Maxing out bandwidth

[neotoky]

I was wondering if you could get into trouble by the isp, if you keep maxing out whenever you download. Can they cancel your account? Can they start monitoring what you download? Also can they cut your bandwidth?

[100%]

You paid for a certain speed and you use it, to the max. This is good.
you can also check if your isp is actually giving you the speed you paid for and not less.
In a recent article it stated that most people only use a Third of their potential.

[bsgjunkie]

I was wondering if you could get into trouble by the isp, if you keep maxing out whenever you download. Can they cancel your account? Can they start monitoring what you download? Also can they cut your bandwidth?

You have to download a lot to gain attention from your ISP. Even if you catch their attention, they're not going to cancel your account. They only action they may take it to throttle your speeds to what you pay for. Sometimes ISPs speeds can be faster at times then advertised. ISP can also watch what you're downloading, but they dont care.

I worked for a small ISP during college. The techs would sometimes notice users such as you're describing, but it only peaked their interests in an entertainment sense. Every once and a while you'd hear about a rep stumbling upon records of a user checking out some weird porn or something. Just stay away from the kid porn and you'll be ok.

[Porkape]

My ISP Charter communications doesn't care, I have had weeks where 18gb-20gb per day download is normal for me and no complaints whatsoever. I still download easily over 2Gb per day even without getting any files as I get a lot of the YouTube type sites linked to me which also max out your connection if you ever notice so between that and getting headers for certain groups you can easily keep your daily download ratio pretty high. I use multiple connections to each of my servers and max out my 5 Mbps connection. I have been using them for over 3 years now.

Although, I know friends in my town who got letters, from Charter, for downloading Sopranos a couple of years ago and Superman Returns recently but they used unsecured bit-torrent to get these files. The letter simply stated that they should delete said material if they have it on their computers as it was an illegal download.

So they do pay attention it seems but looks more like its probably due to the RIAA/MPAA going after downloaders through their ISPs.

[Fulanito]

use it to the max have been doing that for a long time now :P

[NRGFreak]

It depends ISP to ISP but in most cases you will not get capped/banned/trouble for downloading. Uploading is a different story though.

[gamer4eva]

I would call it false advertising if they say they give so much and don't even explain what fair usage policy is and if they are likely to be affected by throtting of speeds and capping.