>> Users in our forums recently discovered that Verizon has begun
>>> conducting a new "trial" in Virginia. As part of this trial, customers
>>> on DSL lines at speeds of 500 kbps to 1.5 Mbps are now informed
>>> "usage" is limited to 150 gigabytes. Users on DSL speeds between 1.5
>>> Mbps and 3 Mbps are now told those lines only feature
>>> 250 GB of "usage."
>>
> Bob Goudreau wrote:
> I'm presuming that these caps are monthly limits. Even at 8 bits per byte
> (ignoring error-checking, overhead, etc.), the maximum that a 1.5 Mbps
> connection could download over the course of an 31-day month is slightly
> more than 502 GB (and that's using "G" to mean a mere 1,000,000,000
> instead of 2^30; if you use the latter definition, the total is > only 468 GB).
>
> So is Verizon really worried about customers who are downloading data
> at a flat-out rate for almost 8 hours a day?
Telecom Digest Moderator Bill Horne added:
1.5Mbps / 8 = 0.1875 MBps
> 0.1875 MBps * 3600 = 675 MB per hour.
> 675 MB per hour * 24 * 31 = 502,200 MB per month (which matches
> the figure given above)
>
> However -
>
> 675 MB per hour * 8 * 31 = 167,400 MB per month
>
> So, downloading for 8 hours/day gives a much smaller total than doing
> it for all 24 hours in a day.
Well yeah, that's precisely why I picked the "almost 8 hours a day" scenario to illustrate my point: that's how many hours it would take to hit the 150 GB/month cap, if a customer was downloading at maximum speed. If a customer was maxing out for a full 24 hours a day, they would exceed the cap by 200+ percent. But even the 8-hour scenario doesn't seem very realistic, and it's therefore hard to imagine that there are actually customers who are even approaching that cap, much less exceeding it. Hence our shared suspicion about Verizon's real motives.
Bob Goudreau Cary, NC