gHacks technology news » data plan http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Tue, 24 Nov 2009 11:26:04 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Bandwidth Monitor http://www.ghacks.net/2008/01/04/bandwidth-monitor/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/01/04/bandwidth-monitor/#comments Fri, 04 Jan 2008 17:51:04 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2008/01/04/bandwidth-monitor/ Not every user has the luxury of a Internet flatrate and I personally know a few who are still using time or data related accounts. I experienced this as well when I used my mobile phone to connect to the Internet during a holiday. Every byte counts sometimes and it is always a good idea to monitor the bandwidth that you are using in that time.

Not only because it gives a clue about the bill that you can expect at the end of the month but also to have proof that you did not download more than the amount shown in the logs of the software.

The Cyber Bandwidth Monitor is one application that monitors bandwidth usage and displays daily, weekly, monthly and total stats. Each period is divided into uploads, downloads and a combination of the two to give you exact data that you can work with.

bandwidth monitor

The user has the option to display a system tray icon that is showing a (mini) graph or a smaller window that can be set to be always on top. There is also a ping and traceroute function but I do not think that many users will need that.

Buttons for alerts and exports are also available but the functions have not been implemented yet. They will be most likely added in the coming releases.

Cyber Bandwidth Monitor is using roughly 6 Megabytes of RAM when run in the system tray.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2008/01/04/bandwidth-monitor/feed/ 4 Unlimited means no restrictions http://www.ghacks.net/2007/09/21/unlimited-means-no-restrictions/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/09/21/unlimited-means-no-restrictions/#comments Fri, 21 Sep 2007 08:51:00 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2007/09/21/unlimited-means-no-restrictions/ That is at least the definition by us common folks who are happy to get an unlimited plan – be it Internet or mobile phone – only to find out that the fine prints are detailing lots of exclusions that turn the advertised unlimited plan into a limited one. I’m not a marketing expert nor a lawyer but this does look fishy to me.

Why are companies allowed to advertise unlimited plans if those are in fact limited ? I could recount dozens of stories on the Internet where someone got kicked because they had been using ‘an excessive amount of traffic’. I mean, if they say unlimited it should mean that you could download 24/7 with full speed without facing consequences, that’s what the word unlimited means in my opinion.

So, my question would be if it would be possible to sue those companies who advertise unlimited plans but kick you as soon as your traffic exceeds their figure X. From my point of view this is misdirection. Consumers think that unlimited means unmetered, but what do lawyers say about this ?

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2007/09/21/unlimited-means-no-restrictions/feed/ 4 When Unlimited means limited http://www.ghacks.net/2007/04/03/when-unlimited-means-limited/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/04/03/when-unlimited-means-limited/#comments Tue, 03 Apr 2007 18:24:13 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2007/04/03/when-unlimited-means-limited/ Did you ever fell into the trap that you signed up for an supposedly unlimited service only to find out at a later time that the unlimited service did not really mean unlimited at all ? I fell into that trap with my first website which i hosted using an unlimited webhosting plan. No extra money for transfers over a certain amount of gigabytes, no worries about cpu and sql usage, everything was advertised as being unlimited. I started hosting some file mirros and ran some pretty resource demanding scripts and it did not took long until I was told to either upgrade my hosting account to a dedicated server or leave the company and look for hosting elsewhere.

This was basically the termination of my account with that provider and I decided to read the terms of service throughly from that time on. Today I read about Verizons Unlimited Data Plan which has a download limit of 5 Gigabytes and restrictions in place that forbid many internet activities such as downloading and streaming movies, p2p or web camera posts. So, the biggest question I’m asking myself now is what exactly is unlimited in the unlimited data plan from Verizon ? It is obviously not the data, so what is it ? What justifies the name ?

I was not able to find an explanation for the term unlimited in Verizons unlimited data plan. It is pretty obvious that there is an inflation in terms like unlimited and flatrate. Many companies use it to lure customers who think that they get the real meaning of the word and not just a way of making more money by fooling the customers.

Back to Verizon, I really like the following sentence in their terms of service agreement:

Anyone using more than 5 GB per line in a given month is presumed to be using the service in a manner prohibited above, and we reserve the right to immediately terminate the service of any such person without notice

So, all rights to the company, none to the customer. Would you really work with such a company ?

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