FiOS customer discovers the limits of “unlimited” data: 77TB a month

[silicon_toad2000]

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/05/fios-customer-discovers-the-limits-of-unlimited-data-77-tb-in-month/

Yes, Virginia, there is a limit to what Verizon will let you do with FiOS' "unlimited" data plan. And a California man discovered that limit when he got a phone call from a Verizon representative wanting to know what, exactly, he was doing to create more than 50 terabytes of traffic on average per month—hitting a peak of 77TB in March alone.

"I have never heard of this happening to anyone," the 27-year-old Californian—who uses the screen name houkouonchi and would prefer not to be identified by name—wrote in a post on DSLreports.com entitled "LOL VZ called me about my bandwidth usage Gotta go Biz." "But I probably use more bandwidth than any FiOS customer in California, so I am not super surprised about this."

Curious about how one person could generate that kind of traffic, Ars reached out to houkouonchi and spoke with him via instant message. As it turns out, he's the ultimate outlier. His problem is more that he's violated Verizon's terms of service than his excessive bandwidth usage. An IT professional who manages a test lab for an Internet storage company, houkouonchi has been providing friends and family a personal VPN, video streaming, and peer-to-peer file service—running a rack of seven servers with 209TB of raw storage in his house.

Houkouonchi switched from dual 150 megabit business class connections to a 300 megabit downstream/65 megabit upstream residential plan in January (though he said he was getting 150 megabits upstream). "I only switched to residential simply because business pricing wasn't in line with residential anymore," he said. (Verizon prices the residential service at more than $200 a month for 300/65; business service for dual 150 megabit lines runs $340 a month, and 300 megabit service costs $259 a month.)

Since the switch, he's used nearly 200TB in bandwidth—an average of 50TB a month. However, traffic most months is in the 30TB range. That sort of bandwidth would cost thousands of dollars per month in most colocation facilities—with the 77TB peak month jumping into the tens of thousands based on pricing plans I looked at from a variety of hosting vendors.