[geeks] Why I hate Verizon Online

[Sheldon T. Hall]

 Quoth Jonathan Groll ...
>
> Here in South Africa, because of monopolistic tendancies from the main
> telecomms provider, I pay something like:
> 
> ZAR490.00 (=USD $68) per month for 384kbps ADSL, 
> 
> BUT and here's the clincher the above price is for an account with a
> 4GiB international cap, so if I exceed total throughput of 4 GiB to
> international hosts my account gets terminated unless I pay 
> more money.
> 
> Are there caps at all on the accounts discussed above?

I've had dial-up, ISDN, DSL, and cable-internet accounts in four US states,
but I've never had an account with a data volume limit.

Long ago, dial-up accounts (about the only kind back then) were generally
charged by the hour, but that mostly went away five or more years ago.

I did have an ISDN account that charged by the "channel-hour" if you
exceeded their base rate of 300 CH/month.  Even the 300 CH/mo was expensive,
almost US$200/month.  After about a year, I found a different ISP who
charged less than $50/mo for unlimited, dual-channel use, so I switched.
ISDN here is 56 kbps/channel (plus the 16 kbps control channel, usually),
and the line charges are pretty expensive.  No one much uses it if they have
any alternative other than dial-up, but it some places ISDN is the best you
can get.

There are about a million ISP/phone company combinations in the US, so it's
hard to generalize, but I would expect that the typical DSL or
cable-internet account here doesn't have any sort of time or data volume
limits.  Come to think of it, though, clapping outgoing data limits on 'em
would be a good way to fight spambots.  Don't limit the amount of data they
can send, or the ports they can send it on, just make the lusers pay for
sending over X GB/month!

-Shel