Does Multiply have a Fair Usage Policy (FUP) too?

Read this article about ISPs & Broadband connections.

"The amount of data that you download has a significant impact on your
broadband speed.

With each broadband package, you're assigned a download limit. Exceeding
this can either cost you money or result in a slower broadband connection.
If you've gone for an unlimited account, you may think that you're safe from
these concerns, but you're not. The reality is that all unlimited packages
are subject to a fair usage policy (FUP), which is anything but
straightforward and fair.

FUP disclaimers can be as the following examples: "excessive online
behaviour may result in termination of customer accounts without notice" and
"very heavy users may have their bandwidth restricted during peak time", or
even "usage not at a reasonable level may lead to disconnection of service".
Unfortunately, quantifying what is excessive, very heavy or not reasonable
is not made clear.

You can't blame the ISPs for wanting to cap broadband usage for fixed and
unlimited accounts. After all, they have only a finite amount of bandwidth
capacity, and it costs money to provide it. If usage truly were unlimited,
the network would become clogged within a very short period of time as users
soaked up the available bandwidth. Adding more capacity costs money and that
cost would have to be passed on by way of higher subscription fees and would
quickly be used up anyway. BT Wholesale, which provides the majority of raw
broadband supply to the ISPs, switched from billing by numbers of users or
total amount of data moved around to a system based upon capacity in 2004.
This means that ISPs are charged by the amount of data that can be carried
every second, and it has led to ISPs needing to control customer usage in
order to keep costs down.

The ISPs use traffic-shaping tools to spot what they regard as abnormal data
traffic, where there is continuous use of the full line capacity over an
extended period of time, such as might be experienced when using a file
sharing service. The bandwidth management system reacts to this and 'shapes'
traffic flow by reducing the available bandwidth, resulting in a dramatic
slowdown for the user.

Soft-capping is another method applied behind the scenes to shape traffic
flow and works by prioritising based upon application: online gaming and
internet telephone calls sit higher up the data transfer queue than web
surfing and email, while file-sharing users sit at the back. If the network
is quiet, then P2P users won't notice a slowdown; when it is busy, they
will. Customers who have gone over any monthly download limit are sent to
the back of the queue."



This is applicable to ISPs in general, but I'm wondering if free online
storage sites or even Multiply has a similar policy for maximum data that
can be stored.



Is this the reason Segaman's account is getting deleted repeatedly?


Received: from C6XB2 at Globe Wireless; Sat, 24 Jan 2009 13:54 UTC
Message-id: 716787311S244