What are the "bandwidth usage limitations" for the FIOS internet service?
I want to backup a large amount of family videos and pictures as well as my music collection to an online backup service (Amazon Glacier). However, I am concerned that Verizon will treat this as exceesive traffic. Verizon's Consumer Internet TOS states in two places that Verison limits bandwidth and punishes excessive use:
Section 4.3: "You also may not exceed the bandwidth usage limitations that Verizon may establish from time to time for the Service.... Violation of this section may result in bandwidth restrictions on your Service or suspension or termination of your Service
Attachment 2.A.i: "The following are examples of conduct which may lead to termination of your Service... (i) generate excessive amounts of email or other Internet traffic"
That is a good question. I could not answer. I have had various level of FiOS service since 2005, 15/5, 20/5, 25/25, 35/35, 50/25, and now 75/35. I have never heard of that being enforced or imposed. I suppose if you are in an area that is highly congested, Verizon may try to throttle somehow, but then would get many complaints, so their end of the network would need improvement if one user in an any area were causing that much of an issue. When I first had my service installed, I would have gigabytes of download traffic in any given day, with no complaints, but at the time uploads were limited to 5Mbps. I would say try your upload quality and how it works out, and not worry about that statement.
IMHO.
I believe that is a catch all for customers that may be having issues with invalid traffic, that may be generated by a virus or malware. Like a constant flood of network inquiries, or attacks on any system over the connection due to malware, or a virus. Just to protect other customers and the quality of service..
Your bandwidth limit is: Don't worry about it 🙂
Essentially, Verizon does not care what you use the bandwidth for, provided that you are not using it for illegal means or are using the bandwidth for running commercial servers off of it. Basically, as long as you're following the ToS you're free to use what you want. That clause that was mentioned about the auditing of bandwidth usage is a common phrase found in many Terms of Service agreements in the case of the provider actually needing to kick or warn heavy Internet users, something Verizon as a Tier 1 provider never has to worry about. There are folks out there doing 40-60 Terabytes (1 Terabyte = 1,000 Gigabytes) a month on FiOS and do not hear a peep from Verizon.
Actually, I recently signed up for one of those unlimited cloud services to back up my family photos/videos and other critical data. Over the last couple weeks I've uploaded about 150GB of data.
Today, my internet started feeling sluggish so I did a speedtest (speedtest.net) and saw my latency spike to 220ms (from under 20) and my bandwidth reduced to 3Mbs/1Mbs from the usual 15-20Mbs down and 5-10Mbs up.
I haven't yet called Verizon to see if there is another issue. But I have a feeling they will say I was consuming too much.
I will update once I know more...
@danNJ wrote:Today, my internet started feeling sluggish so I did a speedtest (speedtest.net) and saw my latency spike to 220ms (from under 20) and my bandwidth reduced to 3Mbs/1Mbs from the usual 15-20Mbs down and 5-10Mbs up.
When you went to speedtest.net, did you test from multiple servers so as to make sure that server you connected to simply wasn't having issues?
Remember, when doing the speedtests, if you have other traffic going on in your network that the results will be sluggish.
So as an example, someone is watching netflix, or doing heavy gaming while you're doing a test, may look REAL BAD, but that is not an accurate test.
For the most accurate result, the test should be done while hardwired, and with as little traffic going on at the house as possible, IE noone should be streaming a movie, no bittorrent traffic and no gaming should really be going on.
Thanks for all of the replies.
I had hoped someone from Verizon would chip in and give us a final final answer. If I get around to it, I'll mail my question to their legal & customer service departments and post the response (if any) here
Start a new topic or ask questions in the open forum.
