Pulp Free

It was bound to happen sooner or later. There were obvious signals that perhaps I should have taken into consideration. Heck – I’ve talked about it on here at least a half dozen times.

The Charter Bandwidth Police.

Last week there was a message on our answering machine stating that I needed to call back Charter Internet Security. This sounded a little worrisome especially since they left a case number. A hacked account? Mysterious content (kind of like when your credit card calls you from the fraud department…) Nope – Charter wanted to let me know I was flagged as a high bandwidth customer.

Specifically – I needed to cut back how much I was downloading. I asked, “How much did I use?” to which their response was very specific – “933 gigabytes.”

“Whoa – that’s a lot” I replied. Charter continued to say that they recently updated their policy and that I should really only be using 250 gigabytes a month or less. Most of their customers use less than 25 gigabytes Charter continued to tell me.

Considering 25 gigabytes of data wasn’t even enough to download one version of the software I use with my customers, this seemed perplexing.

I followed up stating that I actually work from home and download a lot of software for my job (which I do) and that February was a particularly busy month for releases (which it was). But when I inquired as to “how would a customer know how much they’ve been using” they simply stated there wasn’t a way currently. I would have to call into the customer service line for them to let me know if I was getting close. If only I had known!!

Guess I did know…

Fair enough… Of course, 250 GB can be downloaded in a little less than a day with my current bandwidth tier – maybe I should call them every day? Just to make sure I’m not over yet?

To be fair – I do work from home and to date I’ve accumulated about 350 gigabytes of product, but it’s quite possible there were some other items downloaded in February.

Clearly I won’t be trying to break the 1 terabyte usage in a month record any time soon…

This past week has been full of chaos. Am I talking about the revolts happening in Egypt? Nope – closer to home. Canada. Political unrest? Nope – Internet bandwidth metering.

You see, the Canadian Radio-Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) approved UBB (usage based billing) for the incumbent carrier Bell Canada in September. Competitive ISPs, which connect to Canada’s top telco for last-mile copper connections to customers, will also be metered by Bell.

More background from my favorite tech news Web site:

Starting on March 1, Ontario TekSavvy members who subscribed to the 5Mbps plan have a new usage cap of 25GB, “substantially down from the 200GB or unlimited deals TekSavvy was able to offer before the CRTC’s decision to impose usage based billing,” the message added.

Ouch! 25GB a month? It’s time to take to the streets!

So news of this effort started populating the news channels the first of this week. It didn’t take long for a lot of comparisons to begin with Comcast’s 250GB cap nor for a simple reminder of my own fears, here, here, and oh yeah… most recently here (granted, this was talked about almost 2 years ago and has been pretty quiet around Charter-land for some time…)

While my previous calculations based on these overages was just a bit under $500, I was curious to see how my own bandwidth usage was being shaped over the years. Could I see a pattern? More usage? Less usage?

So there you have about four and a half years of my Internet bandwidth habits. Last May 2010 had a pretty good go at the 900GB mark. With my 30Mb/s peak usage (DL), I’m now capable of pulling in almost 10TB of data a month. So I’m using 10% of my capacity? (That made me chuckle.)

To be fair, I’ve now been working from home for the last 3 years and my job requires me to download hundreds of gigs of data every few months. So even if I average out my consumption (uploads & downloads), I’m looking at 260GB a month. Even more interesting is that when I do queue up those large downloads, I’m full speed (30Mb/s) the whole time. So I’m not if there’s a capacity issue where I’m at to begin with… And Charter is already offering double that speed (60Mb/s) – which means you would pass a 250GB cap in less than 10 hours… whoa.

So now that Canada started their own Internet Bandwidth riots, a few days after the first news story – the Canadian government stepped in and provided a bit of feedback to the whole situation.

The Harper government will overturn the CRTC’s decision that effectively ends “unlimited use” Internet plans if the regulator doesn’t rescind the decision itself.

Sounds good to me… We certainly don’t need such talks making more noise for us here in the States. Those bandwidth limitation ideas – NIMBY.

Without much fanfare or customer communications, it seems as though Charter has upgraded their bandwidth speeds for their cable Internet services with no additional cost to customers. I can’t complain too much about that, now can I?The new speed increases impact three of their broadband plans. Only “Lite” speeds remain unchanged:

• Lite: Remains the same at “up to” 1 Mbps/128 kbps
• Express: Increases from 5/1 Mbps to 8/1 Mbps
• Plus: Increases from 10/2 Mbps to 16/2 Mbps
• Max: Increases from 20/2 Mbps to 25/3 Mbps

Based on an article by Phillip Dampier, Charter is also being a bit soft on previously announced bandwidth usage caps… Something I’m quite happy with but have spoken about such disappointment before. While I am currently passing over $60 a month for the Max speed, I’d be quite curious what their limited available offering of Ultra60 plan for 60/5 Mbps service would be like. At $140 a month, I won’t be all that tempted to test the waters. And for the most part, I seemingly already have faster Internet services than most corporate locations I visit. The issue isn’t my connection any more but rather the content providers.

Without any HD Winter Olympic coverage to worry about like a few summers ago along with ramping up on my new job (that is providing the need for a lot of ISO and software downloads) – I’ve actually been pretty lean on my bandwidth usage.

August of 2008 still holds the record… Does make me wonder if I could actually set the bandwidth faucet on full and pull down ~264 GB of data a day or close to 8 TB of bandwidth for the month. Whew! I think I’d get bored with trying to find enough stuff to download to keep that queue filled.

So positive vibes right now for Charter – even after spending an hour on the phone with their Customer Service slash retention team to renew my bundle pricing… (Don’t even get me started…)

And Charter Melissa – I hope you were able to finish your research project with your extra bandwidth!

After being on business for a few days, I returned home to have yet another piece of marketing mail from Charter… My favorite local broadband monopoly. However, this time it was good news!

We are pleased to inform you that Charter has upgraded your High-Speed Internet Max service download speed from 16 Mbps to 20 Mbps – at no additional cost. This speed upgrade is part of Charter’s ongoing effort to provide you the fastest and most reliable Internet speeds available. This means your favorite music, videos, and files can download up to 25% faster than before!

I really can’t find fault with that, now can I? Granted – most of the sites that I visit can’t pulp out that much information. Only sites like Microsoft (when I’m grabbing new ISO images) and fully peg out that connection. It’s finally happened, however… My own connection to the Internet (even if it is a neighborhood shared line) is faster than most upstream providers. Web browsing isn’t any faster… But large file downloads from multiple sites at the same time really do fly.

When I started posting my bandwidth tests back in September of 2007, I was getting 5 Mbps service… That was up from the 3 Mbps service I had previous to that. I was pretty happy (and only paying something like $25 a month…) I tested my work speed and was pulling in close to 12 Mbps down and 1.5 Mbps up. Seemed “fast” – but with everybody at work surfing rather than being productive, I’m sure it was a bit sluggish. 6 months later and I bumped up to 10 Mbps service, with 16 Mbps service coming another 5 months later.

So what does another 7 months get me? Sweet 20 Mbps service:

Dave’s a happy person for sure!! Score one point for Charter… Even if they are hassling people with bandwidth caps… Time to go see how much of this 20 Mbps I can sustain… However, to be fair – my 95th Percentile usage for the last few months is only around 5.5 Mbps.

I love my graphs! LOL! (And yes – I know I have a gap in week 6… Pesky SNMP!!)

As announced yesterday in an exclusive from DSL Reports, Charter Communications will be implementing new usage caps for their broadband bandwidth.

Broadband Reports has learned that Charter will be updating their acceptable use policy (AUP) next week, setting the stage for clear usage caps and potential overage fees. A source familiar with the plans tells us Charter will be imposing a 100GB cap upon any Charter connection of 15Mbps or less, and a 250GB usage cap for broadband tiers “over 15 Mbps up to 25 Mbps.”

So I was pretty excited when Charter finally hashed out their differences with the local Saint Louis CBS affiliate for HD broadcast rights. Charter Good.

Usage caps when I’m paying $70 a month for bandwidth in a Saint Louis monopoly… Charter Bad.

This news isn’t really news, I suppose. I’ve talked about this a few times already… So how have I adjusted?

Meh… No really. Considering I have the 16 MB service – I’d fall into the 250 GB cap. At $1 a GB overage charge… That would be over $470 for two of my months where usage was pretty high. (Average over the last 12 months was right at 251 GB…) Maybe that’s a better way to measure… A rolling 3 month average perhaps? And what about uploads? Do they count? Better hope that there’s some ways to track usage… (Currently there isn’t any…)

I suppose this is a way for the $20 Billion debt ridden company to force users to upgrade to a higher cost tier of service or have those fees roll in. Right now the next tier up from 10 MB to 16 MB is only $25 a month… Do you think that Charter will automatically upgrade users to the new service if they go over 25 GB in a month? Perhaps I should charge Charter $1 a month for every GB under 250 GB I don’t use? How about banking bandwidth like AT&T does with rollover bandwidth?

Now that I’m a full time telecommuter / work-from-home employee who has to pay for his own broadband (don’t get me started) – this just doesn’t help.

We’ll see how it works out… (Especially considering in a month, “unlimited usage” could equate to 5 TB of download capcity on a 16 Mb/s bandwidth tier…)

BTW – I have had a good time reading the comments on Slashdot… A search on Google will bring you plenty of other fun stories about this issue…