Excessive Use & Throttling: How Much is Too Much?

One of the biggest lies in advertising is the word "unlimited" when used by Internet Service Providers. In the fine print, every ISP has ambiguous lines about how excessive use can result in a user's bandwidth being throttled.

Few (if any) ISPs are willing to define what constitutes "excessive use" on an "unlimited" data plan. Although Comcast has officially defined "excessive" home ISP usage as over 250GB/month, I have yet to find specific GB/month figures listed for any DSL or 4G "unlimited" plan.

(If you're yawning and asking "who cares" at this point, please wake up and read on - especially if you have or plan on using an online video service such as Netflix, Hulu or the new Google TV.)

I was almost ready to sign up for Clear 4G "unlimited" home Internet service when I typed in a question and was redirected to Clear's customer forum and read a few posts on bandwith.

HOLY S--T!!!

I read posts from dozens of Clear 4G customers with an identical issue: Those using P2P, Netflix or extreme gaming would suddenly find their service throttled back to around 25KBs (about half the speed of an ancient AOL 56k dial-up connection)!

I saw enough speed test results posted to believe it's legit. Those who contacted Clear's tech support were read scripted "fixes" including resetting the modem, checking firewalls, etc. A few IT Pros were able to get to level 3 support, where someone finally admitted there was a throttle block on their account due to "excessive usage" that would be removed in 3-7 days. Based on these posts, at least two Clear tech support agents thought "excessive usage" was anything in excess of 8-10GB per month.

10GB per month is barely enough for a typical household's e-mail, web surfing and Windows updates - it falls far short of the ability to stream even a few hours of decent quality video per week. Worse yet, the throttle speed of 25KB/s is low enough to cause VOIP service (Clear Voice or Vonage) to not function properly.

My take on this is:

• Before signing up with any ISP, do your homework. Check out current subscribers' actual experiences on BB posts. Although no ISP has 100% satisfaction, dozens of similar posts answered with canned responses by the ISP is a red flag.
  
• If you experience bandwidth throttling issues, don't suffer in silence. Post your experiences with actual speed test results. If you think you're being fed a line of bull by tech support, document and report the problem to your local Better Business Bureau, State Attorney General and the FCC. If these agencies get enough reports on a single ISP, it will eventually result in an investigation.
  
• Consider contacting the consumer investigation reporters at your local TV stations. If the ISP spends big bucks as an advertiser on the station, the odds are against you; however I've seen two major advertisers (a car dealer and an appliance store) busted on the evening news recently for shady business practices.

Eventually, I hope the FCC and/or States' Attorneys General will force ISPs to clearly define "excessive use" in their terms of service and limit the degree of throttling ISPs can place on high usage accounts.