Excitel Account Suspended for Commercial Usage (Baseless Claim)

[Deleted member 70865]

Dude What the hell the same thing happened to me too is this some sort of Christmas joke?
@philip marlowe
can we get some clarification on this matter?

 

[Smh]

pgportal is not very useful for private companies, it works best for bsnl, mtnl.

 

[NikhilS]

It works on Jio, Airtel.

Personally tried.

 

[Sushubh]

it worked on reliance as well in the past. the complaints i used to file were with department of telecom.

btw. the whole commercial usage excuse is bullshit. in my locality excitel is used by PGs all around the sector.

you cannot just sell connections to actual commercial entities and than use the excuse of commercial usage from residential customers.

i mean i get it... ~800GB in a few days is pretty hefty but that's what any new customer would do. abuse the network before settling down. at least warn the customer about excessive usage which is considered abusive usage behavior a couple of times before cutting the cord.

 

[ijsa]

Commercial usage theory is ridiculous, they are selling their service in Chandni Chowk.......

What is Excess usage on an unlimited account.

Speak to CC and get clarification on actual reason of disconnection..... you may also speak to your LCO for the actual reason or ask for an immediate refund.

And I have had more than 10 devices so many times connected simultaneously.... No issues whatsoever.

 

[manu1991]

ISP's identify the number of devices connected to their network by looking at TTL value in IP packet header. Did you have 10+ devices connected? How much data did you actually download/upload in the last 4-5 days?

Interesting, I never knew of that, I always thought the point of NAT was to obfuscate all that information so that the ISP just sees a single IP. So every device connects and sends different rates/size of information and so they can identify the number of devices from that?

 

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[rye]

The TTL(Time-To-Live) technique is a very crude way to detect the number of devices connected. However it is not full proof and is bound to give false positives.

Every device through which the packet passes decrements the TTL value by 1.
For example on Windows, the default TTL value is 128. Assuming you have hooked up your laptop to the router, the router would decrement the TTL value by 1. Thus the ISP would be seeing a TTL value of 127 in the packets originating from your IP.

Now, suppose you connected another Windows PC to your router. In this case, it will also have the same initial TTL of 128 and the ISP will not be able to differentiate this as a separate device.

However, things take a different turn if you connect a different type of device. Say you connect a Ubuntu Laptop or an Android phone (i.e. Linux based). Linux has an initial TTL value of 64. After passing through the router it becomes 63. Now the ISP knows you are at-least using two different devices since it see two different TTL's from your IP (63 & 127).

This is how TTL based detection works and as you see it's not full proof.

Now, bypassing TTL based detection is simple. Both Windows and Linux allow you to customize the initial value of TTL. You can make the TTLs same for all the devices, so the ISP is none the wiser.

The other way is to get a router which supports TTL rewriting. Actually any openwrt/dd-wrt based router will do and you can use iptables for that. In this case, the router will intentionally rewrite the TTL values to make it the same for all packets it sends out.

 

[john_dud]

Even 1TB for 4-5 days isn't much considering, the total traffic on our dual 100 Mbps links in office never exceeds 500GB for a day.

 

[Smh]

@rye so how isp detects more than 2 device as most people use android and windows devices which means they will only see two different ttl values ?

 

[rye]

ISPs which employs Fair Usage Policy doesn't really care about how many devices you connect as you'll automatically be throttled once you cross the limit.

For others, which offer unlimited data (like Excitel) at-least on paper its different. Although the plans are advertised unlimited but they really aren't. They keep track of the usage and if they detect high usage (like 1 TB in 4-5 days) on a repeated basis they will block your connection. It doesn't matter whether you use a single device or ten.

Coming back to the original question, the TTL technique is not without its flaws as already explained.
If the ISP really want to monitor they number of devices they resort to Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) in addition to TTL.
In DPI the contents of the packets are examined to generate a fingerprint. Different devices/OSes will have different fingerprints.

To bypass DPI, you're better off using a VPN at the router level. Every packet that ever leaves the router will be encrypted. All the ISP sees is you're making a connection to the VPN and not the contents of the packets which nullifies DPI based fingerprinting.