FiOS customer discovers the limits of “unlimited” data: 77 TB a month
FiOS customer discovers the limits of &ldquo;unlimited&rdquo; data: 77TB a month

                      
                      
          Yes, Virginia, there is a limit to what Verizon will let you do with FiOS' "unlimited" data plan. And a California man discovered that limit when he got a phone call from a Verizon representative wanting to know what, exactly, he was doing to create more than 50 terabytes of traffic on average per month—hitting a peak of 77TB in March alone.
"I have never heard of this happening to anyone," the 27-year-old Californian—who uses the screen name houkouonchi and would prefer not to be identified by name—wrote in a post on DSLreports.com entitled "LOL VZ called me about my bandwidth usage Gotta go Biz." "But I probably use more bandwidth than any FiOS customer in California, so I am not super surprised about this."
Curious about how one person could generate that kind of traffic, Ars reached out to houkouonchi and spoke with him via instant message. As it turns out, he's the ultimate outlier. His problem is more that he's violated Verizon's terms of service than his excessive bandwidth usage. An IT professional who manages a test lab for an Internet storage company, houkouonchi has been providing friends and family a personal VPN, video streaming, and peer-to-peer file service—running a rack of seven servers with 209TB of raw storage in his house.
Just another home network
I asked what exactly he does with that hardware to generate so much traffic. "Lots of stuff," houkouonchi replied. " I do some VPN stuff for people and Web/FTP/SFTP servers. A lot of friends and family stream stuff off me from my huge media collection. And I also do some P2P and Usenet stuff." Most of the storage space is taken up by videos and other media.
He's always had heavy storage requirements—in 2006, houkouonchi said he already had about 8TB of disk with no RAID. "In 2007 I went to 20x 1TB, then not too much later 20x 2TB, and then I started adding more disks and more chassis… but all the chassis that have a lot of hot-swap disk bays are rack-mount. And after having several rackmount machines, I finally decided to just buy a rack when I bought a house and got FiOS back in 2010."
    
                  
                  
          
    
    
      This Verizon FiOS customer's home network generated 77TB of traffic in one month.

          
  
        
            


          
                      
                  