Charles The Technician

Idiots of the month: Us, or so ISP’s think.

Posted by Charles | Filed under Idiot of the week, Rants

I’m really interested in the legality of this, or if it would even be a good court case. You’ve probably heard all this discussion about net neutrality but really this is only vaguely related.

I’m talking about hard limits on the amount of data you can download or upload through your ISP.

It has been proven over and over that just about every ISP starts to throttle your connection or cut it off completely after an arbitrary amount. The usual kill spot is 100 Gigabytes some go as high as allowing 100 down and 100 up before trottling or shutting down completely.

However in selling you a 1.5Mb/s line with no stipulation on download limits or upload limits in any contract or user agreement is the same as (after simple conversion) selling you a:

1.5Mb/s = 0.1875 MB/s contract.
(8 Megabit’s = 1 Megabyte)

or in terms of months, 0.1875 MB/s * 60 seconds * 60 minutes * 24 hours * 30 days = 486,000 MB/month.

in the future I’ll use the number 2592000 as 60*60*24*30 = 2592000 to show the whole conversion from seconds to months

486,000 MB/month connection. Which comes in at around 474.61 GB/month (due to the whole 1024 MB = GB.)
Remember how we said there were hard coded limits your ISP do not tell you about? Well lets use math! (it works bitches)

( X / 8 ) * 2592000 = Y
For converting Xbits per second to Xbits per month

or

( Y / 2592000 ) * 8 = X
For converting Xbits per month to Xbits per second

X = Units(in bits) per second
Y = units(in bytes) per month

Because there is a 100 Gigabyte limit per month (100 X 1024=102400 to turn it into Megabytes (102400 Megabytes)) we can toss that in as X and figure out your actual speed per second rate.

(102400 / 2592000) * 8 = .31604 (and about 20 more decimal places)

So really all you have is a .31 Mb/s line that is burstable up to 1.5 Mb/s if 1.5 Mb/s is the advertised rate.

Burtstable is a term used a lot in bandwidth, especially on shared T1’s. When working out contracts if one sold you a T1 with full 1.5Mb/s throughput but really only let you have 512Kb/s burstable up to 1.5Mb/s (when conditions favored) they would get their asses handed to them in court. It’s Fraud.

So why do ISP’s get away with selling their service as if we have 1.5 Mb/s when we really only have a .316Mb/s line burstable to 1.5Mb/s?

Damn good question, I’d like to find out myself.

Reason we are idiots

1.) We sign a contract allowing us to pick up a gallon of milk a week but are shutdown if we drink more then half a gallon a month, and don’t care or don’t question why.
2.) We live in a country that is more then happy enough to sue but we don’t.