7.5hrs a day video
So the internet was getting slow much too quickly, much too often. Every couple of weeks everything would start to hang, even netflix would have issues and connection drops. Dan did a speed test and it was dismal, yet again. It's been a few months and we've been working on the tech at home to remedy it so I felt this was likely not our end, but perhaps my recent flood of binge watching netflix while playing on vine and streaming slowtv to the living room for my parrot had triggered a piracy alert.
Here's the thing, it's not legal for them to choke our bandwidth, but they are allowed to restrict ports and speeds by port setting to prevent illegal uses like spam, botnets, and piracy. It's a shady business, really, dancing on the edges of legal service provision. it states right in the contract how and when they'll actually throttle you, but it's phrased such that it doesn't quite fit the legal definition of throttling. Basically, they have data caps as well as speed caps based on which service you buy. We were buying a pretty low end service and outrunning our data cap by nearly double. This is because Vine is very hungry, we've added more smart tv style devices, and finally the xbox pushed us over the edge being handy for streaming. Come to think of it, the new casting apps popping up this summer are really the trigger for increased data use. Suddenly streaming even broadcast programs is using data.
So we were buying 250GB and using it up by the second or third week of our monthly term. That means the auto throttle was coming on half the month! You see, they could just turn it off until you upgrade or reach the next month, so turning down your speed makes sense, only it's technically illegal, so they can't, but they don't want to turn you off, etc. Well I didn't expect to play mind games with the tech or take the company to battle over what kind of service I buy. I understand the business protocols and the profit margin issues. I understand that you don't change the contract at the tech support level either. That battle is won in a meeting room, not on a phone. So I called, told her I'd discussed this paragraph in the contract before signing on and was told to call and they'd sort it out. She explained that we were going through 450GB a month but paying only 250 and this was the source of the issue. I explained that the way we used the service this was going to remain an issue and so we needed to upgrade the service. the biggest they have is 500GB so we'll see if I go over THAT, LOL. We're paying a good deal more too, which should please them, and our budget is not as bad now due to the reduced cost of pets since the medicated dog died. She was costing me enough in meds to cover the upgrade!
Dan says that one movie can be considered approx. 2GB of data, so extrapolating I get a figure of about 7.5hrs of watching movies daily. That's so easy to do, and it's not accounting for websites, vine,, or extra bits on wimp, youtube, or break.
Here's the thing, it's not legal for them to choke our bandwidth, but they are allowed to restrict ports and speeds by port setting to prevent illegal uses like spam, botnets, and piracy. It's a shady business, really, dancing on the edges of legal service provision. it states right in the contract how and when they'll actually throttle you, but it's phrased such that it doesn't quite fit the legal definition of throttling. Basically, they have data caps as well as speed caps based on which service you buy. We were buying a pretty low end service and outrunning our data cap by nearly double. This is because Vine is very hungry, we've added more smart tv style devices, and finally the xbox pushed us over the edge being handy for streaming. Come to think of it, the new casting apps popping up this summer are really the trigger for increased data use. Suddenly streaming even broadcast programs is using data.
So we were buying 250GB and using it up by the second or third week of our monthly term. That means the auto throttle was coming on half the month! You see, they could just turn it off until you upgrade or reach the next month, so turning down your speed makes sense, only it's technically illegal, so they can't, but they don't want to turn you off, etc. Well I didn't expect to play mind games with the tech or take the company to battle over what kind of service I buy. I understand the business protocols and the profit margin issues. I understand that you don't change the contract at the tech support level either. That battle is won in a meeting room, not on a phone. So I called, told her I'd discussed this paragraph in the contract before signing on and was told to call and they'd sort it out. She explained that we were going through 450GB a month but paying only 250 and this was the source of the issue. I explained that the way we used the service this was going to remain an issue and so we needed to upgrade the service. the biggest they have is 500GB so we'll see if I go over THAT, LOL. We're paying a good deal more too, which should please them, and our budget is not as bad now due to the reduced cost of pets since the medicated dog died. She was costing me enough in meds to cover the upgrade!
Dan says that one movie can be considered approx. 2GB of data, so extrapolating I get a figure of about 7.5hrs of watching movies daily. That's so easy to do, and it's not accounting for websites, vine,, or extra bits on wimp, youtube, or break.