So if your ISP lays a bandwidth cap on you and charges for additional usage … and your computer has Zombieware on it and someone else remotely takes control of it without your knowledge … is there anything you can do about the racked up network charges?
What about with an unsecured wireless network? Neighbors feeding off your bandwidth so they don’t pay their own overage charges?
I’d be willing to bet that the ISP’s position is: “Sorry, but it’s up to you to secure your computer and your network, and to control how your bandwidth is used.”
That seems to me that the ISP would have incentive to provide less protection to their customers against viruses and worms, and not to give warnings or anything.
They might be HAPPY that their customers get infected, because then they all go over and pay huge rates.
Possibly, although i don’t rely on my ISP for any sort of virus or malware protection. I install anti-virus and anti-spyware stuff, and a firewall, and i monitor and update them myself.
Agreed, I don’t rely on mine for anything other than an Internet connection.
But let’s say they suspect you’re a zombie based on your usage … they have less reason to tell you about that now than before eh?
Depends on the company, SeanArenas. I think most reputable, reasonable companies would recognise that knowing their client’s account had been hacked and failing to do anything about it, and then holding the customer responsible for the excess charges would likely result in losing the customer and generating bad word of mouth. When we used to run an ISP (some 10+ years ago), we used to notify customers if we suspected they’d been hacked (zombies weren’t such an issue back then); sometimes we would even disable the account while we tried to contact the owner and make sure it was authorised use. We were a small local company so it was easier for us to do. I suppose we could have let the hackers burn through the account and then tell the owner it was their job to make sure they kept their password secure, but we chose the path that made our customers happy and grateful and ensured they would stick with us.
Generally speaking, customers who get slammed with a huge bill that they don’t feel they should be responsible for are more trouble than they are worth.
that sounds along the lines of turning off a credit card which is having a bunch of unusual activity on it - that makes sense.
True – but credit card companies didn’t do that until government regulations came along.
Here in Australia we are charged by the monthly limit and speed of our bandwidth. For instance, I’m with cable at 8 Mb/s download with a monthly limit of 12 GB. I’m charged $59.00/month. If I wanted higher speed I would pay more. If I wanted higher download limit, I would pay more. I can change my plan to increase the download limit if I find myself approaching the 12 GB with a week or so left in my billing month. I will pay the extra pro rata. If I don’t increase my limit I am ‘shaped’ which means that my download speed drops to dial-up speeds for the remainder of the month. We also pay for both download and upload bandwidth. The rationale for the Australian arrangements is that we are paying for the trans-Pacific cables (infrastructure) to communicate with the northern hemisphere. Don’t know if I buy that.
And, yes, people are always complaining when they get shaped. The ISPs have a meter we can access to see if we are using too much. But many people just don’t monitor it. The cause of overuse is generally sourced to stolen wireless bandwidth (unsecured), virus infection or torrents left running.
One last comment - you can organise a plan whereby you pay for ‘unlimited’ broadband. These plans don’t shape you, you pay through the nose for any bandwidth beyond a fixed cap, say 60 GB. These are very expensive.
Australia’s broadband internet charges are unbelievable. While i would, if the right job opportunities etc. presented themselves, be very happy to move back there, i would really miss US internet pricing and unlimited bandwidth (although there are a few ISPs here now that are starting to experiment with caps.
If my calculations are right, you could use up your monthly limit in under 4 hours. I could probably exceed 12Gb in a week just watching a few on-demand Netflix movies.
Hmm. A friend of mine in Sydney has a plan that sounds similar to yours, but she says that uploads do not count towards her bandwidth limit. I’m not sure who her provider is.
>What about with an unsecured wireless network? Neighbors feeding off your bandwidth so they don’t pay their own overage charges?
It isnt typical of ISPs to pay for this. In fact, one of the reasons ISPs add-value to their services by providing wireless is because this stuff is a support nightmare so they might as well start selling their own and locking it down themselves.
If youre truly worried about this stuff, I highly recommend not running windows as an administrator, but as a limited user. Its much more difficult to get infections when youre running as a user with very few permissions. More info here.
I also recommend locking down your wireless with WPA, not WEP. Configure WPA with a nice long non-dictionary password.
There are only two ISPs in Australia that offer cable, Optus and Bigpond (Telstra). I’m, reluctantly, with Bigpond. Both include d/l and u/l in their charges. There are smaller ISPs who offer boutique fibre optic delivery to ‘gated’ communities/body corporates, but I don’t keep up with their charges. But your mate may be with an ISP who only offers DSL delivery and many of them don’t charge for upload. But the temptation to adopt a ‘business plan’ that affords more profit is reflected in the movement of more ISPs to charging for both u/l and d/l in recent times.
I would be interested in any comments you might have regarding the legitimacy of claims by the ISPs that we Aussies pay more to repay the initial investment in expensive infrastructure like the trans-Pacific underwater cables and the use of the links provided by them.