In article <[email protected]>,
[email protected] says...
> Emanuel wrote:
> > I doubt the examples you cite involved people that were innocently
> > surfing the web and checking e-mail a lot; odds are VZW wouldn't
> > notice you unless you're tying up an IP address for 24 hours straight.

>
> I am sure you are probably right. If you are a professional, and all
> you use the "Unlimited" service for is web browsing and checking
> e-mail, VZW will be perfectly happy. But what if you get involved in
> online gaming, or downloading music (legally of course), or internet
> radio, or watching video clips of news (or other things)? These things
> are bandwidth intensive, and what broadband is really made for in the
> opinion of many (including myself). Are these things a violation of
> VZW policy? If you read their "Unlimited" data service policy, it
> seems like a gray area to me. You may argue that users should use a
> land line for this, but some of us (myself included) do not have a land
> line available for much of the time. If a land line was available,
> that's what I would be using. Why pay $80/month if you don't need to?
>
>


Since you included Sprint PCS' newsgroup in this, I should point out
that, at least for Sprint PCS, those streaming media options are almost
a separate service unto themselves. There are a couple of applications
that use the "regular" Internet of the phones to stream to them. But
streaming video is actually part of a dedicated "Multimedia" service.
As such, those kinds of usage actually *would* show up different than,
for example, operating an FTP server via tethered cellular data service.

And yeah, as a former SPCS employee, I actually got a call one night
from a customer doing exactly that over Sprint's "Vision" service.

Which, I guess, is simply a long-winded way of saying yes, carriers
*can* differentiate "server" functions from streaming media.

--
RØß
O/Siris
-+-
A thing moderately good
is not so good as it ought to be.
Moderation in temper is always a virtue,
but moderation in principle is always a vice.
+Thomas Paine, "The Rights of Man", 1792+



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