I received another mail from a reader, it reads as follows:
I hate to use some of your restricted bandwidth but I read your blog and
wished to make a mathematical point you may not be aware of but can surly
use if this issue does go to court.
In your first post (dated Febuary 1st 2007) Demon stated their upper limit
was 60 Gig every 30 days (or to simplify 2 Gig a day). Many years ago I used
to have Dial up internet on a 56K modem. On that connection I could
download files at around 10Kb/sec consistently. Here comes the math, just
so you can check and explain if needed:
10Kb/sec x 60sec/min x 60 min/hr x 24 hrs/day
10kb/sec x 60sec = 600Kb
600Kb x 60min = 36Mb
36Mb x 24 hrs = 864 MB per day
Now, that means if you were to download at just 2 and a half times the speed
attainable by dial up you would consistently pass their 2 Gb a day (60 GB a
month) limit. Conversely, if you were to use their 8000 Kb/sec at full
blast and achieve actual transfer rates of maybe 1000 Kb/Sec you would reach
their 2 gig a day cap after 34 minutes and their rolling 30 day limit after
17 hours. This company allows you to use a maximum of 2.5% of what they
sell you.
Put another way, this company charges you for a 10 Lb box of instant potatoes
of which you are allowed to eat 4 ounces.
Well the math is over and I am sorry for any headaches it may have caused.
I hope you, your attorneys, and the judge/jury are as offended by what
these numbers show as I am. I wish you the best as I may soon be in a
similar situation with my ISP.
It's interesting, and shocking, to see how easy it is to exceed the FUP set by Internet providers. It certainly surprised me. Besides, when I take a "unlimited" service, I want to use all of it, perhaps not all the time, but a lot of the time - not 2.5%.
Just to keep everyone up to date, the summons was issued on the 16th of February and the defendant has 14 days to respond.
Finally, I have been asked by a lot of people whether it is possible to begin a class action against the Internet providers to get compensation for the loss of service. Frankly, I don't know, but if there are any lawyers out there who are interested in taking up these cases, I would be interested in hearing from you.
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3 comments:
Not entirely sure but it's worth checking how companies have advertised their download speeds and the corresponding math in this post. I think I am right in saying that most companies use kilobits/ megabits when displaying there download speeds. Converting the equivelent amount of kilo/ megabits into kilo/ megabytes is tricky (most people when talking about storage space talk about kilo/ megabytes). I am definitely no expert but there are online calculators out there. For instance the calculation given of 600Kb x 60 minutes = 36Mb could well be right but if the company did indeed use bits in their advert (and also along the way transposed the correct abbreviations) the actual answer could be 600 kilobits x 60 minutes = 36000 kilobits or 4500 kilobytes (8 bits to a byte) or 4.39453125 megabytes. All very confusing and to be honest above me! Hope you don't think I'm being pedantic, just wouldn't want any potential argument to be picked apart by demon. Either way the percentage of advertised to actual download speed/ limit is always heavily stacked in the favour of the ISP.
Incidently I am a demon customer and have been for two years. I have had no trouble as yet but I do download large files fairly frequently so I am expecting my letter any day soon. Good luck and all the best.
you can put this in a similar way and say that if johnny leecher likes to leech isos (not interested in debating the rights and wrongs of this) he gets a good 600K download and it takes him around 20mins to get the file which is 700meg. Even if johnny's a greedy so and so and has nothing better todo that d/l iso's and he downloads 3 of these a day. Hes getting 2.1gig a day but hes still only using his connection for an hour. After a month he's cained 63gig and gone over the limit but hes only used his conx for 30 odd hours.
How can using the internet at the advertised speed for an hour a day be detrimental to the other users on the network?
Now personally I am on AOL who have just been taken over by CPW who have introduced a FUP that couldnt be more vague. my download of choice is HDTV. For the simple reason that i was conned into buying an HD telly before realising normal TV looks god awful on it. Again i dont wanna go into the rights and wrongs of this but a 50min TV show runs at aroun 6gig. This is the future. IPTV and HDIPTV these services are not far away. XBox Live has huge HD downloads available and this is set to increase this year. Sky have been running a p2p service for movies for a year, channel four have jumped on the band wagon recently. Give it 18 months and every little low satellite bandwidth renting TV station is gonna have its internet distribution arm and then bandwidth usage in the UK is going to go through the roof.
My point? (sorry i was banging on a bit) When are ISP's going to realise that the model of charging customers per byte is not going to be sustainable?
"How can using the internet at the advertised speed for an hour a day be detrimental to the other users on the network?" - if its the same hour as everyone else is trying to do the same thing then they're going to get about 2% of the advertised speed or less, if it doesn't just fall over. If his download is scheduled for 2am it won't impact anyone with current use patterns.
ADSL is designed for bursty high speed applications, not sustained high capacity downloads. Its in the product spec.
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