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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."
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)
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
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
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.)
People that believe in their opinions don't post AC.
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?
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?
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
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.
Ned.
Wireless network cards - GUARANTEED 100% Linux Compatible!
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.