Comments on: How do you know if your broadband meter is accurate?

By: Steve Donovan

Steve Donovan — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 16:39:30 +0000

Don’t like the service so…get the FCC involved?? How about changing providers? Every person should be leery of asking government to take more control of the free market no matter how unhappy you may be. Go to the competition and your provider will get the message No other ISP choices…then move! Internet access is not a right. Yet.

By: richardgarrison

richardgarrison — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 17:52:59 +0000

My ISP sent me a message that said I used 880 GB last month! Really? I don’t use bit torrent or any file sharing. I’m sure the number is completely bogus. My wifi is encrypted and I live on a dead end residential street and my neighbors are old clueless people. At least Century Link doesn’t charge extra if you exceed the cap. They just warn you and threaten to cut you off if you exceed a 250 GB cap twice in a 12 month period. Also, Century Link only counts downloads not uploads. Not that it would matter, because its the worst – 1 megabit/second.

By: KC

KC — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 17:35:13 +0000

“He said he couldn’t send me charts of his data because he had mistakenly erased them” – not great for an argument. Hard evidence would really help!

By: Stacey Higginbotham

Stacey Higginbotham — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 17:26:14 +0000

Other ISPs also cap services, including Comcast, CenturyLink and others cap broadband, and some also charge overage fees. Here’s a list we did last month http://gigaom.com/2012/10/01/data-caps-chart/

By: Parkite

Parkite — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 15:40:12 +0000

I’ve got the same issue with AT&T wireless on my iPhone 4S. I use the app “my data mgr” to monitor my data consumption and compare it to what AT&T indicates. AT&T is always 3-4x higher.

By: Eric

Eric — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 14:16:42 +0000

Why is it every time I read a story about excessive use and overage charges it contains the letters AT and T? I know there must be people being shut down by other ISPs, but it seem like AT&T is the most aggressive. Remember the crazy bills iPhone users got back in the old days?

By: Greg Folkert

Greg Folkert — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 13:24:17 +0000

If you knew Brett’s Legacy, you’d press the *Ignore* button.

Ask him about his triumphant days of Info-World and how he and Ed Foster and Nic Petreley and the Dynamic Twins and “NT is the Future” Editor In Chief… and a myriad of other things.

Let just say, we are glad he has focused his attention to actually running a business rather than focusing on “GPL vs BSD” licensing… it just go *OLD*… which this will probably also do. He sees big bad old Google invading his domain and is scared and unwilling to make changes and screams really loud… like that kid in the grocery store that his parent won’t get him the candy he wants.

Meh. Sorry to see he still is doing it.

By: Greg Folkert

Greg Folkert — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 13:18:32 +0000

Bike shedding again huh, @Brett? Your “legacy” make you incredibly unbelievable. I see you’ve changed you attack mode since you’ve gotten out of “Journalism” and are now into being an “ISP”, and a pretty much controversial one at that.

YMMV, BSD is the *ONLY* proper license… Linux steals from Businesses. Right Brett?

By: davidcdean

davidcdean — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 09:21:21 +0000

They’re probably not inaccurate calculations… or at least as wildly inaccurate as it seems on the surface. The issue is that we need to know exactly *what* they’re measuring. His Tomato firmware might not be recording packet headers. It might not be recording blocked inbound traffic. The calculation window might be off between him and the ISP. All of these are things we should probably know since we’re billed against it.

This was going to be an issue sooner or later, and the ISP’s knew it. They’ll have to disclose exactly what they measure, and everything will be fine.

By: keninca

keninca — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 05:49:20 +0000

That is nonsense. What does this have to do with Google? How is it harassment?