Best Buy / Speakeasy service suspension - advice requested

[Stephen Ronan]

Hi
I wondered whether any of you have experience/advice re:Best Buy / 
Speakeasy given our situation here. As a volunteer in Boston I helped a 
tenants organization set up a wireless mesh network in a low-income 
housing project. It uses open source MIT Roofnet software running on 
Netgear WGT634u routers.

For the past 1.5+ years, the tenants organization at the site has been 
paying about $230/month for two 6 megabit by 768 kbps business class DSL 
lines from Speakeasy, which at some point in there was acquired by Best 
Buy. There's additional bandwidth donated to the project by a 
neighboring Institute of Technology (heaviest usage at the housing 
development is in afterschool, evening hours when the Institute sees 
little activity and presumably Speakeasy business customers are also  
reduced in  activity).
 
A year or so ago, we blocked almost all ports via m0n0wall firewalls so 
that since then almost all traffic is via port 80. Given the Roofnet LAN 
within a LAN architecture and the fact that none of us involved in the 
project are extremely technically sophisticated it hasn't been possible 
to limit or even determine bandwidth usage per user. And usage has been 
quite high, apparently as much as 63 GB on one line during a week 
(although that's less than 1 megabit on average of the 6 megabit line, 
it's understandably more than Best Buy can readily profit from). And as 
a result Best Buy/Speakeasy just today suspended service on that line 
asserting that we were using too much capacity.

So I'd be grateful for suggestions either in regard to attempting to 
better understand individual usage patterns, given the difficulties of 
the network architecture we're working with or in regard to encouraging 
Best Buy/Speakeasy to invest a little philanthropic capital in allowing 
the community network to continue. Unfortunately, the tenants 
organization is strapped for cash so adding additional DSL lines 
probably isn't an option and nor is swapping out the Netgears for the 
newer Meraki devices, which have a great deal more capacity to allow 
monitoring of individual and collective bandwidth usage.

Thanks,
 Stephen Ronan