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The Internet Network

Cable ISP Warns 'Excessive' Uploaders, Says Network Can't Handle Heavy Usage (arstechnica.com) 101

Posted by BeauHD from the hidden-limits dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Mediacom, a cable company with about 1.4 million Internet customers across 22 states, is telling heavy uploaders to reduce their data usage -- even when those users are well below their monthly data caps. Mediacom's fastest Internet plan offers gigabit download speeds and 50Mbps upload speeds with a monthly data cap of 6TB. But as Stop the Cap wrote in a detailed report on Wednesday, the ISP is "reach[ing] out to a growing number of its heavy uploaders and telling them to reduce usage or face a speed throttle or the possible closure of their account." Mediacom told Ars that it is contacting heavy uploaders "more frequently than before" because of increased usage triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. The company said that heavy uploaders "may be under their total bandwidth usage allowance but still have a negative impact on Mediacom's network."

Mediacom's terms and conditions say the company charges $10 fees for each additional block of 50GB used by customers who exceed the data cap. But users may be warned about their usage long before they risk overage fees. One user in East Moline, Illinois, who described the predicament on a DSLReports forum in early January, said they paid for the 6TB plan "to make sure we wouldn't go over the cap" and had never used more than 4TB. Another gigabit user in Missouri named Cory told Stop the Cap that the 6TB monthly cap "is way more than I will ever use, but I still received a warning letter claiming I was uploading too much. I discovered I used about 900GB over the last two months, setting up a cloud backup of my computer. At most I can send files at around 50Mbps, which they claim is interfering with other customers in my neighborhood. I don't understand." Mediacom is blaming the pandemic for its hidden limits on uploaders. "When contacted by Ars, Mediacom pointed to cable-industry statistics showing 31.8 percent growth in downstream traffic and 51.1 percent growth in upstream traffic since the pandemic ramped up in March 2020," reports Ars.
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Cable ISP Warns 'Excessive' Uploaders, Says Network Can't Handle Heavy Usage More

Cable ISP Warns 'Excessive' Uploaders, Says Network Can't Handle Heavy Usage

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  • Fraud (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Geoffrey.landis ( 926948 ) on Friday January 29, 2021 @07:16PM (#61007498) Homepage

    Basically: the service they offered was fraud.

    They though they could get away with it because they thought people wouldn't catch on.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by thedarb ( 181754 )

      This. Let them throttle and kick off users... They'll band together and sue.

      • Re:Fraud (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Riceballsan ( 816702 ) on Friday January 29, 2021 @09:14PM (#61007824)
        and, after they've cost thousands of people their internet, probably collected some fees some way or another from this illegal activity. Everyone can band together and form a class action lawsuit... in which the cable company will be forced to pay back almost 1/4 of what they made in fees etc..., and the lawyers will only take 70% of it before distributing it to the portion of the victims that were in the suit.

        • Good description of the current business model for many things. However, Starlink is just around the corner. Europe is scrambling to copy it. There is a giant fucking volcano of resentment towards many US ISPs and I predict a lot of people will switch just because of that. It probably won't happen this year, but next year all bets are off. ISPs are either going to have to pull out of the rural market entirely or figure out a way to compete. They will face losing economies of scale while trying to innov

      • Actually, it isn't illegal to tell someone they "might" throttle them even if it might be illegal to actually follow through with it.

        A similar situarion has already been tested with warning labels on some equipment that stated "Breaking this seal voids your warranty". That would be illegal under the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act if they actually refused warranty service, but placing the labels themselves usually just gets the company a warning from the FTC. https://www.npr.org/sections/t... [npr.org]

        So if the ISP

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      The other carriers advertised "unlimited bandwidth" so they had to follow suit. They knew there was a risk of overselling, but the alternative is to lose customers. So they lawyer'd up and dived into the deep end blindfolded.

    • Re:Fraud (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Revek ( 133289 ) on Friday January 29, 2021 @08:37PM (#61007730)
      Sure, What they don't like is when actually start using it. The larger the company, the less efficiently they use what they have. Downstream channels are 6Mhz wide and can be bonded in to large service groups. Upstream on most HF plants are limited to the 20mhz to 42 mhz range or less. Noise is a problem in those frequencies. Due to this many isp's use 1.6mhz upstream channels. Some 3.2 and a few 6.4.

      When I ran the backend the plant i'm now a customer on I was forced to match the upstream channels to the nodes limitations. Sometimes the diplexers cutoff was 32mhz. This really meant the cutoff was 30mhz. This severely limits upload speeds. Often 100Mbits or even less. Couple to that the age of the plants and poor maintenance you can never get enough upstream bandwidth. The node I'm on now can use from 20mhz to 42mhz and when I did the configuration I ran three 6.4mhz 64qam channels bonded which gave decent amount of upstream bandwidth. When the company who bought it out took over they reduced speeds. Its now three channels at 1.6mhz 16qam. They do this to make it more noise tolerant which really just allows them to ignore maintenance.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dryeo ( 100693 )

        Downstream channels are 6Mhz wide and can be bonded in to large service groups. Upstream on most HF plants are limited to the 20mhz to 42 mhz range or less.

        Are they really using millihertz frequencies? Seems like it would not work as we're talking what, a thousand seconds for 20-40 cycles?

    • Starlink is on the Horizon. Covid has accelerated the disintegration of the fraud-based ISP model.

  • All the video chat/meetings (Score:4, Insightful)

    by sarren1901 ( 5415506 ) on Friday January 29, 2021 @07:20PM (#61007506)

    This makes sense for people that are stuck working at home and doing all these video meetings and what not. Especially if they are doing both personal and business video chat, I imagine with a high enough video quality you could get past the cap.

    My wife tends to do all her video chat on her phone since it's unlimited data use anyway. 6TB does sound like a high number and my first thought was maybe there are lots of people trying to be influencers and uploading tons of video. If that was the case, I don't feel bad for charging people more for doing "business" on a residential line.

    They sell business contracts for a reason, after all. I'm sure tax wise, these individuals are 1099s or possibly they have formed corporations and are a w2 employee setup as a sole proprietor. If you were making tens of thousands off your youtube channel it may make more sense to form the corporation and run everything through it. There is likely a tipping point where going from 1099er from youtube to w2 from your own company that only interacts with youtube.

    Now that I've typed all that, I definitely think it's all the video meetings that's pushing these uploading numbers up.

    • Iâ(TM)d be interesting to just do uploads in the middle of the night; see if they still complain. Maybe some popular torrents.

    • Re:All the video chat/meetings (Score:5, Insightful)

      by StormReaver ( 59959 ) on Friday January 29, 2021 @07:27PM (#61007536)

      They sell business contracts for a reason, after all.

      Yes, because a ton of steel weighs down their pipes more than a ton of feathers.

      The only thing a business account gives you versus a residential account is a higher bill for the same service.

      • Maybe a static IP as well, but I totally feel you. ISPs are monopoly assholes for sure. Worse, all our local politicians suckass and gobble down the cash and here we sit, with shitty Internet options that cost to much.

      • So, fraud all the way?

      • Not quite. You can also get SLA's, which are just not available for residential accounts. They often result in faster response times and (minuscule) credits to your account for longer outages.

        • [SLA's] often result in faster response times and (minuscule) credits to your account for longer outages.

          All things considered, Mediacom is not a bad service. I had AT&T for years, and that is a bad service. In my final six months with them, I had daily (I wish I were exaggerating) outages that would last anywhere from a few seconds to several minutes. And that was on a service that maxxed out at 30mbs/6mbs (if I remember correctly). When I called tech support, I would frequently get disconnected while they (the phone company) tried to transfer my call to another phone. Apparently, actually using phones wa

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by godrik ( 1287354 )

      I havent looked at my upload recently because I am on google fibers. So don't quite care.

      But I am probably on zoom 4 hours a days.
      I teach online, so I upload raw footage to youtube daily to synchronize with people helping me edit.

      My son streams his ps5 gameplay to experience it with his friends probably an hour a day in average.

      That can't be small.

    • Re:All the video chat/meetings (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Jeremy Erwin ( 2054 ) on Friday January 29, 2021 @07:33PM (#61007554) Journal

      6TB does sound like a high number and my first thought was maybe there are lots of people trying to be influencers

      My first thought is that the ISP has certain preconceived ideas about how people use the internet, and those preconceptions are being shattered.

      Maybe a lot of people are discovering youtube, and uploading content in 4k. Maybe people are discovering the security oi off sight backups. Perhaps they're contributing to the internet archive. Or perhaps videoconferencing is getting a lot more use.

      • It's happened before, around 2000-2003. It was p2p software back then - first Napster, and then the many services that followed and improved upon it. A lot of ISPs faced capacity issued because they designed their networks to provide ample downstream at the expense of upstream, and a few people sharing their MP3 collection could saturate it.

    • It's fraud.

      If you're using 6Mb/s for video upload, that's ~2GB/hr or 1.5TB for a 24x7 stream per month.

      Perhaps Mediacom is billing for how long these seeming endless meetings feel instead of actual usage?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gl4ss ( 559668 )

      personal business is still personal things. It's not like you're expected to buy a business phone line just to get fucking service to get your therapy session over the phone. they oversold their service many times over and so they're in this pickle now, it's basically fraud.

      and business line just gets you different pricing anyway nowadays in most locations on earth - and longer installation time(because if you're a business and you made an order then who cares you're on the hook anyways).

      and get this: in m

    • We pay for business internet to our home and STILL desk with this crap. Even though it contract stipulates otherwise. Honestly the state of cable ISPs is shite.

    • It is all the LAN traffic of businesses moving to the WAN. It is also things like 4K home video cameras being used remotely. It is cloud backup services.

      My only option is cable— if I could get fiber and symmetric data plans, I would be white on rice. There is a clear solution, but investment has been lagging.

  • It ain't business service (Score:4, Insightful)

    by HoleShot ( 1884318 ) on Friday January 29, 2021 @07:40PM (#61007584)

    If you SELL a service with well defined limits, then MC should provide the service and quit bitching at customers who are within their limits. Maybe MC should upgrade their equipment to handle what they sold to their customers.

    • Maybe MC should upgrade their equipment to handle what they sold to their customers.

      Does that include permission to dig up the roads to install new (or more) fibre in the ground?

      I think I've been reading this story longer than I've been using Slashdot. The only thing that changes is the technology involved.

  • Downloading - do too much and you slow the internet Uploading - do too much and the internet stops working for connections - Like - youtube might still work on your TV but stops working on your phone. At the ISP side that could also mean clean 1 works, client 2 does not. Same old same old. Other countries are on 10GB internet connections - a better question might be if the internet is soo critical - why aren't we getting the needed upgrades? (too busy giving each other bonuses)

  • The problem isn't their customers (Score:5, Informative)

    by bl968 ( 190792 ) on Friday January 29, 2021 @07:54PM (#61007640) Journal

    It's a lack of investment in their network...

    Perhaps Mediacom should expand their network capacity...

    Mediacom Combined Results for Third Quarter 2020*
            Revenues were $538.6 million, a 5.5% increase from the prior year period
            Adjusted OIBDA was $228.9 million, a 15.4% increase from the prior year period
            Free cash flow was $138.9 million, a 41.0% increase from the prior year period
            High-speed data (âoeHSDâ) customers were 1,425,000, an 8.3% increase from September 30, 2019
            Net debt of $1,857.5 billion, a $427.0 million reduction from September 30, 2019
            Net leverage ratio of 2.03x, compared to 2.88x at September 30, 2019
            Interest coverage ratio of 27.08x, compared to 8.28x at September 30, 2019
            Average borrowing costs of 1.7%, compared to 4.1% for the prior year period
            Available cash and unused revolving credit lines exceeded $673 million at September 30, 2020

  • If you sell the service, you need to provide it (Score:5, Insightful)

    by marcle ( 1575627 ) on Friday January 29, 2021 @08:00PM (#61007658)

    Otherwise it's a scam. If your network is unable to provide the service you've advertised and charged money for, you need to give refunds or upgrade your network. It's that simple.

  • If you don't deliver what you sell, (Score:4, Insightful)

    by BAReFO0t ( 6240524 ) on Friday January 29, 2021 @08:05PM (#61007670)

    that's a breach of contract.

    If you do it systematically,
    that's mass-fraud.

    Yes, hello airlines! Come in, sit down, get a slap in the face too, yer bloody cunts!

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Burdell ( 228580 )

      I doubt they ever promised you would get continuous usage at the top speeds - that's listed as a peak. Residential service is always oversubscribed because statistically people don't all use all the bits at the same time. It's the only way to make it economical. Your electricity is also oversubscribed - even though I pay a "demand charge" for 200A/240V service, if everybody tries to use 48kVA at the same time, the system trips breakers, knocking some offline.

      As someone who works with a bunch of small Intern

      • Ask Briggs and Stratton how inflating specs went. They settled a pile of lawsuits in 2010 for misleading inflated horsepower specs. And there wasn't even any complaints

        "Quite honestly, we never received a phone call from a consumer telling us that our engines did not provide the power they were looking for," Timm said.

        Or how about the lawsuit against CRT makers for inflating viewable screen size?

    • If you do it systematically,
      that's mass-fraud.

      No, it's business.

      It's at least 20 years since I first heard this story - back when I was wondering if I was close enough to the exchange for a 33k6 modem to be worth the cost, and there was this new thing called Slashdot.

      Surely nobody who signed a contract with this industry (after doing due diligence on the industry and it's history) could possibly have been surprised about this? At least, nobody who had completed potty training and learning to read (I'm n

  • Coax networks stink. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by tuxkamen ( 157118 ) on Friday January 29, 2021 @08:19PM (#61007700)

    There is an inherent limitation in HFC (Hybrid Fiber-Coax) networks. Most companies allocate 6-24MHz total for Upstream bandwidth.
    Downstream bandwidth is naturally much higher as noticed in the speeds most cablecos are marketing.
    The nature of upstream bandwidth in a RF network means that one guy with crappy wiring mucks things up for everyone in the fiber node.
    This makes expansion of the return path in a cable network difficult since so much time and money goes to maintenance things like sweep, balance, and ingress mitigation.
    None of this excuses the cable companies. They should have had fiber to the premises long ago.
    The infrastructure in cable just plain doesn't exist.

    • Pretty sure there is hardware limitation's that prevent more then that for up stream. Throw on TOP of that you have people on OLD hardware so they can't do things like swap over to 3.1 channel up to help.

      • I spent 15 years in cable. There definitely are hardware limitations. The split between forward and reverse could be raised to allow for more upstream bandwidth. The problem with this is it can possibly lead to a large swath of existing DOCSIS3.0 and older hardware that might not play nice. Comcast is and has been toying with better and more aggressive signal multiplexing techniques. Again the problem there is that those technique allow for less noise in the signal. That goes back to the upstream ingr

  • First the TV subs left and now mish mash of last mile fiber build outs often by much smaller operators is coming for the rest.

    To all those Cable operators sitting on their "good enough" RF while whining and bitching about usage, over charging and under delivering please don't feel any pressure to change. Everything will be just fine.

    • > last mile fiber build outs often by much smaller operators is coming for the rest.

      There are surprisingly few such businesses. The initial investment is a real burden, and larger companies can and will lower prices locally to drive them out of the market. These basic capitalist practices have had to be relearned by many idealistic young libertarians or eager startup companies.

  • Mediacom is dishonest in other ways (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ITRambo ( 1467509 ) on Saturday January 30, 2021 @02:00AM (#61008198)
    A sales rep from Mediacom rang my doorbell last summer telling me how much better off I'd be returning to Mediacom. I told the guy that Mediacom has data caps while my new ISP does not. He outright lied and told me with a straight face that "all ISP's have data caps". I told him to look it up and asked him to leave because my experience with Mediacom was poor and he was making it worse. I also told him that we saved about $100 a month by changing ISP's. I will never go back to Mediacom. They still send at least four pieces of mail monthly offering "deals with no contract", which is a lie as the phone call where you commit to the service for a year or two legally is a verbal contract. They need to shrivel up and float away on the dustbin of history.

    • The last time the "cable company" rang my doorbell, I got a letter a a couple weeks later saying that there were imposters going around posing as cable employees that were suspected of burglary.

      That was especially interesting since I gave them no indication I was home, but maybe both of my neighbors answering their doors meant I wasn't an isolated enough target? Or maybe the obvious cameras scared them off? My home didn't look worth breaking into? I don't know.

      Even if they were really from the cable comp

  • I am on suddenlink and getting half of the advertised speed or less at prime time. Luckily the advertised speed is 400Mbps...

  • I might have sympathy (Score:3)

    by jd ( 1658 ) <imipakNO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Saturday January 30, 2021 @08:09AM (#61008602) Homepage Journal

    If US ISPs didn't have a reputation for price gouging, illegal monopolies, getting lawmakers to prohibit competition, defrauding customers, bribing the FCC, etc.

    But they can't even be bothered to set the switches up properly? (The gear used will have, as standard, options for handling this sort of situation.)

    I'm supposed to cry tears for those at the ISPs who are too lazy to read their instruction manuals?

    They're asking a lot. Ok, tell you what. ISPs in America rescind all illicit practices and remove throttling on emergency services, and States authorize municipal ISPs where currently prohibited. I'll let them off being incompetent, this time.

    THEN I'll think about shedding a tear next time there's a crisis.

  • We only have cable, and the upload rates are always abysmally slow. With working at home and every other aspects of life using Zoom we needed more upstream bandwidth, which they are unwilling to allow.

    Sad state of tech, or complacent providers who just want a payoff? I lean toward the latter. IDK though ðY

  • What goes UP must come DOWN (Score:3)

    by Retired ICS ( 6159680 ) on Saturday January 30, 2021 @12:11PM (#61009220)

    So what they are really saying is that they "made a gamble" and "tossed the dice" hoping for an outcome contrary to that which was dictated by logic and simple arithmetic, and they lost.

    Boo Hoo.

    They should hire people with a better grasp of reality (and that obtained a passing grade in grade 1 arithmetic) going forward and get rid of the current crop of gamblers and dissemblers.

  • Maybe they should use some of that money they're raking in to improve their network and bandwidth instead of giving their customers the raw end of things.
  • How about the ISPs do what Ajit Pai's claimed on his net neutrality push would happen: ISPs will build out better!

    Where has that happened?

    Perhaps now that Pai (et al) is out, real progress can happen.

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