[Quote:]

How much Internet service is “unlimited” Internet service? If you are a user of Verizon Wireless’s Broadband Access wireless Internet service, “unlimited” means five gigabytes per month or less. The company is quite specific in its advertisements that the service is for unlimited e-mail, web surfing, and corporate intranet use, but not for downloading music or videos or running servers.

That sounds fair, I guess, but what happens if you go over your five gigs per month (a figure that is not published anywhere)? You get a letter saying that you’ve gone over your “unlimited” allotment and had better cut back or risk being booted from the system. Even then you aren’t told that you’ve gone over five gigs, just that you’ve been using too much.

If you continue to use too much bandwidth, your account will be cancelled and you will be charged the $175 early termination fee.

Now here’s the part of this story I find especially interesting: Verizon doesn’t look at packets or protocols to determine if you are improperly using bandwidth, they just look at total bytes transferred. If you go over five gigs THEY ASSUME YOU ARE BREAKING THE RULES and cancel your account. There is no way to appeal this decision, even if all you were doing was precisely within Verizon’s own definition of “unlimited.” Verizon’s position is that using more than five gigs per month is IMPOSSIBLE without violating their terms of service.