Bandwidth brouhaha-- You get what you pay for, or do you?

Marc Espinoza subscribed to wireless Internet service from Clearwire last year.

But the 38-year-old Yakima resident would soon learn a lesson in the limits of bandwidth.

Espinoza used his connection to look up sports scores as well as other types of information.

When he used it to download games and other updates for his Xbox 360 video game console and to download old full-length movies and songs, his connection speed began to slow.

When he called Clearwire's customer service, the representative said that large numbers of downloads can cause connection speeds to slow. This would occur several times, forcing Espinoza to call customer service to reset the connection.

Earlier this month, he attempted to go online after getting his computer repaired, but he could not connect.

He again called customer service and learned that the company terminated his connection for excessive downloading.

Downloads generally require more bandwidth than normal Web surfing.

Clearwire spokeswoman Susan Johnston said the company gives a customer several warnings before terminating a customer's account.

"How can you abuse (the Internet) if you're paying the monthly fee?" said Espinoza, who still believes that his usage was within reason.

A small number of users nationwide like Espinoza are learning they don't really have unlimited access to the Internet.

Internet providers say they have to find a way to maintain their networks to provide competitive service for customers who use it for everything from e-mail to video streaming to music downloads.

Many Internet service providers have a fair-use policy.

According to Webster's New World Telecom Dictionary, it is "a policy of some Internet service providers that imposes bandwidth restrictions on users who exhibit patterns of system usage that exceed certain thresholds for extended periods of time."

"You got these people that have grown bloated, from a computing perspective, with all this free available bandwidth and they think it's a human right; it's an entitlement," said Ray Horak, a telecommunications writer in Mount Vernon, Wash., who wrote the Telecom Dictionary. "But it's not, it's just not."

Qwest, which offers DSL, says it will provide three warnings for its residential customers who have usage habits that are hundreds of times of "normal residential usage."

Such warnings are given to a small group, about .002 percent of its 2.5 million customer base, said Bob Gravely, a Qwest spokesman in Portland.

"You pay for a certain level of standard, you don't get to exceed it," he said.

And how much users pay can vary by the provider, the type of service they offer and the promotions that providers may offer.

Many Internet service providers base their pricing structure on what they believe is the residential customer's average usage, said Suresh Kotha, a management and organization professor at the University of Washington.

While it's understandable that providers want cooperation from their customers, providing such a vague policy misleads customers to the amount of access they truly have, said Robb Topolski, chief technology consultant for Free Press and Public Knowledge, two organizations that advocate for free access to information online.

So why not just specify the exact amount that is considered fair use?

One theory is that Internet providers don't want to reduce their competitiveness, Kotha said. When one company names a specific limit, another company could undercut it by providing more bandwidth at a lesser price.

Gravely, of Qwest, said that Internet technology evolves too quickly for them to specify a figure. And he says that such abuse is only done by a small percentage of customers.

"You really have to be using extreme amounts of bandwidth to violate our agreement," he said.

Discussion of limits, named or otherwise, often veer into a discussion about net neutrality, a principle where providers are expected not to restrict the content, sites or other applications used on their connections.

In August, the Federal Communications Commission ruled that it was unlawful for Comcast, a Philadelphia-based satellite provider and one of the nation's largest Internet providers, to block traffic to users who used BitTorrent, a common peer-to-peer file-sharing application.

The program allows its users to share and receive files. The FCC believed that such restrictions gave users the false belief they had unlimited, unrestricted access.

In the ruling, it asked Comcast to provide explicit documentation of its network management practices.

Earlier this month, Comcast placed a 250-gigabyte-per-month limit on downloads by residential Internet users. In layman's terms, a user would have to either send more than 50 million plain-text e-mails, download more than 62,500 songs or download more than 125 full-length, standard-definition movies to exceed the limit. Comcast said having such a limit would give all users optimal access to its network. It also notes that most users don't use more than 2 to 3 gigabytes per month.

There's chatter among the tech community that placing a limit is a legal way for companies like Comcast to discourage use of certain applications in the name of network management.

If anything, there's a belief that imposing such limits will actually curtail innovation in technology, Topolski said.

"I think going from unlimited plans to limited plans is backwards according to how technology generally works," he said.

Several Internet providers operating locally, such as Qwest and Clearwire, are quick to point out they are only concerned with how much customers use, not how they use it.

"We're aren't targeting any specific applications at all," said Johnston, of Clearwire.

As for Espinoza, the Yakima resident, he's moving on and looking for a new Internet service provider. "Football season is on and I have to know the scores," he said.

And he's learned his lesson. "The next time I get Internet, I'm going to ask what (the company's) standards are," he said.

* Mai Hoang can be reached at 577-7685 or mhoang@yakimaherald.com.