True Unlimited Broadband in the UK?

Tango42 asks: "Next (academic) year, I'm going to be living in a student house with 4 (inc. me) heavy internet users. I can see us potentially using 50-100GB/month. Do you know any UK ISP that will accept that kind of usage without claiming it's abuse under some 'acceptable use policy'? We're willing to pay a bit more that we would on more restrictive ISPs, as it's divided 4 ways, we just don't want to end up getting cut off or throttled for going over the limit on an 'unlimited' account."

Comments

Maybe

[x2A]

I use blueyonder through telewest (cable modem), and we've had our bandwidth maxed out for long periods of time without any complaint ever. I'm not sure how many gigs this translates to per month, but it's about the most you can get with that speed connection. This is achieved through running p2p apps constantly, with a linux gateway/router to give priority to certain packet types (eg, so shareaza doesn't slow down ssh etc)

Re:Maybe

[ShecoDu]

Could you point me to a place to learn how to set up iptables to achieve those rules?

Re:Maybe

[thelost]

I can second this. Telewest have provided consistent service for me, the whole time I've lived in Bristol. If it's possible to get them then do, they don't cap the service and I've never had any complaints about bandwidth usage, even when I was living in a heavy usage household which must have been sucking over about 60-100gig a month while we still enamoured of downloading. Eventually, we downloaded the whole internet though. It was quite peculiar, a series of interconnected copper pipes.

Re:Maybe

[Spad]

I'll put in another vote for Blueyonder. While I was at uni we had 6 of us on a 2Mbit connection averaging around 175Gb/month for the best part of a year and we never had any problems. Very good tech support too, should you ever need it - it's always nice to come across people on 1st line who are smart enough *not* to force you to disconnect your router to diagnose every single problem.

Re:Maybe

[malkavian]

Blimey, another Bristolian!
But, I'll add my vote to BlueYonder/Telewest.. Had Broadband in since it started, and not really had any issues with it..
The only ones I did were hardware related (they had a fault due to corroded copper in a service pit just outside the house.. Took about 5 engineer calls until one of them fixed it correctly)..
Last time I checked, the phone in support desk doesn't support Linux, but you just tell them you're using Windows, and answer the questions they have using Linux tools.
Their call in engineers are happy to 'unofficially' sort out the wiring problems no matter what OS you have.. Pragmatic guys.
Had my link maxed out for a few months (pretty much up and down), and nobody batted an eyelid.. So, they're certainly sounding like the best bet..

Re:Maybe

[clickclickdrone]

I used to be on Blueyonder and used 150+Gb/month, same sort of pattern. I moved and had to change to ADSL which is a nightmare in comparison. For heavy users in the UK, cable is the way to go. Totally unfiltered, fast and unlimited capacity.

Re:Maybe

[ThaReetLad]

ditto. Telewest is great, except when some **** cut the cable before the England game last month. I was able to watch it on the bbc website though, which wasn't to bad once I reduced my desktop resolution towards the native stream size.

Re:Maybe

[thebudgie]

I just moved out of a place in Edinburgh where I had 2mbit down/256k up from blueyonder broadband. We transferred over a TB in torrents, and god knows how much in websites last year and they didn't even blink. Not only that but if you have a phone line from them, customer service is free to call iirc, and they're really good. The 3 for £30 package is ace too. Cable TV, broadband and a phone line with free weekend calls. I just wish we weren't about 200m too far from their area in this new place...

Now we have Tiscali, and I've never had the download on a 2mbit line maxed out. It sucks.

Re:Maybe

[Bizzeh]

There is no maximum to Telewest/Blueyonder, its totaly unlimited.

Re:Maybe

[stevey]

I'm living in Leith and have the 30 quid package, mostly because the previous owner/tenants had all the cabling already installed. I can max out the incoming connection too.

I can't say I've ever had to call their customer support, so I dont know how good they are. But I guess saying that I've had no problems in two years is something.

They have occaisional outages. I think I've seen maybe two mornings where I had no internet in the past 18 months. Frustrating since my neighbours open wireless link also went down ;)

Re:Maybe

[Nurgled]

Blueyonder have always been quite a nice ISP, in my experience. Back in my dial-up days I had unlimited dial-up from them on a second line and I left it connected pretty-much 24/7 and they didn't seem to care. I figured this was because I got my telephone line from them as well, so it wasn't really harming them. At about that time all of the BT-based "unlimited" ISPs were using automatic cutoffs every hour or two, whereas I'd keep connections up for weeks at a time. It doesn't really suprise me that they'd be liberal about bandwidth usage too.

Re:Maybe

[elrous0]

The only things that are "unlimited" in this world are governmental incompetence and Jesus's love. Everything else that bills itself as "unlimited" is full of unlimited bullshit.

-Eric

Re:Maybe

[x2A]

That generalisation, as well as all generalisations, is completely false.

Re:Maybe

[thebudgie]

We only had one outage in the entire year. The day they quadrupled our download speed, for no extra cost. That was a great day.

Re:Maybe

[x2A]

My parents (who have kids as young as 2) moved house last year. Telewest/blueyonder availability was checked before deciding on the new house. Okay, like me, they run internet businesses, so connectivity is very important (just as most people wouldn't want to live too far away from where they work), but still... I wouldn't move to an area where I'd only have ADSL to "choose" from either. If you stop and think about it - that's pretty extreme!

Re:Maybe

[lazybeam]

Everything else that bills itself as "unlimited" is full of unlimited bullshit.

Here in Australia it's even worse - the biggest ISP has "Unlimited" plans with 10GB of *transfer* quota (uploads+downloads) before the whole thing is shaped to 64kbps. But what is even worse is the "cheap" plans with 200MB of transfer and than charging $150/GB for excess. I talked to someone today who joined that plan and didn't even know about the excess charges...

maybe, maybe not

[Anonymous Coward]

It's happened before -- http://digg.com/tech_news/Comcast_Users:_Download_ 600GB,_Get_Booted

Re:maybe, maybe not

[Anonymous Coward]

On the other hand, I am a comcast user. I pay for the premium account - 8Mbps. I regularly do 2TB+ per month. Yes, that's over 2 terabytes, almost all of which comes from giganews. And I have been doing that for over a year without a peep from comcast.

I chalk it up to:

1) Competition:
a) DSL in the area is very competitive price-wise, they don't do 8Mbps accounts, but they do 1.5Mbps for under $15.
b) Some bordering communities have FIOS available, mine does not, but Comcast may not be smart enough to distinguish.

2) Partnering: Giganews is Comcast's Usenet "partner" for regular accounts which get a whopping 1GB/month for free. They may have extra provisioning for giganews because of this partnering - traceroute is all att.net which used to own comcast.

3) Low Utilization: I'm in a blue-collar town (see the above about FIOS bordering us, its actually more like they provisioned all the surrounding towns except this one which has the lowest property values) so there may be an excess of available bandwidth for this town and even with my excess usage, they still aren't maxed out and thus they don't really care how much bandwidth any one individual uses.

4) I use port 80 instead of the normal NNTP port. Maybe they are just so stupid they don't count port 80 traffic against you?

Re:maybe, maybe not

[Millenniumman]

1.b)They probably are smart enough to distinguish, and smart enough to know if they raised prices, FIOS would likely come to your area. 4. Port 80 is the standard http port, so they will certainly count it.

Re:maybe, maybe not

[Anonymous Coward]

1.b)They probably are smart enough to distinguish, and smart enough to know if they raised prices, FIOS would likely come to your area

FIOS is not here because Verizon doesn't think there are enough people willing to pay a premium for a premium product. Comcast giving me the boot would not change that. Comcast ain't going to raise their price in this town when the price for the rest of the state and probably anywhere within 300 miles is the same price.

4. Port 80 is the standard http port,

No WAY! I had no idea! Thanks for cluing me in!!!!!

so they will certainly count it.

Oh yeah, that really follows. Er, no.

Port 80 being standard HTTP means that it is unlikely to be P2P since most users don't change the port their P2P app uses and of those that do, picking port 80 is pretty rare. If an ISP is looking to cull their heavy users, they might well want to save the heavy web-users for last since for 99% of their population, "the web" is the internet. Take out the P2P and other non-web users first because its unlikely that they were just heavy browsers. That way you have less people bitching about just using the web like the commercials on tv show regular people doing.

Re:maybe, maybe not

[spleck]

I'm in the US.... I regularly peak out my bandwidth for days on end and haven't had any problems. I don't remember the source, but I was told that the bandwidth limits weren't enforced except in areas with lots of customer complaints for speed issues.

Re:maybe, maybe not

[JimXugle]

Lucky You. I may be in the coverage area for a 6MBit/384Kbit DSL Line... if I'm lucky. The cable modem sevice around here is disgustingly unreliable, so I'm pretty much stuck with DSL. Windstream's Acceptable Use Policy nor their terms and conditions say anything about maximim data transfer. Which is good, because I'm big into the bittorrent.

Re:maybe, maybe not

[David Horn]

Do you ever feel guilty about stealing 1TB(?!!) of movies/music/tv shows/apps every month? Can't be anything else, and don't try the "Linux ISO file" crap.

1TB is approximately 400 movies at DVD quality.

Re:maybe, maybe not

[plumby]

Can't be anything else,

Could be porn...

Re:maybe, maybe not

[Anonymous Coward]

But only between 8 to 9 seasons of any 24 episode 1 hour (42 mins) TV shows in HD.
Or ~30 movies in HD.

Re:maybe, maybe not

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you ever feel guilty about stealing 1TB(?!!) of movies/music/tv shows/apps every month?

No. And make that over 2TB per month, try to read more carefully next time, ok?

The content is almost purely HDTV recordings of movies I've already purchased on DVD or are unavailable on DVD due to poor business practices by the copyright holders (e.g. Ridley Scott's 1492).

I am archiving these recordings as a hedge against the chance that hollywood will be successfull in their efforts to permanetly steal our culture through DRM. I rarely share them with anyone else, when I do it is primarily to increase the size of the archive through trading. To the same end, I have purchased over 8,000 fully legitimate DVD titles as well. I am demonstrably putting my money where my mouth is.

I strongly believe that human civilization is based on the widespread sharing of information. I believe that DRM is one facet of an agenda that is anti-civilization. It may not be purposely so, but the long term effects of locking down information is to retard the development of civilization for the benefit of a few, already fantastically wealthy, individuals that have absolutely no moral right to that wealth because they are just bottlenecks on distribution.

If DRM should ever become as pervasive as hollywood desires it will be a dark day indeed. While I work on other projects to keep our culture Free and DRM at bay, this archive is intended to be a last ditch source of cultural liberty. I fervently hope it will never be needed, but until new business models based on the free sharing of information have displaced the current systems that are based on creating artificial scarcity where there is natural plenty, the risk is too high to ignore.

Re:maybe, maybe not

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you ever feel guilty about stealing 1TB(?!!) of movies/music/tv shows/apps every month?

No.

Once, a long time ago, I knew guilt. But thankfully, the RIAA and MPAA have cleansed me of such feelings in regards to their wares.

If they can afford that many lawyers, they certainly don't need my money.

No

[nagora]

That's the simple answer. Apart from the cable companies, who will all kick you for that level of usage, all the other lines are ultimately owned by BT and they don't sell wholesale unlimited lines to the other ISPs (nor do they reserve them for their own customers). There is no totally unlimited bradband in the UK because of this.

Sorry

Re:No

[Psychotext]

As much as I hate to disagree, I've been pulling easily 100gb a month (NTL) for the last year, as have many of my friends (Telewest mostly). http://www.home.ntl.com/page/broadband3 shows the 10mb NTL package which clearly states that you have unlimited downloads (http://www.home.ntl.com/page/broadbandusage). Oddly they refer to their user agreement which says nothing about fair usage.

But anyway, don't take the piss with peer to peer maxing your bandwidth all month and I doubt you'll have a problem.

(p.s. Just noticed "unlimited" also applies to the lower connection bands as well.)

Re:No

[Ned_Network]

...all the other lines are ultimately owned by BT and they don't sell wholesale unlimited lines to the other ISPs (nor do they reserve them for their own customers)..

That's utter rubbish.

Whilst all the lines are owned by BT, when they were privatised by Maggie Thatcher in the 1980s they were put under the supervision of OFTEL (now OFCOM, I think) which was given the job of ensuring that BT doesn't behave in a monopolistic manner. For this reason BT have to provide lines to ISPs on reasonable terms - in fact BT's wholesale division are required to treat other ISPs on equal terms with BT Retail (and sometimes maybe they even do!) - and ISPs are allowed to resell services through BT's lines on whatever terms they wish. BT may have the right to charge ISPs usage fees for using their backbone network (between the exchange and the ISP's offices), but since Local Loop Unbunding ("LLU") ISPs are no longer required to use BT's backbone, so cost may not be prohibitive, either.

FWIW I use Eclipse (referrer link) for my ADSL. I find them to be very good indeed and those of my customers who have followed my advice (all too few, alas!) have been pleased with them, too.

• I pay £29.99 for Eclipse's most premium home service. I get 3.5meg down out of MaxDSL & 445k or whatever up.
• I believe this to be a truly unlimited service, but don't know for sure. I surely hit the 50gig per month that the OP mentions, but maybe not 100gig.
• If I have technical support problems, Eclipse are brilliant. Their staff are based in Exeter, I believe. My line started giving problems on a Sunday, I called them on a Monday morning and as soon as the girl took my user login she told me she could see that the line was dropping every few minutes, that it was surely a line problem and that she'd escalate to BT wholesale. 2 hours later I got a call to arrange the engineer's visit (it actually took 2 engineers' visits to resolve the problem, as the first one disconnected the ringers of the telephones on my extension lines, but I'm getting used to that). Contrast this with the typical phonecall to BT's or Tiscali's tech support, where the call-handlers barely speak English and always ask you to reinstall the modem drivers. In fact, before now I've had to pretend to reinstall the modem drivers in order to get the PPPoA username & password to install a router, because the call handler didn't understand me when I asked for them (in however many different ways!) but was capable of reciting her script to the point where she could tell me "now type in user123@hg54.btinternet.com and fidothedog1".
• Eclipse technical support managed to talk Mary, the 30-something, god-squad single-mother of 3, how to set up her own choice of email address through their web-based interface, AND THEN how to access it with Outlook Express. They must truly be saints, and deserve your business.

Ned.

Re:No

[Don_dumb]

I think the gp was talking about lines through their telephone network (which is basically the UK telephone network, there may be some obscure others). The gp may well be correct, in his/her understanding of BT only selling limited lines.
So you rightly have pointed out that perhaps the only truely unlimited service is offered by NTL and Telewest but you are not actually disagreeing. NTL and Telewest are connections not actually made through BT's infrastructure but their own cable (originally TV) network, which has not AFAIK ever been in the control of BT. Do bear in mind however that many people don't, and wont for the forseable future, have cable, perhaps the submitter of the ask will not either.

There is possibly another alternative in Satellite broadband, but I believe that is relatively expensive and requires some DIY.

Re:No

[M1FCJ]

NTL works fine, I use their middle-speed entry which is 4MBit/s at the moment and I've been on my long-loved quest of archiving Internet to DVDs for years now. No complaints from NTL - yet. :) Simply put, the latest SUSE releases (SLES10 and SLED10) took 4 DVDs and 16 CDs to cover DVD and CD versions of both architectures and even that would blow a lot of companies' download limits and it's a legitimate use.

Re:No

[clickclickdrone]

This is simply wrong. Cable on BY is unlimited and there are ISPs who let you do whatever you want such as Zen, albeit at a price.

Re:No

[Bert64]

As an ISP, BT sell you the line to the exchange, and then the central pipe back to your network.
Ofcourse, since BT are a pain to deal with a lot of ISPs use third parties as the go between with BT, companies such as easynet, griffin and entanet... Who offer a range of plans, both traffic limited (fixed cost for a line regardless of speed, and you pay for traffic usage) and unlimited (where faster lines cost more)...

Currently i have 2mb unlimited, and i run it flat out pretty much 24/7.

Re:No

[RupW]

I pay £29.99 for Eclipse's most premium home service.

My only niggle with Eclipse is that every once in a while they make their accounts better and cheaper and don't tell you about it until you stumble across it and ask to pay less :-)

Sounds like you're already on their latest accounts though.

Re:No

[gbjbaanb]

I have unlimited broadband, but that's probably because I don't download continuously all day long. I'm with PlusNet (who are great), and a while back they introduced a 'fair use' policy that caused quite a fuss.

The whole industry is based around buying X mb of bandwidth from BT, and then reselling it on to customers, expecting the customer to use a fair amount of it - not to use all the 2mb that they are given. This overselling is common as you'd be paying £100 a month for a 512Kb connection if they had to give everyone that much. So, they introduced the fair use that said you won't saturate your connection so other users wouldn't be disadvantaged (as the company wouldn't buy more capacity just for the few users who do abuse the service).

That said, they do give several options, and the expensive (£22) connection gives you a lot of bandwidth anyway - 20Gb during peak hours (4pm to midnight) and unlimited at other times. Even then, if you download more, they won't do anything about it until you d/l more than 60Gb. Its more of a reason to stop people who are literally downloading all the time. (hmm, that'll be you)

The fai ruse policy is something every ISP has, to a greater or lesser extent simply because the economics of providing broadband don't allow it otherwise. http://www.plus.net/support/broadband/network/sust ainable_usage_guide.shtml

You might want to check out Adslguide.org which has a list of all UK BB providers, you may find a better one in there, or you may want to try the "business" offerings from places as they should be mouch more friendly to your large bandwidth needs. Alternatively, contact the ISP and ask!

Re:No

[Psychotext]

I was disagreeing with the statement that 100gb usage will get you kicked off the network by the cable providers (NTL / Telewest). I can't really comment on BT as having worked for them I now avoid them like the plague. :)

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

That's utter rubbish.

Well, I was reporting on what a friend of mine (who is high up in the tech department of a bank) discovered after being kicked by 5 different ISPs, including Eclipse and NTL, for using too much bandwidth on "unlimited" accounts.

The problem is the phrase "reasonable terms". BT argue that infinite usage is not "reasonable" and regardless of LLU, they still own the exchange and the copper wire and they exert a basic level of control on that as they are the mugs having to run the first and maintain the second. The fact that they are crap at both sadly does not enter into it.

Re:No

[Kuad]

I can certainly agree for that. I regraded for free last month and quadrupled my down bandwidth for less money a month. They sure don't go out of their way to tell you that you *can* do this.

I stay with Eclipse because no other ISP has ever given me less hassle than they do. Their only black mark is botching my transfer when I moved houses.

Re:No

[Badfysh]

I was on NTL a few years ago, and I seem to remember that they did sneakily introduce some kind of fair use policy. Unfortunately I can't provide links as my source at the time was NTHell, which was bought by NTL and taken down. The impression I got at the time though, was that it was just a way of dealing with the handful of seriously hardcore downloaders, the type of people who sell moody DVD's in pubs. Only about 3 or 4 people on the NTHell forums ever got warning letters, so I suspect that if your usage is high but not outrageous, (as in downloading movies 24/7) they will just leave you alone.

Re:No

[Psychotext]

That's right, was not long after those usage policies that NTL bought nthellworld.com and closed it down. There is still nthellworld.co.uk but it seems to lack the same bite. :) The usage policies were widely criticised at the time as most of NTLs advertising was focussed on "wearing out your modem" and stating very clearly that you can, and should download as much as you could. Even their portal site ntlworld.com gives information on the best ways to make the most of your connection and gives you a ton of links to high bandwidth media. Don't know if they ever got stamped on by the advertising standards agency, but they should have been.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

I use Eclipse too, absolutely agree with the re-branding niggle, but can't fault them otherwise.

I'm sure I have breached their 'fair use' policy, both my wife and I being reasonably heavy P2P users, without any consequence. Although in their terms they do say the 'fair use' only applies during peak hours, but don't state what they count as peak hours!

=)

Seems like it shouldn't be a problem...

[Anonymous Coward]

My roommates and I are constantly downloading movies/music/games from bittorrent and I assume that our usage approaches your estimate and we haven't had a single problem from our ISP. I mean I was just tel

Connection Reset by Host - Over Bandwidth Limit

Re:Seems like it shouldn't be a problem...

[Millenniumman]

The parent poster obviously forgot that the internet is not a truck, and he filled up the series of tubes that make it up. It is a good thing ISPs are cracking down on this, because it recently took 5 days for an internet to arrive when someone sent it to me.

Oh, remember to support bridge building!

Re:Seems like it shouldn't be a problem...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well Duh... use Fedex when you really need your Internet by the next business day

nildram 50GB limit

[Jamesie]

I have the 2MB for £22.12 pcm service and there is a peak limit of 50GB and you can carry any unused over to the next month, all that happens is that they throttle you down to 64 KBs after you use all your peak download bytes. Additional 2GBs for £1.98 at 2MB.

Re:nildram 50GB limit

[RelaxedTension]

I hope you mean £1.98 per 2 MB should be per 2 GB. Otherwise, you're looking at a rediculous amount of money to do an additional 50 gigs,which is easily do-able by 4 people. (over £50,000) Even at almost £2.00 per gig thats an additional £100.00 extra a month by itself.

Re:nildram 50GB limit

[Breogan]

Read it closely: he said 2Gb more at the 2Mb full speed (and not 64kb).

Re:nildram 50GB limit

[Anonymous Coward]

With Nildram (and BT I think) you can get your account 'regraded' for about £12. Depending on where you live you could get upgraded to an 8mb connection (about 400k up).
Check out the Nildram site, under 'MyControls' if your already with them.

Business plans

[The MAZZTer]

I hear plans for businesses tend to actually give you the limit you pay for, and without throttling... I think the reasoning is that businesses are paying for bandwidth that they NEED for their mission-critical ... things (sorry I only took business 101, and I ran out of buzzwords). Anyways, MY thoughts on this are, if you were an ISP, would YOU want to cut off a business when they might train their lawyers on you? I thought not.

At any rate, you should look into it.

Re:Business plans

[Chris Graham]

Some buzzword help from a company director...

In order to facilitate the delivery of high-end dependable data services, a forward-facing enterprise connectivity provider will rapidly leverage their contractual provisions to mitigate against otherwise impending client bandwidth-insolvency.

Now the programmer inside me makes me hate myself ;).

Re:Business plans

[ttldkns]

i would whole heartedly reccomend nildram as an ISP.

my friend uses them and he has an ace connection with low latency and low connection ratios.

their business boradband doesnt seem to have a limit (the 8Mb service) and tbh 512k^h^h^h^h 8Mb should be enough for anyone ;)

http://broadband.nildram.net/products/pro/?is=hp-b lock-bbb

English equivalents of US units

[Anonymous Coward]

I have the 2MB for £22.12 pcm service and there is a peak limit of 50GB and you can carry any unused over to the next month, all that happens is that they throttle you down to 64 KBs after you use all your peak download bytes. Additional 2GBs for £1.98 at 2MB.

Sir Dude, what's the English measurement for Mega-byte? I mean, that's the US measurement and all, but isn't a mega-byte in the English system like, "X stones per pound per nut of wire diameter" or something?

Re:English equivalents of US units

[fbjon]

Aren't US measurements the more convoluted ones?

Re:English equivalents of US units

[Anonymous Coward]

You have heard of Kilobytes right? The 'Kilo' part being the give-away here. That's the metric system you're using.

Re:English equivalents of US units

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not the grandparent, but the answer to your question is no. When they adopted the Imperial system, the US tweaked it to get rid of some of the worst parts, which were mostly pointless intermediary units such as the stone (14 pounds) and the chain (22 yards). They used that to redefine bigger units like the ton to be easier to calculate - 2000 pounds rather than 2240lb (160 stone). They also redefined other parts of the system, such as the number of fluid ounces in a pint, for no particular reason except to confuse visiting Brits.

That's part of the reason why the Americans are taking so long to switch to the metric system - they've got less of an incentive to move, because their units aren't quite as bad as the original British ones were.

Re:English equivalents of US units

[elvum]

The Americans call their convoluted system of measurements "English units" for some reason. ;-)

Re:English equivalents of US units

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure you're aware that the word "mile" has the same root as "mille" and means thousand, referring to a thousand (roman) paces in length. Thus (some) Imperial (or English if you are from the US) units were metric long before the kilometre...

Prodigy Networks

[Anonymous Coward]

Prodigy Networks are the firm you are looking for. They have several good unmetered ADSL packages. Excellent reliability (I've been a client for 3 years and had 8 hours downtime) and English based customer service. Just call and ask for Nick, or sign up online.

It's wires only, so you will need your own filters and modem, but the prices and service are great.

HTH

ADSL Guide UK has some good recommendations.

Re:Prodigy Networks

[NexFlamma]

Anyone else kinda get the feeling that this AC's real name is 'Nick'?

Re:Prodigy Networks

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not. Just because I don't have a /. account with username "Bob" doesn't mean I am Nick. Go to the ADSLGuide site and look in the Prodigy Networks support forums. Nick is a chap from Prodigy who seems to spend most of his working day offering really useful tips and advice to customers, and when the occaisional problem arises (I was attacked by a bot on the same subnet) he gets right on it.

Anyway, don't take my word for it. Check out the speedtest results and customer feedback on ADSLGuide (this is wise whenever you choose a UK ADSL ISP - look at the ratings for Tiscali for example and you will see what I mean).

High Usage

[Anonymous Coward]

Try purchasing a commercial connection. I know in the states cable companies have commercial lines that they lease at a premium.

Re:High Usage

[Anonymous Coward]

Plan B, get two connections?

Bandwidth is not everything

[Col. Bloodnok]

I pay 25 quid a month for a half meg connection. I get an extremely reliable service, no contention issues, reliable email hosting, no complaints when I max-out the line for days at a time, and access to *all* the newsgroups. Not only that, if I have any problems with the service, I immediatedly get put though to a northern (England rather than India) bloke who knows what traceroute is. What more could you ask?

BY are great

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm on blueyonder as well & share my connection with 2 others. Maxed out all the time with no complaints.

Best ISP I've ever had. Never had any OS issues before I started sharing either ( never had a windows PC )

Re:How about

[Timo_UK]

what's the name of the ISP? ;-)

100GB/mo == 256kbps

[billstewart]

Unless I've dropped some zeros or 8s, 100GBytes/month is only about 256 kilobits per second fulltime (ok, 277 for a 30-day month, but 256kbps is a nice round size that telcos sell.) A business that bought a 2 Mbps E1 line and got spanked for using it more than 1/8 of the time would quickly find another ISP. I don't know the prices for an E1 in the UK; a 1.5 Mbps T1 in the US is typically under $500 including access. Fractional-speed service is more expensive per bit, of course, but you may still be able to find a good price for the box you hang your P2P service on, and then use cable or DSL for web browsing.

Re:100GB/mo == 256kbps

[boron boy]

256/8 = 32 kilobytes/second (MAX)

Assuming 1 megabyte = 1024 kilobytes we get 0.03125 MB/s

0.03125*60*60*24*30 = 81000MB per 30 days. Roughly 81GB.

Of course that is running 24/7 at the maximum theoretical speed of the connection, which is never going to happen.

Re:100GB/mo == 256kbps

[Anonymous Coward]

Bitrates are not measured in powers of 10 (binary), therefore 1MB == 1000KB as the SI prefix would have you believe.

Re:100GB/mo == 256kbps

[Peil]

A business that bought a 2 Mbps E1 line and got spanked for using it more than 1/8 of the time would quickly find another ISP.

Afraid that over here that the cable ISPs will routinely include a caveat in their contract specifying that you cannot use these conenctions for business use, and they WILL kick you if your caught.

Re:Off topic sig comment.

[illuminatedwax]

"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" as "Library" is to "A lot of people standing at a bus stop who collectively have read all of the books in the library."

iproute2/tc, not iptables. http://www.lartc.org/

[tabrisnet]

not iptables so much as iproute2/tc.

http://www.lartc.org/

Wondershaper can be a wonder, tho I have found that it can be improved somewhat by rewriting the concept in perl (Python should work too), rather than bash. Makes it more flexible. Use your language of choice of course, so that you understand it.

IPtables cannot do shaping, although you can use it alongside iproute2/tc with MARK.

don't use tiscali

[Yahweh Doesn't Exist]

we do because we have to, but they put us on a crap connection (sent us an email saying so) because there are lots of us sharing it and we actually use the bandwidth we bought.

I recomment a QOS Router

[BlueCoder]

I highly recommend that someone setup a QOS router and firewall for the house with five or more NIC's. Everyone will otherwise be complaining about how much other people are pips. Also I think it would be imparitive that you actually get 5 or more real IP addresses otherwire it's will be a bear setting up certain programs.

Re:I recomment a QOS Router

[x2A]

You don't need multiple NICs, I use iptables to classify packets from different IP addresses so they get picked up by different tc rules.

I also set up port forwarding on address ranges to different IPs, for example,
20000-20999 -> 192.168.1.20
21000-21999 -> 192.168.1.21

Then, anything that someone wants to run on their machine, they just set the port within that range (most listening programs will let you specify a port to listen on). New services can be added no problem without having to configure the firewall each time.

Re:Off topic sig comment.

[arose]

More books then in the library and also recent newspapers.

Re:Off topic sig comment.

[illuminatedwax]

Oh, and they know tons of useless pop culture garbage, too.

Be Unlimited 24 Meg Broadband

[Kerr]

https://www.bethere.co.uk/ - If you're lucky enough to live in one of their areas, i'd go for Be. Their pay-per-gb package goes up to 90gb, so their unlimited is for those who will use more? £24 connection fee £24 a month 24mb down 1.3mb up

Get BE 24mb adsl

[tom1974]

I have a http://bethere.co.uk/ BE adsl which gets you upto 24mb/1024 down/up, depending on distance from the exchange and line quality. I'm around a mile away from the exchange and get ~15mb.

Between the 3 of us in the house, we use around 150~200Gb a month for the past 5-6 months without any complaints from BE.

They've been good to us, give them a try.

Re:Get BE 24mb adsl

[Beige]

I'll second that. We've been using BE for a few months now and easily get the 200Gb the parent mentioned without complaint.

Re:Off topic sig comment.

[arose]

Is anime pop now?

How much are you prepared to pay?

[alanw]

For £79/month you can have Zen's Office 8000 Max.

One month minimum contract (useful if you are only staying in the house for 10 months)
No bandwidth limit
Excellent technical support
Max ADSL - up to 8Mb/s, depending on your distance from the exchange and quality of the circuit.

Re:How much are you prepared to pay?

[Albanach]

Blackcat networks will sell a business connection for 35/month + VAT with 100GB allowance and a 200GB allowance for 50 + VAT/month.

Those might be of interest. I'm a happy blackcat customer.

Plusnet

[Criffer]

Plusnet rock. Up to 8 meg downstream with no limits for £14.99 a month. And you get wide open ports and a static IP address. Great for bittorrent, hosting your own web server, gaming... And apparently they now throw in VOIP, just for the hell of it.

And the referrals program means you may end up not even having to pay for any of it. Tell them negativezero sent you.

Re:Plusnet

[PatrickThomson]

Plusnet aren't unlimited. They have a hazy and poorly-defined acceptable usage policy, and a CEO who rants and raves about the top 2% of bandwidth users like he'd round them up, put them in camps, and gas them. If you mod me troll, it's clear you've never used plusnet.

Re:Plusnet

[Anonymous Coward]

Plus net will tell you off if you use loads of bandwidth - i have plus net and got told to cut down mine bandwidth when i reached about 100 gb - i now have a business package and its fine.

I think with most broadband if you have a business package they are less likely to limit you (but charge you more)

Re:Plusnet

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know which plusnet your using, but I dumped them recently because they are doing none of what you just stated they are doing. There cap is 10gig a month yet they still charge the same rates as others, which have a cap at 50gig. And they provide no extra bandwidth purchase and have a shorter overnight off peek period.

They are to be avoided.

Re:Plusnet

[gbjbaanb]

I use plusnet, and they are great. I do get unlimited broadband - but as with everything in life, 'unlimited' just means a large limit I don't notice. There again, I don't download music and vids 24/7.

Plusnet do allow true unlimited downloads from midnight to 4pm though - they throttle it during peak time when mum and dad are downloading emails and surfing for their new vacuum cleaner, so its understandable the CEO wants to give them a good surfing experience (they pay lots for little usage after all) without the pirate kiddies using up all the capacity with bittorrent, IRC, and CS.

Plusnet are good, you should try some other providers if you think they are draconian! (and tell them bolstridge sent you - I want my 50p!!)

Re:Plusnet

[Anonymous Coward]

"They have a hazy and poorly-defined acceptable usage policy"? It's pretty clearly defined, it's on their Sustainable Usage Guide, and they do Traffic Management too which is clearly explained on their Traffic Management page. Basically, don't take the piss during peak time and you can do what the heck you want, but do a lot of P2P during peak hours and they'll throttle your P2P. I took the piss (I downloaded loads of torrents at line speed during peak hours) and got throttled (only during peak hours though). I can't complain, I was warned, they're fair rules and the service is good at a good price. If I'd used Azureus with Speed Scheduler properly and done it all out of peak hours, it wouldn't have been an issue. I'm a long time customer, and the initial Fair Usage fiasco shock my confidence, but the way they've got the system running now seems to be working well (for me at least) and the price is good.

Re:Plusnet

[soliptic]

Ditto, I was going to mention plusnet. Although by the looks of things you got a better deal than I did!?

I was paying £30/mo for 2 meg -- but it was two years ago that I signed up (and a year ago I quit) so I guess their pricing has been forced down by competition.

Anyway, I paid as much as £30 because it said unlimited and it meant it. I used over 100GB/mo (just me!) and they never batted an eyelid.

Re:Plusnet

[cs02rm0]

They blocked bittorrent on my account without even telling me they were doing it. I was a customer of theirs for four years. I now have a different ISP.

Re:Plusnet

[MrAngryForNoReason]

Up to 8 meg downstream with no limits for £14.99 a month.

Plusnet do have usage limits they just hide them in a 'Sustainable Usage Policy'

On their PLUS package you pay £14.99 a month and are capped at 10gb
On thier Premier package you pay £21.99, £29.99 or £39.99 for 15gb, 22.5gb or 30gb caps.

These caps are on peak time usage, initially this was afternoon/early evening for a 4 hours or so. It is now 4pm until midnight and can be changed on their whim. At one point it was 4pm until 6am. If you exceed the cap they drop your speed to 256kbps until the end of the month, if you exceed it two months running then your speed is only reset to what you are paying for if you agree to move up to a package with a higher cap.

When I was with them they also had additional caps on certain traffic, for instance only 10gb per month from newsgroups no matter what package you are on or what time you are downloading.

In addition to all of this they also do extensive traffic shaping, so speeds for anything other than email and web browsing drop through the floor most of the day.

All in all plusNet certainly do not allow unlimited usage and have very little tolerance for heavy users and p2p.

I was lucky enough to migrate over to Zen at the point when they were offering a truly uncapped 2MB service. They have now changed their packages to 100gb caps with extra usage charged per gb but existing customers could keep their uncapped accounts if they didn't mind the 2MB speed instead of 8MB.

If you are likely to be using more than 100gb bandwith a month and don't want to pay per gb for extra bandwith then look into business packages as they are almost without exception uncapped with better contention.

Re:Plusnet

[bograt]

I'll second that: stay away from PlusNet. I was aware of the limits and peak times on their "unlimited" plan when I joined, but a couple of months in they changed the rules without warning. The first I heard was an email telling me I was being throttled for what I thought was usage well within the limits.

And now I'm having a hard time cancelling, their customer service leaves a lot to be desired.

Re:Plusnet

[alanxyzzy]

For anyone with Plusnet, or thinking of joining them, this posting on ADSLGuide might prove interesting

Recently, we received notification that during the process of emailing customers about the announcements posted yesterday, whilst uploading the information to the email tool that we use, an error occurred and we sent the contact information of 20,000 people to approximately 3,500 customers.

Re:Plusnet

[PatrickThomson]

Plusnet aren't draconian, that's the problem. They won't say "we enforce bandwidth" because then people will not switch to them - they've not quite grasped how "false" and "advertising" juxtapose. Then they do it anyway. It used to be the opinion that plusnet was a geek ISP - now it's mom-and-pop and desperately trying to keep the geek vote, by just lying. And deleting all the customer's emails last week.

Re:Plusnet

[PatrickThomson]

Sustainable use policy, they don't exactly advertise it. It's the sort of thing you discover after you've entered into a contract, and only because you didn't pick up on warning flags like "limit" or "cap".

Re:Plusnet

[Anonymous Coward]

I have had experience of Plusnet as well as Blueyonder cable - if you are forced into choosing ADSL because of availability of cable or other reasons I really advise you choose someone other than Plusnet if you intend to use the connection for anything other than web browsing and email.

I had the 1 mbit "platinum" package, which originally started out as no cap, AUP suggested use of 200gb a month. 5 months into my 12 month contract the AUP changed to 50gb, then a few months later 25gb and I think at the moment it may be even lower. This was made worse by what seemed to be some very sloppy rate limiting which often was in place way after Plusnet said it should have expired.

That sucked really bad, so after moving house I jumped onto BY 10mbit cable, which seems to actually be unlimited so far. Speeds are obviously better, but so far the lack of crazy packet shaping seems to be making the experience better :)

Just my experiences...

Re:Plusnet

[James_Duncan8181]

Plusnet are singually awful. They start shaping well before the download limit, and my home connection is currently shaped down to 5KB download on ~4GB worth of usage. Their customer service is very poor[1] and the quality of network access is also not great. For downloaders, you should note that non-encrypted bittorrent is far slower then encrypted, as they mess with the whole protocol. They are specifically mentioned in the Bad ISP page on the Azureus wiki [2]. They may have at one point been OK, but they now suck to a remarkable extent. Using them==having root canal surgery.

Do you see?

[1] For one example: I brought an ADSL modem from them that was advertised as doing 128 concurrent connections. It overheated at around 60. I was told that it was only meant to do "basic email and web", and had to get Trading Standards involved to get them to replace it. All with large wait times to talk to someone, natch. Oh, and the management do not have externally accessable email.

NTL, seriously

[Anonymous Coward]

I recently setup shared internet at the house my sister is living in this year (she is at uni). She shares the house with 3 other girls. They use around 45-55GB a month and when I checked this with NTL they said that was fine.
 
Providing they are aware several people are using the internet they can put this on the account information. They have had it setup for almost 3 months now and not once had a complaint from NTL.
 
While some people hate NTL I have never had a problem with them, their customer service isn't the best but I have only had about 8 hours of down time (that I noticed) to my cable connection in the past 6 years, not bad at all IMHO. Their prices could be a little better but in general they are ok, my sister pays £35 for 10Mbps a month.

Happy Zen Customer

[wild_berry]

Zen's customer support (home, not business) have been good to me. Their Web Portal's okay for managing your account and their phone support lines have knowledgeable and helpful staff. http://www.adslguide.org.uk/ have their users rate the Zen experience as faster and more reliable than any other service I could compare them to.

Re:How about

[Anonymous Coward]

From the description it sounds like Andrews and Arnold.

Demon

[Xest]

Demon's HomeOffice solution isn't a bad bet, I've been with them years, they're saying they're implementing limitations on their users now they're giving them 8mbps free but when I spoke to them last night to see what limitations would be imposed I was told that 100gb a month would be okay, they said it's people who are maxing their connection constantly for a full month that they'll impose limitations on and even then they wont cut them off, they'll just slow down their connection from 9 - 5.

One thing to note, there's no compromise for intelligent downloading too, honestly there's only so much you can download. If you get a cheap machine you can all share it and whack a bunch of hard disks in it then use that as a server and as a download box, get everyone to do their downloading on that machine so that people don't waste bandwidth downloading duplicates.

Freedom 2 surf

[sammydee]

I can highly recommend freedom 2 surf (www.f2s.com) as a decent ISP. They're customer service is excellent. When I first signed up, our broadband didn't work because we were too far away from the box thing that it goes through. They sent a guy round and he switched over some wires so it worked properly, and set up all the splitter's and stuff for us.

It's reasonably cheap too, I pay £17.99 a month for 512k-2M and although they technically have a 10gig per month limit, I use about 50 gigs per month and nobody has ever said anything, and my connection has never been cut off.

Tiscali horror story

[Proud like a god]

Someone else has already said don't use tiscali, and I'd agree except for this rather important fact:

You may be able to get out free after 9 months instead of 12!

If you're only in the student house for one year, you only really need the connection for about 9 months, i.e. not over the summer afterwards. Most ISPs contracts are 12 months, with terms that you pay the remaining months to get out early, so as useful as just paying and no one receiving the service.

However: Me and 3 others signed up for Tiscali's cheap 2Meg unlimited connection, and the post-grade geography guy was downloading satellite images while us three comp. sci. students were slinging our 3rd year projects back and forth with the uni Subversion server. Many legitimate reasons to have huge bursts in our usage, no p2p, honest. ;)

Soon we were working our way through the Fair Usage Warning Letters 1, 2 and Final, and then being 'managed' during peak hours... then Warnings 1, 2, final,.. 1 again! It just repeated, that all they do to you. Basically for a few hours slower service during weekday evenings we managed to maintain high usage, and then when we were done we responded to the part of the warnings about canceling or migrating, and did so for free at the end of the month!

So triggering a fair usage policy and only having to pay for 9 months not 12 may save you a bit of money, but maybe not hassle. ;)

We did learn that 'high usage' is simply being in the top few percent of users connected at the same local exchange, so the absolute rate is not the same across the country, it just takes someone to complain about slow service and then the top users get singled out. Other ISPs may have different policies, but I dont think any state a fixed level of usage that constitutes unfair usage.

How public spirited! Thanks!

[chiark]

I just wanted to thank you for running p2p constantly, and also for providing an advert for bulk DVD writers/copiers/duplicators. It's obvious that you're pulling the latest and greatest builds of every distro nightly and are distributing them for free or small amounts of money on physical media

So from everyone, thanks for that!

After all, there's nothing else you'd be doing running P2P and disc duplicators, is there? ;-)

(PS - this is an attempt at humour and should not be taken seriously or internally)

Re:How public spirited! Thanks!

[x2A]

"oops" :-)

The link's a client's tho who I'm trying to draw traffic (or at least, google rating, although it doesn't seem to be working)... perhaps I should include a "my opinions do not necessarily reflect those of..." disclaimer in my sig too? :-)

Price

[ebcdic]

There is unlimited broadband, it's just expensive. From what I can deduce from comments by various ISPs, BT charges around 1 pound per month per GB of bandwidth. So Zen, for example, who charge 35 pounds for an
ADSL Max service with a 50 GB/month limit are probably not making a huge profit - they're relying on
many customers using less than the limit. They have a much more expensive unlimited "business" version.

ISPs can avoid BT's bandwidth charging by "unbundling" exchange lines: they put their own equipment in the exchange instead of going through BT's IP network. This would require a huge investment from the ISP to cover
the whole country, so is more commonly available in big cities, especially London.

You can find out whether any ISPs provide unbundled services in you area from http://www.samknows.com/broadband/search.php

Easy

[Kosi]

Just subscribe to some thing called "flatrate". Yes, the real thing. If they complain, threaten to sue them, because even in .uk it can't be legal to offer a flatrate, get paid for a flatrate but then refuse to deliver one.

I had even > 300 GB in some months, and never got any complaint, but I'm in Germany. :-)

Kosi

Funnily enough, AOL

[Anonymous Coward]

Funnily enough, AOL

I used them for ages and never had any problem with them and neither does my brother (and he is a HEAVY user).

Don't use NTL.

Re:Funnily enough, AOL

[chiller2]

Don't use NTL.

Wise words! Just the other day I tried to VNC into a laptop on an NTL connection and had to literally wait about 2 minutes for the screen to draw. The laptop had nothing bandwidth intensive going on at all either.

Further to that NTL force proxy all their web traffic through a cache. Serious b/w issues there.

The owner of the laptop plugged into a BT ADSL connection at his other location and we tried VNC again. Nice and fast!

NTHell!

Re:Funnily enough, AOL

[Anonymous Coward]

I concur, never ever EVER consider using NTL. Ever.

I did once and wont be ever again.

Worst. Customer. Experience. Ever.

Not so

[DB'C]

I emailed them about this and they said no such thing to me. I requested that I get a discussion that formally applied in the same way as the upgrade T'S&C's so that if I agree to their new contract I know where I stand. Their answer to me was that they are going to measure the progress of the upgrades and then set the limits. Furthermore, the official webpages state that the slow down of connection is 9am-10pm not 9-5 as you post. I am going to give them the benefit of the doubt because customer services indicated to me that I would not be subject to a new minimum term contract, so I can leave immediately if the service provision degrades. However, I must say I'm unhappy with the "open" contract they expect me to subject myself to and now am actively taking action to be able to switch trivially at my whim (i.e. switching away from using any of their services apart from TCP/IP access).

Re:Not so

[Xest]

Odd, I got the info speaking from a customer service rep. just last night, it seems they don't even know themselves what the hours and limits are then. I'll admit he wasn't willing to give me details of what the slowdown actually was too- i.e. whether it was down to the previous max of 2mbps or if it was something much lower.

One of the things I brought up too was the fact the fair useage policy wasn't mentioned in the new contract they sent via the post for the 8mbps service.

Another thing I noticed that was in the contract was a clause where they say they'll hand over my personal details to a third party for investigative purposes or some such clause, I was under the impression that in our country the police are the ones who do investigating, not some random third party company!

Do you know anywhere where Demon users gather forum-wise? It'd be nice to get some numbers behind our want of a proper contract governing the new limitations they wish to impose rather than them doing it as, when and how they feel.

Re:Not so

[DB'C]

Demon user discussions I've seen can be found at: http://groups.google.com/group/demon.service and http://bbs.adslguide.org.uk/postlist.php?Cat=&Boar d=demon

Simple idea: Get a life!

[mgblst]

Or at least, that is what I tried to do - no internet at home. Of course, now I just waste time on the net at work, so maybe no a solution for you.

But this is some serious downloading, shouldn't you be spending your money on cidar, and banging fat chicks at students parties? Throwing up your guts after the quid nights, passing out in someones garden? ....ah, fond memories!

Bulldog

[bernywork]

I would have voted for Bulldog, I have been with them for a while, unfortunately, they aren't taking new customers.

Be broadband would have to be my other choice though. A guy who works with me does some stupid stuff with his line and doesn't have any problems.

Berny

MOD PARENT UP

[matt_wilts]

I was going to post myself on Plusnet, but MrAngryForNoReason did it for me. Plusnet do a very shoddy job of making their AUP understandable or even accessible to their customers. I hesitate to say "users" as it's become clear that their preferred userbase is the occasional surfer who reads a couple of emails occasionally.

I joined them about 3 yrs ago because at that time I considered them one of the most technically aware ISPs - but with the gradual throttling of any protocol that's not HTTP or POP3, and sharp business practices, I'm looking elsewhere, and will probably go with Zen.

Matt

Zen Internet

[rhs98]

They do a 8mbit package for business use, which is availible at home which is unlimited. They are also a bunch of massive geeks and theyre network is one of the best in the UK.

Think its about £80+VAT / mo - which is alot, but not split 4 ways.

http://www.zenadsl.co.uk/ML_Business.aspx?page=527

They've won the ISP of the year award in the UK for several years running.

I am on their 8mbit home, which has a 50gb cap. Which I hit most months on my own - so I will be upgrading soon to the above.

UKOnline

[Redwin]

UkOnline does up to 22Mb (if you are close enough to an exchange) with a cap at 500GB per month for £29.99 a month. A couple of my mates are on it and haven't got anywhere near that limit ever.

Well There is a way

[mistralol]

Hi,

There certainly is a way todo this. Theres going to be 4 of you ?
So if you each pay £20/month towards a net connection it should not be a problem to enter into
an unlimited bisness grade account which dont have caps / limts etc.. but they do cost around £80/month or more.

All BT ADSL Lines in the UK charge the ISP's for data form the exchange to the ISP at a rate of around £300/mbit per month. This is why the limits exist.

I have been looking at moving away from my current ISP because they have caps between 4 - midnight where i cannot use more than 15GB during that timeslot per month. The rest of the time i can use as much as i want. After looking at other providers and being lied to by several of there sales staff i decided to stay with the current provider as it really is unlimited the rest of the time.

This is the worst response i got back from a company called griffin. After contacting them i replaied asking for there defination of unlimited. I fine the following rather misleading and down right dirty tricks.

> We have a number of packages available for Home and Business users which
> can be viewed at http://www.griffin.com/Products . Griffin do not operate
> a cap on the service, but we do monitor usage of Homeworker products with
> anyone affecting the quality of service of other users being subject to
> the terms set out below.
>
> "4.1 The Customer must not use the Service in a way that in Griffin's
> reasonable opinion could affect the experience of others on the network;
> More specifically heavy download users affecting the performance of the
> network, in the case of homeworker ADSL products, may be asked to upgrade
> their product to business ADSL, or in extreme circumstances Griffin
> reserve the right to give a Migration Authority Code and ask the customer
> to leave. A heavy user is defined by Griffin as anyone downloading or
> uploading more than 50GB per calendar month."

Pritty much the UK ISP market is driven by lies and phrase words like unlimited / unmonitored / uncapped and by High speed with little to no thoughput options on all accounts.

AOHell

[Ginger Unicorn]

as much as it disgusts me to suggest this but apparently AOL are giving away wireless routers and not levying any fair use policies or transfer limits.

this is just what me freind told me you might want to make sure first, as AOL are a bunch of cowboys.

Black Cat Networks

[Xugumad]

Black Cat Networks do services up to 200GB/month:

http://www.blackcatnetworks.co.uk/services/adsl

And native IPv6, incase you're really geeky :)

Be Unlimited

[sebFlyte]

I have Be's ADSL2+ service, and think that, if you can get it, it's probably what you need. If there are four of you sharing the line and downloading a lot, then 8Mb really won't be enough. Be will get you 12-24Mb depending on your location, and don't seem to impose limits on the amount from what I've found -- and given that you're talking about 2-3GB a day, I can't see it being a problem.

Business vs. Non-Business

[billstewart]

Yes, that's common over here too, but I'm suggesting the opposite transaction - buying the business-rated service for residential use. You might get overcharged, but you won't get kicked.

Disgusted, Tunbridge Wells

[Rameriez]

Ever since 8 meg lines starting becoming the norm in the UK, broadband companies over here have somehow managed to sidestep the Trade Descriptions Act quite nicely with their advertisement of "unlimited" broadband. Frankly, I'm wondering where the hell the Trading Standards Authority stands in all of this. How can you market a product as "unlimited" when it quite obviously isn't?

Bitrates, Powers of 10 vs. Powers of 2

[billstewart]

Bitrates are usually measured in powers of 10, with kilo=1000, but they're actually rounded values in practice. typically a multiple of a power of 2 * 1000 for telco circuits. A "2 Mbps" E1 line has a raw speed of 2048 kbps, but there are framing channels that often reduce that to 1984 or sometimes 1920 kbps. A "1.5 Mbps" T1 line is really 1544000 bps, or 1536000 after framing. For Ethernets, it's 10/100/1000 Mbps, where those are straight 1000000 bps Megabits per second.

Easy solution

[uradu]

> I'm going to be living in a student house with 4 (inc. me) heavy internet users.

Get some sturdy seats--preferably recliners with build-in cup holders--and you should be fine.

Zen Office 8000 Max of course

[westi]

At £79+VAT per month it's not cheap but with 4 of you sharing the cost is this then that expensive and you can have routed /29 to share giving each of you a private public IP Address if you set it up correctly - For more info see http://www.zenbroadband.com/ML_Business.aspx?page= 527

bandwidth abuse

[buddyglass]

Congrats. You're the reason we need net neutrality. It is my sincere hope that BT starts charging on a per-bandwidth basis so guys like you can't hog it all.

Re:bandwidth abuse

[shd666]

> It is my sincere hope that BT starts charging on a per-bandwidth basis so guys like you can't hog it all.

There's plenty of local bandwidth available so it makes to use most of it. Current p2p systems, which make up the most traffic in internet, tend to favor the fastest peer, which will statistically be someone near you. Also, billing for used bits can cause economic surprises for people and make true internet based computing harder because there has to be some kind of limits for bw usage. It is easier for the ISP to QoS down people causing much traffic, but not much point in cutting them entirely off (because they won't be customers after that).

At least here in .fi, all common ADSL lines are unlimited bw services. The operator may QoS people down, though. But I haven't heard that it has happened to any of my bandwidth-hogging friends =) If I wanted to be somewhere, it would be .se, because they have regional 10/100 Mbit unfiltered links (bredbandsbolaget) to home customers.

My line has been maxed out for a week now, keep those lines busy and make those ISPs compete.

Re:bandwidth abuse

[buddyglass]

There's plenty of local bandwidth available so it makes to use most of it. Current p2p systems, which make up the most traffic in internet, tend to favor the fastest peer, which will statistically be someone near you.

Unless he's on a cable modem, in which case he and his geographic neighbors share a fixed pool of bandwidth. In other words, his level of usage makes all his neighbors' internet experience that much less satisfying.

Also, while it's true that p2p systems favor the nearest host, it's also true that that host will most often not be on the same subnet as the downloading client. Meaning it's costing someone, somewhere, bandwidth. Maybe not at the backbone level, but it's costing someone. And this is just if there's one server being pulled from. With something like BitTorrent, you're talking about several at once. What are the odds that all of them are located on the same subnet as the downloading client?

Also, billing for used bits can cause economic surprises for people and make true internet based computing harder because there has to be some kind of limits for bw usage.

If you're worried about surprises then only charge for bandwidth over a certain limit and have the cost-per-unit decrease as you approach the theoretical maximum. Rig the numbers so that a customer with 100% utilization for an entire month would pay approximately 10x what a "normal" customer would expect to pay. Set the limit at which per-bandwidth charges begin so that 90% of customers fall below it and never pay a usage fee. The only real limit on usage would then be economic, i.e. the customer uses only what he's willing to pay for.

Re:How about

[Anonymous Coward]

andrews and arnold havent done 512 kbps connections for quite a while - they charge by usage, not by speed, so a 2mbps connection doesnt cost any more than a 0.5mbps. and since they do charge by peak time usage, there's no way they would let you max out your connection for several days for 25 quid. every night, yes, but not every day. also they don't offer binary newsgroups.

Traffic Shaping / Port Blocking

[Anonymous Coward]

Assuming the bandwidth that you'll be using will be P2P (and most home user bandwidth probably is that these days) then you'll need to be aware of which "unlimited" ISPs prioritise other traffic ahead of P2P bits, or doing nasty stuff like blocking ports - and whether, if they don't, their terms of service allow them to start doing that any time they please.

"Unlimited" bandwidth is useless if you can't actually use it for what you want to.

I Agree, BY best in UK

[Drasil]

I'm a happy customer. Their tech ppl actually know what they are talking about too. If you can get BY where you will be then that's the way to go IMO.

Hats off to all u Mainlanders...

[g00p]

We only get 2mb max contract (which averages out at a max bandwidth of about 1.6) over in the Isle of Man, as we only have on ISP because out gov't are monopolising fucks.

U lucky lucky bastards!

Screw unlimited

[Rob Kaper]

I have no experience with fair use plans in the UK, but given the choice between "unlimited" and a provider that actually quotes data limits and surcharges, I'd always pick the latter if there was anything critical or even remotely serious happening over the connection. "Unlimited" is usually a nice way to say "we'll kick you out whenever we like". All contracts offer a termination clause. Companies who offer a price for traffic beyond a certain limit benefit will find a way to keep you happy. Those who claim to offer true unlimited traffic for a fixed fee eventually realise they can not actually provide you with it and then use the termination clause. Let that happen to you once or twice and you'll soon realise not to trust unlimited traffic.

Nildram and/or bonded ADSL

[adl99]

I have used Nildram for along time and they do a good 50GB 'peak' fair use. However for a supercharged service you can also get a 'bonded' service, so doulble the standard 448kpbs up and 8mb down - with double the download limit. You'll need a seperate comp router with these: http://www.linuxadsl.co.uk/index.php?page=shop.pro duct_details&flypage=shop.flypage&product_id=24&ca tegory_id=8&option=com_phpshop&Itemid=6 plus about £10 a month on top of the extra service. Looks worth it, though...

Must have something to do with marketing

[Anonymous Coward]

The Americans call their convoluted system of measurements "English units" for some reason.

And since some of the units are different from the British ones, it's not a simple matter to figure out the reason.

Britain is making some progress (glacially slow progress, but still progress) toward converting from ounces and pounds to grams and kilograms. When (if?) the conversion is complete, I wonder if Americans will still continue to call pounds "English units"?

Who knows, by about 2160, Britain might have made noticeable progress in switching from feet and miles to meters and kilometers ...

Most bandwidth throttle now anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

Freedom2Surf have an unlimited account. But only the 512 kb/s is economically worth while. Since they've been taken over Pipex, they've started using (and admitted) that they now bandwidth throttle P2P traffic. But then so do almost all UK ISPs (whether they admit to it or not).

Hence, that's the reason for not bothering with anything above 512 kb/s - you'll may well not see any speed improvement.

The irony is, because I now have to remain online for way longer to download anything, my outbound traffic now reaches a *far* greater total.

I'd leave F2S for a while...

[djkitsch]

I've been a long-term F2S customer for years and always found them good, but in recent months their support has been appalling. Once you get through to someone it's fine, but I was on hold for 2 and a half hours last week....

Maybe try in a few months when they've had a chance to boost their support staff...?

Re:How about

[Col. Bloodnok]

Zen Internet. I had a good experience with Claranet too, especially with newsgroups, as they also sell a news+email only package.

Blueyonder / Telewest Cable

[Anonymous Coward]

We use Blueyonder / Telewest's 10Mbps Cable service, dl'ing crap TV and movies 24/7, usually more than we can watch between the 3 of us. The river is wide, deep and very very long. £30 a month (or something) on top of our cable tv and phone charges.