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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday June 09 2020, @10:37PM   Printer-friendly
from the rent-seekers-gonna-seek-rent dept.

Jon Brodkin over at Ars Technica is reporting on Cox Cable's heavy-handed tactics in limiting upload speeds for entire neighborhoods, claiming network overuse by those who pay extra for "unlimited" access.

From the article:

Cox, a cable company with about 5.2 million broadband customers in the United States, has been sending notices to some heavy Internet users warning them to use less data and notifying them of neighborhood-wide speed decreases. In the case we will describe in this article, a gigabit customer who was paying $50 extra per month for unlimited data was flagged by Cox because he was using 8TB to 12TB a month.

Cox responded by lowering the upload speeds on the gigabit-download plan from 35Mbps to 10Mbps for the customer's whole neighborhood. Cox confirmed to Ars that it has imposed neighborhood-wide slowdowns in multiple neighborhoods in cases like this one but didn't say how many excessive users are enough to trigger a speed decrease.

[...] Comments in a Reddit thread last month confirm that Mike isn't the only Cox customer being warned to cut upload speeds in order to avoid being kicked off the network. Cox didn't tell Mike exactly how much data he'd have to shave off his monthly usage. There was "no magic number or threshold, just an arbitrary amount of decrease, a Cox-deemed 'good effort,'" or his service would be cut off, he said.

Shortly after that phone call, Mike received an email from Cox with the subject line, "Alert: Action required to continue your Internet service." Mike provided Ars with a copy of the email.

[...] This raises several questions that we asked Cox. We asked the cable company why its network is "unable to handle Mike's uploads in the middle of the night" and whether it has "considered adding capacity to its network instead of forcing unlimited-data customers to use less data." We asked Cox how much data, specifically, customers who pay for unlimited data are actually allowed to use, and "Why isn't Mike allowed to use unlimited data when he is paying for the highest speeds and paying extra for unlimited data?"

We also asked why Cox is imposing slowdowns throughout entire neighborhoods instead of only on the people allegedly violating the Acceptable Use Policy and whether the slowdowns are imposed even when only a single customer in a neighborhood is flagged for excessive usage. We also asked how many people in Mike's neighborhood are affected by the upload-speed decrease and whether they will get discounts to reflect their reduced service.

[...] Cox didn't provide as much detail as we were looking for, but it confirmed the neighborhood-wide speed decreases, saying it has "identified a small number of neighborhoods where performance can be improved for all customers in the neighborhood by temporarily increasing or maintaining download speeds and changing upload speeds for some of our service tiers."

Cox defended the temporary 10Mbps upload speed for its gigabit-download plan, saying that "10Mbps is plenty of speed for the vast majority of customers to continue their regular activity and have a positive experience."

Have any Soylentils had similar experiences with their ISP?

Is this a reasonable step for ISPs to take, or are they just trying to squeeze as much money out of their customers without performing infrastructure upgrades to support increased bandwidth requirements?

Cox imposes data caps on their broadband users. Is this appropriate?

Does your ISP impose data caps (neither of my two ISPs do so)?

Previously:
(2020-06-06) Small ISP Cancels Data Caps Permanently After Reviewing Pandemic Usage


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  • (Score: 2) by Muad'Dave on Thursday June 11 2020, @12:27PM (2 children)

    by Muad'Dave (1413) on Thursday June 11 2020, @12:27PM (#1006247)

    100 mS was mentioned as the cutoff.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday June 11 2020, @10:26PM (1 child)

    by Arik (4543) on Thursday June 11 2020, @10:26PM (#1006631) Journal
    So an order of magnitude out of spec with what I would consider "moderate" latency.

    Two orders of magnitude off from what I would call "low" latency.
    --
    If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
    • (Score: 2) by Muad'Dave on Friday June 12 2020, @11:13AM

      by Muad'Dave (1413) on Friday June 12 2020, @11:13AM (#1006815)

      1mS is only 300 km at the speed on light. You canna change the laws pf physics!