
 FiOS customer discovers the limits of “unlimited” data: 77TB a month - bane
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/05/fios-customer-discovers-the-limits-of-unlimited-data-77-tb-in-month/
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georgemcbay
I'm usually pretty sympathetic to these stories of people getting screwed on
"unlimited" data with, say, 5 gig or whatever caps, but in this case... cry me
a river, man.

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.

~~~
Domenic_S
> _I really wish Google would put more pressure on the US ISP market_

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...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/eliseackerman/2012/08/04/how-kansas-won-
the-google-fiber-jackpot-and-why-california-never-will/)

~~~
georgemcbay
I don't doubt that there are overbearing regulations in place in California
(and I say this as someone who is pretty liberal and generally in favor of
government regulation where it makes sense, but recognizes that they can go
overboard), but I don't buy that Google's primary limitation is regulation,
because there are many cities outside of California that would bend over
backward for Google Fiber and yet they are still rolling it out at what I
would consider a snail's pace.

~~~
Domenic_S
The article I linked discusses some of that, how navigating the politics of
even cities that welcome Google with open arms is troublesome.

------
codegeek
In general, I, like most of us, hate ISPs who advertise "unlimited" data but
it really is limited. However, this particular case, the guy used 77TB (jaw
dropping) and it probably makes sense for Verizon to step in.

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.

~~~
jdhzzz
Is unlimited, but throttled, still unlimited? If so my $30/mo. phone plan is
unlimited. I'm not sure it is capped at all. It may drop to 1200 baud, but
won't ever run out.

~~~
codegeek
You know what I mean. yes we the HN crowd know all about throttling and stuff.
What about the average Joe who sees the TV ad for "Unlimited data" and goes
"wow I can watch youtube all day".

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.

~~~
DanBC
I have an unlimited plaan from tmobile. I carefully checked with them what
they meant.

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.

~~~
XorNot
Man I _wish_ you could get data plans like that in Australia. I have 1gb of
data per month, but then I get overage charges which means in practice I can't
use that data aggressively at all because of the risk I'll get massively
screwed by going over the cap.

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.

------
TrainedMonkey
Pretty cool, especially when you consider that in a month of march there are
2,678,400 seconds and 77TB is ~ 77,000,000 MB. So he sustained on average
throughput of 28.75 megabytes a second for the entire month.

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).

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derefr
Note that this isn't a "getting screwed" story, and the person it happened to
isn't _complaining_ that it happened. It's really just a tech-PR piece on how
far you have to go to run afoul of these limits. (Look at the paragraphs spent
gushing about his setup. Those wouldn't be there if this were rabblerousing.)

------
tseabrooks
I like that he is totally cool with switching back to business class. He is
just confused that they're freaking out over the extra 50$ a month. That 50$ a
month isn't covering the difference between himself and the average consumer
class customer.

------
jlarocco
IMO this actually makes Verizon look pretty nice as an ISP.

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.

~~~
jffry
I used to have Verizon FIOS, before moving away to somewhere without FIOS. I
was on a 25 Mbit symmetric plan, but almost always got 35/35.

------
colechristensen
> houkouonchi 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

------
izzydata
Houkounchi is a friend of mine. Interesting to see this story show up here
almost a year late.

[http://whatpulse.org/stats/bandwidth/](http://whatpulse.org/stats/bandwidth/)

------
joshbaptiste
Previous Discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5758585](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5758585)

------
broolstoryco
tldr:

> 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.'

~~~
tseabrooks
You forgot the last line: > 'No problem, switch me over. Thanks. Bye'

------
btgeekboy
I wonder if he's the reason I can get a full 50+mbps on a Verizon bandwidth
test, but I get roughly 5-10mbps to basically anywhere else on the internet.
(Even the Linux mirrors, like mirrors.kernel.org and mirror.anl.gov, where I
used to be able to fill my connection with no problem, are now around
500KB/sec.) Get more bandwidth please, VZ.

------
United857
To give some perspective to how hard it is for any consumer usage to reach
this amount, assume one was streaming Blu-ray quality video 24/7 for the whole
month:

(3600s/h) _(24h /d)_(31d/m)*(7MB/s) = still only about 18 TB.

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jotm
Haha, 77 TB on a residential plan. I mean, come on, I understand 500GB, maybe
1 TB (I personally never used more than 250GB in a month), but this is
ridiculous. I'm surprised Verizon didn't shut him down way earlier...

~~~
MAGZine
Throw in a couple 50GB game downloads, some TV, some music, file downloads and
you'll easily break 250GB. Netflix HD will chew throw bandwidth pretty fast,
especially if you have a couple people in the house watching at the same time.

... And game will only get larger, bitrates will only go up.

~~~
zurn
Netflix's HD is 3.8-5 Mbps, compared to Blu-Ray's 30-40 Mbps. Lots of things
"want" a lot more bandwidth than they're currently getting by with, even
services that seem very bandwidth hungry now.

------
hyborg787
Article is from May 2013 FYI, currently not reflected in the title with a
(2013).

------
BlackDeath3
So... was this customer under the impression that the data plan was
_literally_ unlimited?

~~~
angersock
If they call it unlimited, it damned well ought to be unlimited.

~~~
ceejayoz
They call it unlimited, but you also have to stick within the TOS, which
clearly forbids this sort of use case on a residential contract.

~~~
xixi77
Well, I think the "unlimited" and "no heavy bandwidth usage" clauses are not
compatible with each other.

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.

~~~
ceejayoz
I'd say it's unlimited for any current residential use. Even streaming HD
video 24/7 wouldn't do 77 TB/month.

