TL;DR: Suddenlink sucks and you need to sign this petition to help us get rid of data "allowances": http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/stop-suddenlink-internet.fb47?source=s.icn.fb&r_by=12433449
Most of this was copy-pasted from my Facebook post, so please forgive me if it seems to be referencing people that have Suddenlink as a service provider.
"Allowances are one step among several that will help us continue delivering a quality Internet experience for our customers. Other steps include the sizable investments we’ve made – and will keep making – to provide greater downstream and upstream system capacity and more bandwidth per home. Even with those investments, a relatively few customers use a disproportionate amount of bandwidth, which can negatively affect the Internet experience of those who use far less. That’s why, as a complement to our network investments, we’ve established allowances. In short, we want to help make sure the vast majority of our customers continue to have a great Internet experience — and that the relatively few who consistently use much more bandwidth than normal have a choice: either use a little less or pay a little more. We believe that's a fair and reasonable approach." - http://www.suddenlink.com/allowanceplan
We are being capped to 250GB of data per month in a new Suddenlink initiative that they consider to be an "upgrade". They call their caps "allowances" rather than caps. I guess that they think that sounds better?
If you happen to be one of those "relatively few" such as myself, then say goodbye to being able to use your internet connection freely. "Either use a little less or pay a little more". Those of us who actually USE our internet connections for anything more than Facebook, video games, and email are getting punished for the wrongdoings of nobody.
Good luck streaming your favorite Netfilx movies in high definition, because you will eat through your data "allowance" in no time at all. The average movie length is around 2 hours. At ~3GB per hour to stream in HD, you're looking at 6 GB per movie on average. At the minimum data cap size, 250GB, and assuming a month has 30 days on average, you get roughly 7.75 GB per day to spend. Watching a single 2 hour HD movie or TV show on Netflix each night will eat nearly all of your data cap every month. This leaves you with 70GB to play with in the time that you are not watching Netflix movies. If you need to download any games that you purchased, then that's another 15-30GB on average per game. All of this adds up to a data plan that is gone before the month is over, and leaves you, the customer, with a hefty bill at the end of the month. Keep in mind that it is $10 for every 50GB over the data cap. This needs to stop right now.
I actually just got off the phone with Suddenlink. After being transferred around to 4 different people I was able to speak with someone in tech support. They had no idea how to respond to my questions and I was immediately handed off to a supervisor. I complained, asked questions, and fought with them for upwards of thirty minutes only to hear the same conflicting answers over and over. I got nowhere with them and never got a legitimate answer to any of my questions. I could go more in-depth about what I asked, and why, but this is already far too long as is.
I really need the help of the fellow Tek Syndicate viewers to help us petition Suddenlink to remove these "allowances". The link to the petition is up top if you need it. If you happen to be a Suddenlink subscriber and care about this, then you can also submit a claim to the FCC (fcc.gov) and the BBB (bbb.org) against Suddenlink. I really hope we can get some people together to stop the evil that Suddenlink is doing.