FiOS customer discovers the limits of “unlimited” data: 77 TB a month | Hacker News Reader

FiOS customer discovers the limits of “unlimited” data: 77 TB a month

arstechnica.com

42 pointsdpcx54 comments

77TB is quite a bit, but part of being able to charge little old ladies $80/month who only do 20MB of email is running into the occasional fellow who does the opposite.

Unlimited. Hu keep hu-sing tha word. I do-na think it mean wha you think it mean.

Edit: I'm not sure why this is getting down-voted repeatedly but let me just add: If a company is going to use the term "unlimited" it has to be prepared for 2 eventualities. 1) Some one pays the monthly fee and transfers 0 bytes. big win for company. 2) Someone pays the monthly fee and transfers at full speed 100% of the time. Potential big lose for company. If a company is not prepared for both of these outcomes, don't use that word. It sucks to grab the first and then try to outlaw the second with TOS weasel-ry.

Except the whole "Don't run servers on a residential connection" part of the service agreement, which he clearly in violation of. That's the real story here.

Ahh yes, but he had to tell them he was running servers. They just saw the overage and called to ask. What is a "any type of server" anyway? A p2p client listening for connections? A personal VPN end-point? Its a grey area ripe for selective TOS enforcement. Clearly this guy was over the top but its all part of "unlimited as long as you don't use it too much". Why should they care what runs on a connection? Just sell the damn bandwidth already.

Not that hard at all. A simple metric might be that if outbound > 0.20 * inbound, there's probably something going on, and that if outbound > inbound, huge red alerts should go off.

I hope not. I use my FIOS for offsite backup to colo for the projects I work on. I'd guess I have about time and a half more outbound than in.

Unless your project is huge, I don't see that tripping anything off. If your project, is, say, 1GB, then it'd only take about 45 minutes of HQ Netflix streaming to balance out a complete upload.

Its real estate stuff, audio, video, photos. I'd guess in the neighborhood of 3-5 gig/day. Sometimes lots more. I'd hate for a "30 gig day" to set off a bunch of alarms that had me explaining myself to some corporate enforcer all the time.

Couldn't they bust him for P2P or sharing illegal content? He said friends and family stream media from him, and I doubt he has a whole rack of hard drives to store legitimately owned data.

This is probably why he chose to remain anonymous.

But what's a "server"? That sounds like a clause that includes everyone, just so they can drop absolutely anyone they want with no repercussions.

Back in 2003-2005, when I was managing telecom for a smart grid company, I was negotiating with Sprint, Verizon, and AT&T for wireless data plans. A conversation with them, Verizon in particular, was like a comedy sketch.

  Me:  So, for $90/month, how much data do I get?
  Rep: It's Unlimited. 
  Me:  Great - so how much is "Unlimited?"
  Rep: We have no Limit. 
  Me:  So, can you tell me how that is?
  Rep: Seriously, it's "Unlimited!"
  Me:  So, you're telling me there no cap, right?
  Rep: Exactly!
  Me:  Great - can I purchase 1000 circuits, I'll be 
       downloading approximately 32 gigabytes/circuit/month.
  Rep:  Woah - hold on there - that's over the limit.
  Me:  Yes, of course - so, for $90/month, how much data do I get?

Now I'm somewhat interest, did you get an answer?

The best I could ever get them to commit to was, "Unlimited within reasonable amounts." I.E. They would let me know if I was pulling down too much traffic, but wouldn't let me know what "too much" was.

"Oh, it is unlimited? Put that on the contract then."

AT&T wouldn't allow me to enable tethering from my iphone because i had an "unlimited" data plan. fancy that.

i switched to T-Mobile after that conversation. although my unlimited plan is still "unlimited", it's at least a higher cap, with tethering, $30/mo less.

The point is that I don't want to think about the practical limit of my bandwidth and considering the guy is clearly an outlier, I don't blame Verizon for pitching it as 'unlimited' when for nearly all intents and purposes... it IS unlimited. I give credit to Verizon for being fair in this case. Especially since the guy basically admitted he is pirating like crazy and letting his friends/family serve it up. This guy gives responsible consumers a bad name.

This guy gives responsible consumers a bad name.

Sure he does. He makes me want to say "cut it out, you're going to ruin 'unlimited' for everyone"... and that sets off an alarm in my head right there. Just like those deplorable Westboro Baptist folks yelling "God hates fags" test our commitment to what we mean by "free speech", obnoxious outliers like this test the limits of "unlimited".

"X Mbit/s, Unlimited" has a very specific meaning. It means being able transfer at X-MBit/s continuously, 100% of the time. Anything else is limited. Which is fine, and may indeed be "so much I never have to worry about going over". Just don't use the U word.

For better or worse, service providers have settled on using "unlimited(asterisk)" as a shorthand for 'We are selling you a shared resource that we provision based on the probabilities associated with a statistical-multiplexing framework modeled upon observations of actual customer usage. 95% of our customers will not be limited in any way. The other 5% of our customers will have to negotiate a separate solution to meet their needs.'

As long as the actual limits of an 'unlimited(asterisk)' service are reasonably easy to discern prior to purchase and are only going to affect 0-5% of the users, I don't have a problem with the 'unlimited(asterisk)' shorthand.

P.S. How do you get a literal asterisk to appear in a HN comment?

As I read the article and do the math, he purchased a 300Mbps line and saturated it. (300e6/8)x24x60x60x30 == 97 TB/mo. That 77 isn't a contractual limit, it's just a 20% pipe efficiencey factor (or just measurement slop) on top of the fundamental limit of the line.

If that's the "limit" I can expect Verizon to enforce, then bravo Verizon! How about this for a headline: "Verizon allows you to saturate 80% of your line 24/7 without complaining!"

But as the article (and not the linkbait headline) explains, his contract was canceled for bleedingly obvious ToS violations.

If you read the article, his data usage wasn't the reason he was cut off. He was caught because of it, but the reason he's being forced to business class is that he's running a server (multiple actually.) Residential has it in their TOS, no hosting servers on that connection. If anything Verizon should be applauded compared to companies like Comcast... they didn't even throttle him before they called to find out what was going on. He willingly gave himself away.

However, traffic most months is in the 30TB range. That sort of bandwidth would cost thousands of dollars per month in most colocation facilities

Huh? That's about a maxed out 100Mbps line. I'm not super familiar with different DC pricing for this tier of speed but from what I've seen this seems to be very misleading. For 100Mbps managed with IPS/IDS, I've seen $3000/Mo. But usually the offer is for unmanaged and with that the price can be in the hundreds or less. Any DC experts care to comment?

I pay $10-ish per 1TB at my colo's. So that would be about $300. Off by a factor of 10.

The AWS price sheet says that the 77TB would be $6570/month delivered from Amazon. So it's not far out of the range that people are accustomed to paying for this kind of data.

Yea but cloud bandwidth and DC bulk bandwidth are really apples and oranges. I guess I just didn't like that the article seemed to be making it appear as if this guy is costing Verizon thousands because of his extreme bandwidth usage. Being that Verizon doesn't pay for transit to anyone, his effect on the network is even more minimized.

I really would like to see a class action suit initiated against companies who dishonestly use the word "unlimited" like this.

Unlimited means "without limits", not even absurdly high ones.

Technically, they dinged him for violating their TOS, not for hitting a bandwidth cap.

(Although the concept of "running a server" is pretty meaningless, too.)

The problem is not that he was using a lot of bandwidth. If the usage didn't violate the Verizon ToS (no servers), he would have a good case.

But he (presumably) agreed to the ToS when he signed up for the service, he violated the ToS by running servers, and then got threatened to lose his service if he didn't upgrade to business without such restrictions.

Is everyone surprised because Verizon came knocking on his door after using 30,000% more bandwidth than anyone else?? If you were running this network, wouldn't you want to know what was causing such high usage?

He'd have a hard time arguing legitimate use in _any_ case, considering that running a full-bitrate, un-recompressed Blu-Ray stream 24/7 would only be 11.7TB/month. Anyone using more than that is either running servers or hitting alt.binaries.* a bit hard...

If I was in charge of an advertising standards authority I would make it outright illegal to use the words "unlimited" or "infinite" in a commercial context.

In other news: Major German ISP will start throttling DSL connections at 75Gb/month

Deutsche Telekom. We should name them.

People like him are the reason we're seeing unlimited disappear.

FIOS means fiber optic which means the speed of light. Recent breakthroughs allow multiple signals down one fiber cable, which means multiple times the speed of light.

Yes, the fault for slow service in the US, as compared to the rest of the world, is people like this guy - not that the local telco and local cable company have a monopoly over the local loop and are usually one of the biggest, if not the biggest contributors to state (and federal) government campaigns.

Multiple times the speed of light? I think you're confusing speed with capacity.

I have a two-lane country road with a car going the speed limit. Now replace that with an eight-lane freeway with the same speed limit, and put a car in each lane driving at that speed.

Are we now driving at four times the speed limit? Each car takes just as long to get to its destination.

Because he thinks the unlimited service is unlimited?

Tragedy of the Commons. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons )

If enough people use the internet like he was, then we have a problem and can't sustain it. For most people at this exact and present time, < 50Tb/m is "functionally unlimited".

This isn't tragedy of the commons; it's false advertising. No one should be advertising unlimited Internet, as there is no such thing, never has been, and probably never will be. But bandwidth providers want to suck people in and claim they have to offer unlimited Internet to compete.

Context of the argument. "post_break" was complaining that people like this were the reason that unlimited internet was going away. "jpdoctor" asked why, postulating that it's because someone actually believed them, to which I responded that people abusing the commons (the common pool of bandwidth) is why offering unlimited may go away.

And you certainly can deliver "unlimited internet" where unlimited = max_speed_per_second * 60 * 60 * 24 * 31 + 1 Because that is "unlimited" relative the max throughput.

Unlimited should disappear, it's a lie and it prevents honest comparisons of internet providers. If Verizon set a limit of 5 TB per month for residential customers, I think very few people would be complaining. They won't do it, because it would make LTE look like a really bad deal.

Why does unlimited prevent honest comparisons?

I'd argue that unlimited makes "honest" comparisons more convenient: compare the bandwidths and you're done!

The alternative is to compare bandwidth x1 and limit y1 against bandwidth x2 and limit y2, which I find more difficult.

> People like him are the reason we're seeing unlimited disappear.

Umm, it was never here to begin with.

I'll bet all of that 77TB is linux distros too... It sounds like he is enabling massive copyright infringement with that "video streaming, and peer-to-peer file service" ... "A lot of friends and family stream stuff off me from my huge media collection. And I also do some P2P and Usenet stuff."

300mbit connection - max theoretical bandwidth usage is: (((300/8) * 60 * 60 * 24 * 365)/12)/(1024^2) = ~94GB. This guy did pretty good work!

re: "300mbit connection - max theoretical bandwidth usage is: (((300/8)606024365)/12)/(1024^2) = ~94GB"

Soulver tells me: 300 megabits/second at 30 days in terabytes is 97.2 terabytes. If you have a Macintosh - get Soulver. Just doing bandwidth calculations alone makes it worth it. Thank you Marco Arment for telling me about this wonderful app.

Or just google "300mbps in terabytes/month".

And as a bonus you'll get the right answer, unlike with Soulver.

Google: 300 Mbps = 94.0469681 terabytes / month

Soulver: 300 megabits/second at 30 days in terabytes is 97.2 terabytes

My calculator: 300,000,000 * 60 * 60 * 24 * 30 / 8 = 97,200,000,000,000 bytes.

Soulver wins.

Note - in everything (Storage, Bandwidth, etc..) except memory, megabits means 10^6, not 2^20. One day, perhaps mebibits will catch on...

(Google: 300 (mebibits / second) = 94.0469681 terabytes / month

Funny. I used to work with the guy featured in this story. He always tends towards the extremes of technology.

About 5 years ago he was using a medical grade, high DPI display on his Linux desktop machine that required 4 separate video cards to work. He'd seriously have to hold his face 6 inches from the screen to work on it, but he claimed to love it.

Shine on you crazy diamond.

I love how cell phone companies have "Unlimited" data plans [1]

[1] Speed will be very slow though once you cross x MB or y GB.

If the guy can have tens (or maybe even hundreds) of thousands of dollars worth of servers, networking equipment, etc, I'd say he can pay for a business class line. Heck, I just switching my personal FiOS from residential to business and all I'm running is a low-traffic Mac mini server.

The article mentioned he works in a "test lab", so does that mean all of this storage hardware came from the lab after being tested? Otherwise, this is quite an expensive hobby to purchase and run this hardware for home use.

Some guy posted this traffic graph on [H] the other day, he said he was "verizon's most wanted"

http://i.imgur.com/gyB8Sya.png

> It just surprises me they would bother going after people just to get them to pay a little bit more per month.

I don't even know where to start. From the hardware he has, I know this guy is no simpleton/fool, yet he thinks that his behavior is okay.

His hardware costs alone are probably many multiples of his Verizon bill.

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