FiOS User Finds Limit of 'Unlimited' Data Plan: 77 TB/Month 573
An anonymous reader writes "A California user of Verizon's FiOS fiber-optic internet service put his unlimited data plan to the test. Over the month of March, he totaled over 77 terabytes of internet traffic, which finally prompted a call from a Verizon employee to see what he was doing. The user had switched to a 300Mbps/65Mbps plan in January, and averaged 50 terabytes of traffic per month afterward. 'An IT professional who manages a test lab for an Internet storage company, [the user] has been providing friends and family a personal VPN, video streaming, and peer-to-peer file service—running a rack of seven servers with 209TB of raw storage in his house.' The Verizon employee who contacted him said he was violating the service agreement. "Basically he said that my bandwidth usage was excessive (like 30,000 percent higher than their average customer)," [the user] said. '[He] wanted to know WTF I was doing. I told him I have a full rack and run servers, and then he said, "Well, that's against our ToS." And he said I would need to switch to the business service or I would be disconnected in July. It wasn't a super long call.'"
Sweet (Score:5, Interesting)
Think of Verizon's position (Score:5, Interesting)
I think "WTF are you doing consuming 77 terabits a month" is a legitimate question. I read TFA yesterday and I realized that Verizon probably can't afford to have a whole lot of users chewing up that kind of bandwidth. Asking him to switch to business service does not out of line to me, considering that he's running these servers for business use.
Note, also, they handled this with a short phone call rather than a nasty-gram or just cutting off his service without warning. That's more courtesy than I'd expect from a big ISP, given some of the horror stories I've heard.
Re:Think of Verizon's position (Score:2, Interesting)
I think "WTF are you doing consuming 77 terabits a month" is a legitimate question. I read TFA yesterday and I realized that Verizon probably can't afford to have a whole lot of users chewing up that kind of bandwidth.
Then perhaps don't call it "unlimited"...
Asking him to switch to business service does not out of line to me, considering that he's running these servers for business use.
It is not really clear, but it seems he's not charging anything for the services, so no business here.
Note, also, they handled this with a short phone call rather than a nasty-gram or just cutting off his service without warning. That's more courtesy than I'd expect from a big ISP, given some of the horror stories I've heard.
True.
Was never an 'unlimited' plan to begin with (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd like for someone to point to marketing or promo material from Verizon calling this plan an 'unlimited' plan. While it's possible the marketing guys screwed it up, it's more likely that this plan was never labeled an 'unlimited' plan at all. For some reason when ISPs crack down on excessive use, there are always hordes of people who claimed they purchased an 'unlimited' plan when the evidence says otherwise.
Companies like AOL got in trouble because they went from only having time-metered dialup plans to having so-called unlimited plans where you could stay dialed in as long as you'd like. A lot of people took them up on this and left themselves dialed in for weeks at a time. AOL took it upon themselves to make exceptions to this (as it impacted service for other users - no free lines for customers to dial in to!) but never put in any fine print in. AOL got sued and lost over this, and subsequently they started changing the wording of their marketing materials and putting in fine print.
Now days nobody expects broadband to have the same types of limits so the ISPs simply just don't bother with the 'unlimited' verbage. They prefer to use terms like 'always on' and such, which means something entirely different.
Re:Sweet (Score:5, Interesting)
If only it was always that easy. Comcrap put me on 6 months of "probation" a couple years ago. "You're moving too much data. If you don't stay below 250 gigs per month, we're shutting off your service and blacklisting you for a year." This was their first contact so I figured no biggie. Let's just switch me to a business account. What's the monthly limit on those. "I don't have information on business plans but you can't switch because you're on probation. Call back in six months."
That's when I realized ISPs don't want you to pay for the data you move. They want you to pay for data you don't move. They want a bunch of octogenarians who fire up the computer once a week to check their email for pics of the grandkids.
They quietly stopped enforcing the 250 gig cap around the time my probation was up so I'm back to my old patterns on the normal residential account. If they'd been smart enough to let me switch to business class service instead of spanking me like a child, they would have been collecting more money all this time.
For once the ISP has a point (Score:3, Interesting)
This case really IS excessive; it goes well beyond what an individual user would reasonably use on their own.
Most of the OTHER cases (esp. cable companies) involve mysterious limits that individuals can break by watching (or downloading) too much online video. Of course, if you buy the cable company's overpriced TV services, you can watch as many shows as you like, on however many set top boxes you have, drawing down an unlimited volume of video-over-IP traffic to do it. Just don't watch video that competes with the cable provider, and it's all good.
Re:Sounds reasonable to me. (Score:3, Interesting)
From the conversation, they were looking for a reason to shut his service down, but until he said he was running a server, they didn't have reason. This is one of those times when shutting up would have been better.
Re:Sounds reasonable to me. (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't think the ToS is against servers, it's simply against using that connection for business purposes. So if this particular dude wasn't making money off these servers (not as in bitcoin mining, as in selling server time/space & bandwidth), which he wasn't, there should be nothing against him running home servers to communicate with friends & family.
What the fuck man? (Score:5, Interesting)
Dude, it's assholes like this that make telecom companies see the need for data caps in the first place. If you're doing that kind of data transfer, you need to be on a business plan. If you know enough to create that kind of set up, you know enough to know what kind of plan you need to be on. Stop fucking up the home networks people. You're dealing with companies that have lost their minds! The last thing you want to do is feed their delusions.
Re:Sounds reasonable to me. (Score:4, Interesting)