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)

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: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?

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?

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

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: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.

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.

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: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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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