Exceeding usage quota

[Stevie46]

Max Home 3:

What happens if I exceed my usage quota?

More specifically:

What happens if I exceed my Peak Usage but not my Off Peak Usage?
What happens if I exceed my Off Peak Usage but not my Peak Usage?
What happens if I exceed both?

Ideally I would prefer to see my connection severely bandwidth restricted for the remainder of the month, thus allowing me at least a barely working connection with which to receive important emails.

Alternatively, if access was disallowed for the remainder of the month, that would be okay - providing I could use another dial-up supplier to access my adsl24 email by pop3.

Alternatively, if the answer is "we automatically bill you more" then I'm afraid I will probably have to drop adsl24 from my shortlist because it would be all too easy for someone to deliberately increase my costs via a DOS attack and there would be nothing I could do to undo the damage once it had been done.

[James]

If you exceed any allowance (peak, off-peak or both) there is a standard £5+vat admin fee plus the difference to the next package. We do not bill per GB, so if you went over the 3GB cap, you could use up to 30GB (next package) and still only pay the difference.

We do not do any bandwidth restricting or capping and thus are unable to provide that or indeed block your account.

It's entirely up to the customer to monitor how much they are using, and as such you have complete control over viewing how much you use via the "My acount" page on our website. See www.adsl24.co.uk/myaccount_overview.php for screenshots of what you can expect.

Thank you

James

[Stevie46]

Thanks James, pretty quick response :)

So, to confirm, there is nothing to stop a DOS attack running up costs that I cannot control, short of disconnecting the modem if/when I realise such an attack is taking place?

[James]

That's of course the best option - the same with any ISP. DOS attacks can happen on any IP at any time, so unless you are doing something to warrant someone running a DOS attack (doubtful but there are some strange script kiddies out there!) on your IP you should be fine.

If you have any more queries just ask :)

James

[Stevie46]

Thanks.

I'd prefer to pick an ISP that has either no caps or hard caps, thus ensuring no automatic financial liability on my part for these script kiddies actions.

That's why the "purchase an extra GB" option is so nice - it gives me the choice whether to ride out the affected month or make the payment. I've also seen ISPs that drop your connection rate to below that of a 56K modem for the rest of the month - at least ensuring some access - without extra unwanted fees being enforced.

[vexille]

Just wondering whether these DOS attacks are likely to affect the average user? Is this something I should be worrying about? Please could you explain what a DOS attack is and how to tell if one is being attacked?

Thanks.

[Stevie46]

A denial-of-service (DOS) attack is where an attacker deliberately bombards your connection with lots of pointless traffic, in this context, to eat up all your available bandwidth and quota.

It's admittedly a small risk, but since you have a static IP, if you did upset a moron, perhaps in a chat room, or online game, or by email or usenet post, or anywhere else they could find out your IP, they could decide to attack.

ISPs in this country would be quick to respond to an abuse report by you to the attacker's ISP, since he would be violating their terms of service by attacking you, but foreign attackers are not as well controlled since many of those ISPs don't seem to care less about how their networks are abused.

Like I say, small risk, but one that exists and could lead to the victim incurring extra financial costs if the ISP automatically bills for the extra bandwidth.

[Stevie46]

Oops, forgot to answer your other question: you'd see it happen in your firewall logs. You might also "see" it on screen if you have those little green (blue?) monitor icons flashing down on the right hand side of your Windows taskbar indicating network activity - you'd see a lot of activity happening when you believed your system should be idle (assuming no other reason for the traffic).

[James]

Yeah, it is very minimal but could happen to any user on any ISP at any time. This is another reason why routers are better than USB modems as they will help protect these attacks from taking your offline.

You could try out Max PAYG service, 1GB by default but you can use as much GB as you like and just pay 99p per extra GB.

It appears you are almost *expecting* to be DOS'ed. This isn't normal unless you have some reason to suspect you may be DOS'ed. If you are worried too much about this, then you'll struggle to find a new ISP that offers a solution. Why not try our Home Max 30? Its only £3.49 more than the 3GB plan and gives you 30GB/peak and 300GB/off-peak. If anyone can send DOS attacks on that amount of data they are something else!

I'm just trying to work out why you are worried so much about this... has it happened to you before? As long as you don't upset anyone online - what's to worry about :)

Thanks

James

[ianonline]

I had a DOS attack happen to me about 3 months ago with Zen, however I use a Netgear DG834N Router so not only did it block the attack it also IMMEDIATLY sent me an email to say it was happening. So at the risk of repeating, you cant beat a good router

[James]

Definitely - a router wins every time.