PSA: Exercise caution when buying the gift of data

[Mark R]

I bought my mom a carbonite gift subscription for her birthday. She'd just got a new camera and had taken up photography as a hobby, and wanted something to protected her photos.

I also noted that she had just upgraded from a rather sketchy ADSL service to a new 60 Mbps FTTC VDSL service.

She just phoned me to tell me that her ISP has dropped a massive bandwidth overage bill on her, of about $150

It turns out that her initial backup was about 50 GB, but her ISP service, only comes with 10 GB per month of bandwidth - anything over that is charged at about $4 per GB

I didn't even realise you could get services with that level of data cap/speed combination.

 

[Harabec]

Why do you guys even have data caps?

 

[Crusty]

Why do you guys even have data caps?

Greed.

 

[88keys]

10GB/month is ridiculous and quite useless this day and age. Sounds more like a scam to me.

And let me guess. Early contract termination fee is also insanely expensive.

 

[mkrohn]

I'm on comcast... they have a data cap system in place but its never been enforced anywhere I've lived.

 

[88keys]

And it's 250GB. While that was huge back when it was implemented, it's really not so much anymore with the advent of Youtube, Netflix, etc.

 

[xSkyDrAx]

Where do you live that you have a 10GB cap? Unless that's an upstream cap? 60Mbps and 10GB will give you basically unlimited browsing with great speed but nothing else. DL a dvd or any program that's a decent size and you're screwed.

 

[ahenkel]

my ISP has a data cap on the cheaper price levels of 300GB a month. Then they sell 100GB a month packets for 10 a month. We average about 700gb a month. Finally after a year of that they started offering 1tb capped 100Mbps connections but it's 130 a month.

All to not have cable TV

 

[Jeff7]

Where do you live that you have a 10GB cap? Unless that's an upstream cap? 60Mbps and 10GB will give you basically unlimited browsing with great speed but nothing else. DL a dvd or any program that's a decent size and you're screwed.

But the ISP will sure come out ahead, and that's really all they care about.