable with phone only runs 99.95. Last edited by Crowley155; Jun 04, 2008 at 07:11 PM // 19:11..

Jun 04, 2008, 08:07 PM // 20:07	#31
Crowley155 Ascalonian Squire Join Date: Jun 2008	We don't even monitor customer bandwidth usage. It requires purchasing an automated system to check each IP for their current bandwidth usage. The only way we ever shut customers off is if they have e-mail viruses and it may affect us for example we got blacklisted by Time Warner Cable and SBC Global over the past 2 weeks because of several viruses on customer computers but we just blocked internet traffic from those IPs and changed our own to get around the blacklists. The reason companies do meter charging is because they haven't purchased enough internet transport from one of the tier 1 providers. For example we have 2 internet drains from Cojent and AT&T which connect directly to the internet. If we don't gauge the amount of transport we need then we may end up purchasing 6 gigs of transport but customers actually use 10 gigs. We're billed for the 10 gigs of transport and our prices to customers are based on 6 gigs of transport. This is why some of those companies are moving towards metering. This really is just a matter of those companies not wanting to lower their margins and purchase more internet transport so they forward the cost over to the customer. EDIT Which is really silly.. the cost of internet transport is always going down. We could add another 4 gigs of transport and put that many more customers on it without lowering our margins at all which leaves no reason to charge the customer for it. Plus we could fit a ton more customers on the extra 4 gig of transport which in turn would actually raise our margins that much more. The more people you can fit on the same pipe the better. Last edited by Crowley155; Jun 04, 2008 at 08:09 PM // 20:09..

Jun 04, 2008, 08:15 AM // 08:15	#21
gremlin Furnace Stoker Join Date: Oct 2006 Guild: GWAR Profession: Me/Mo	While having no actual download limit my isp does cap speed The Virgin service is pretty open about its capping policy, it has changed over time. At first it was a variable download amount depending on your service but the top was 6000 mb in a day and you could expect a cap. Then it changed to if you were in the top 3% of users during peak hours you could have your speed capped to 50% for 5 hours Now I am told its changed again but I have yet to confirm this with virgin

Jun 04, 2008, 04:30 PM // 16:30	#24
IslandHermet Wilds Pathfinder Join Date: Aug 2007	This is old news. The provider I use has a cap after 20 gigs dl 5$ extra per gig over (which is crap I can DL 20 gigs a day). Had a nice suprise on my bill the first month (this was 4 to 5 years ago) Most ISP providers will not tell you this when you sign up because if you do go over its more money for them. It is pure crap they the can do this anyway (considering the price of high speed cable or dsl)