FiOS customer discovers the limits of “unlimited” data: 77TB a month
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I'm stuck in an area where my two options are Time Warner Cable, which I refuse to use due to terrible experiences with them in the past, and AT&T DSL (old school DSL, not U-Verse), which works fine but is slow and has 50 gigabyte caps (you can go over the caps but they will bill you for extra usage).
I really wish Google would put more pressure on the US ISP market (maybe partnering with Netflix and others who stand to lose on the current sorry state of ISPs here), because clearly these companies need a lot more pressure put upon them, but 77 terabytes a month is by any measure a huge outlier and I don't fault Verizon for getting involved in this particular case.
You want to know what Google's biggest issue is getting fiber out?
Quote:
In California in particular, environmental regulations prevent companies from improving the telecommunications infrastructure, Medin said.
“Google is a big believer in protecting the environment for future generations, but certain types of state and local environmental rules make investment very difficult,” he explained. ” Laws like the California Environmental Quality Act can make it prohibitively expensive for companies to invest in new projects, such as our fiber project, within California.
“Many fine California city proposals for the Google Fiber project were ultimately passed over in part because of the regulatory complexity here brought about by CEQA and other rules. Other states have equivalent processes in place to protect the environment without causing such harm to business processes, and therefore create incentives for new services to be deployed there instead.”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/eliseackerman/2012/08/04/how-kan...
Google is doing this to get people to complain to their ISP that they are not getting as good a deal as people on Google Fiber. They get into businesses to disrupt things that could potentially hurt their core business but they do not REALLY want to be in that business. A similar thing was when they were going to bid for the 700MHZ frequency auction and managed to get many provisions put in there that were beneficial to them and then did not buy the frequency.
That plan only has a chance of working if they increase coverage by a lot to put real pressure on ISPs across many local regions. What does the local duopoly of ISPs where 99.99% of us live care if we know that Google Fiber is much better and cheaper when our only option of getting it is to move to KC, Austin or Provo? They won't give a shit until Google is actually competing in their backyard.
FWIW, Google's half-baked plans for the spectrum failed as well, Verizon never did shit to open the upper band of 700MHz up for open access after buying it and after their recent court victory, it is virtually certain they never will.
Data caps aside, this is like saturating a quarter-gigabit connection nearly full-time. I can't even get a connection like that at home to begin with.
1. Prime TV lineup
2. Unlimited landline phone service
3. 75 M/bps downstream and 35 M/bps upstream Internet
Whenever I run a speedtest, the amount I always get more than the speed I'm promised. Typically see a floor of 80 M/bps downsteam and 40 M/bps upstream.
It is rock-solid reliable, my IP address never changes unless I unplug my router for more than a day and it is completely unfiltered Internet - they don't physically stop you from running servers.
I probably transfer 500 GB per month every month and I would consider myself a "heavy user" of bandwidth. As you said, 77 TB of bandwidth in one month is outside of normal use patterns to an insane degree.
The internet is great from them but when the 2 biggest bandwidth sites on the internet are slow it is a big deal. You cannot get HD Netflix from them but they offer a competing service which they CDN with and give you HD which is a conflict of interest.
I am guessing they route to different locations and some are less congested.
To be fair, the guy clearly doesn't think it's a big deal either. From the article: "I don't mind upgrading to business if that's really all the problem is," houkouonchi told me. "It just surprises me they would bother going after people just to get them to pay a little bit more per month."
I've been a FiOS customer for about a year and I still wonder what's going on with it to make it so good. By all rights, nothing sold by Verizon should be this easy, high-quality, and free of problems. Yet here we are.
What makes it so good is that it is only available in a couple of dozen cities in 16 states (almost all coastal states), within any city focuses on wiring up affluent areas first,[1] is a premium product that starts at $60/month (averaged over 2 years), and is relatively unregulated compared to POTS or cellular.
[1] Check out the FIOS map for Baltimore (within 15 miles of 21217): http://fios.verizon.com/fios-coverage.html. That reverse-S shape is more or less a map of the higher-income corridor of the city. The pinned addresses are generally luxury apartment buildings. Also check out the coverage map of Philadelphia (within 20 miles of 19106). Zoom in note good coverage in Center City, particularly in Rittenhouse Square, no coverage in North Philly, South Philly, or West Philly, but decent coverage in the wealthier western suburbs. Follow Lancaster Ave westward from poor West Philly; note the lack of any coverage until you get to Lower Merion Township, one of the historically wealthy suburbs.
They certainly are targeting big cities and the wealthier areas thereof, but I don't see why that would make it better than services from other providers in the same place.
A $60 minimum subscription price is definitely premium compared to the $15-$20 minimum service price typical for a cable provider. Remember, it costs more or less the same to wire up a customer whether or not they buy the more expensive packages, and cable companies are often required to offer very cheap basic service at a regulated rate (e.g. $13.50 for basic cable where I live).
> They certainly are targeting big cities and the wealthier areas thereof, but I don't see why that would make it better than services from other providers in the same place.
If a company is allowed to focus on dense, wealthy areas, it can concentrate infrastructure spend on customers who can pay premium prices for premium service. That's what Verizon can do with FIOS. But cable companies usually do not have that freedom. Their agreements with municipalities require them to wire up a much broader cross-section of the population, which means their infrastructure dollars are spread thinner.
This article isn't "bah caps" complaining, rather "how did someone use 77TB in a month?" curiosity.
Now. going back to the unlimited thing. I really want some kind of govt control here and make it unlawful for these companies to advertise "unlimited" because lets face it, it never is. There is always a "cap" or "Throttle" (EDIT). So instead of advertising as "unlimited", why not say "Use as much as you want upto xyz GB". Yes this does not sound nice for marketing but honestly, claiming unlimited with a fine print is really getting old and boring.
For example, I have an "unlimited" data plan from TMobile. But they try to explain it to me like this "After 2GB usage, you will lose the 4G speed and it will be very slow". They even send me text messages with this crap once I reach a certain "limit" on my "unlimited" plan. It cracks me up.
They meant unlimited reading of email or surfing, but if I used too much data (1GB per month) I wouldn't be able to watch YouTube or download large files.
It's an aggressively stupid method to sell bandwidth. Now no one knows what's allowed or expected.
I would love a data plan which just throttled me down to dial-up speeds or whatever. Still enough to use email/IM, and I'd be able to use my data cap more liberally. Which is of course, why it will never happen.
It's not a matter of sounding nice. The average person has no idea what a gigabyte is. But they know what unlimited means.
Figure out how to explain what a gigabyte is to the average person and I'll get behind your proposal. Otherwise, I'll just read the fine print or search on the net as to what "unlimited" means for that specific plan and company.
I'm not sure how I feel about ISPs trying to regulate what you do with your connection, rather than just how much, but it's at least a different question from the one of "unlimited".
It's unlimited which does not mean there aren't limitations. For example an "all you can eat" buffet means all you can eat in one visit and also means you can't expect to take home what you don't eat. Likewise unlimited would typically come with some restrictions and expectation that you aren't watching movies 24x7 but more like a normal person might (call it 12 hours x 30 days?).
"So instead of advertising as "unlimited", why not say "Use as much as you want upto xyz GB". "
Well for one thing most end users wouldn't have an idea of what that means. So right there that would be a fail in the brains of most normals. How many people can translate "x" gb or tb into something that means "I can watch 10 movies a night". So I guess that is the answer but then again they actually might not even realize how much bandwidth email takes or visits to the amazon store. Hence "unlimited" is much easier.
By the way at the 7-11 they don't say "you can have 10 ketchup packs" because then everyone might take 10 ketchup packs because it says they can. Leaving the ketchup and allowing people to take what they feel is right typically results in less usage overall.
Another interesting titbit from the article is Verizon engineer claiming the OP used 30,000% of average Verizon user. Simple calculation shows that average Verizon user uses a little over 255 Gigabytes per household per month (I assume this is combined bandwidth).
If this guy was only told to upgrade to business after running a rack of servers and averaging 50 TB a month, then I'd think almost any "normal" usage would be fine.
> residential service
> 'I have a full rack and run servers'
> 'Well, that's against our ToS.'
> 'he said I would need to switch to the business service.'
(3600s/h)(24h/d)(31d/m)*(7MB/s) = still only about 18 TB.
(Not that 77TB isn't an insane amount for a customer, but the point is: the fact that most people don't use their connection to its full potential doesn't mean nobody should.)
... And game will only get larger, bitrates will only go up.
He did violate ToS by running the servers though, and overall, Verizon looks really good in this story, if I were them I would consider this a free advertisement.
Both parties look like the good guys to me. As a bonus, it was interesting to me to read about his setup.