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In UK, Broadband Limits Confuse Nine In Ten Users
Mark Jackson writes "ISPreview reports that 86% of UK broadband users don't understand the usage limits on their service, and nearly one million have reached or exceeded their ISPs limit in the last year. This is important because 56% of major providers are prepared to disconnect those who 'abuse' the service. However, it also shows how damaging bad marketing can be, with 6.2M people believing they have an 'unlimited' service with no restrictions. The UK Advertising Standards Authority is also blamed for making the problem worse by allowing providers to describe their services as unlimited even if there is a usage cap, as long as it is detailed in the small print. However, consumers are none the wiser with over 10 million broadband customers never reading their usage agreements and a further 1.8M not knowing whether they have read it or not. Unsurprisingly 7.5M do not even know their download limit, which is understandable when so few providers clarify it."
that limited unlimited plans are a bad idea.
Really, just throttle them based on how much theyve used in a given period. everyone wins. consumers keep their service, and providers can cut their bandwidth down a bit.
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
Do U.K. ISP advertisements include the real total cost of the service?
U.S. ISP and telephone companies are notorious for not including all of their charges in their advertised rates, preferring to split out various fees, taxes, and other costs of doing business. Even VOIP providers regularly charge $5-10/month more than what they advertise.
The UK Advertising Standards Authority are a bunch of complete tossers.
They'll stop an Apple ad claiming the iPhone can reach the whole internet, but they let these ISPs advertise unlimited when it is anything but.
Double Standards anyone?
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
is why are companies allowed to describe something as unlimited when it's limited. If that was changed, there'd be no problem. The ISPs always say `most users....` then I lose attention. If most user don't use 50 gigs, then limit it to 50 gigs.
10% of the users using 90% of the bandwidth still leaves 10% for Grandpa to check his email and your sister to update her MySpaz.
Why punish those who actually USE what they paid for? I've had the same contract since BlueYonder "real" unlimited connections, and my usage hasn't changed. All that's changed is as soon as ive watched a couple of iPlayer programs, my downstream drops from 250k to 100k. My dad, mum, and brother don't notice, so there's 75% who don't understand and aren't affected. Only we know, and only we use it.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
...usage caps were sold as a legit tool for ISPs despite advertising unlimited because these caps affected only a tiny minority of heavy users.
I'm not convinced 1million is a tiny minority. It's about time the ASA actually did some work for once and punished broadband providers for not advertising their caps more obviously. Last time it was brought up they said they didn't need to force them to change their practices for the above mentioned reason that caps were high enough to only effect a very small amount of users.
Even Plus Net which prides itself in being open and which is probably one of the most open out the lot can be quite evil. When I renewed my contract with them for a year I don't recall seeing anywhere (except perhaps in the depths of the contract which I did read but must have overlooked) that by renewing my contract I'd accept a change in the definition of off-peak from midnight to 4pm down to midnight to 8am.
Of course, it wasn't until I hit my 20gb on-peak cap within a couple of weeks that I looked into it and found I'd started being metred during the previously off-peak 8am to 4pm.
Similarly when I stuck with their old package I noticed my speeds dropped below their advertised maximum caps at times also.
If this is the kind of practice arguably the UK's most transparent ISP engages in it's no wonder users are confused about caps. The argument about the validity of ISPs imposing caps is one thing but the fact is that ISPs can't even be honest to their customers either and I'd argue this is the crux of the problem in terms of end user confusion on the issue.
Even if the users knew what their usage limits were, a huge majority still wouldn't have any reasonable sense of what that is. They have a vague idea of what the number means, but most can't even tell you how big a file is even when the number is staring them in the face, let alone when there's a constant stream of data trickling in every time they click a link. And that's not even getting into things like streaming video. The only way these limits will ever work is if the ISP provides some way of monitoring your usage.
This guy's the limit!
Where is it on this earth where governments are going to play their proper role in making sure the playing field is level and participants are not deceived?
Government's roles are to provide rule of law, not bending of laws, & adherence to meanings of words, not redefining them in advertising to suit a malicious manager.
to see how much bandwidth you have used. That's probably the most retarded thing. How can they set limits without you being able to see them?!
As others mentioned, I don't know why they don't just cap your speed once you hit a certain threshold of usage. What is the point of disconnecting and kicking off a paying customer? Bad business if you ask me.
I can guess why they do all this though. They don't want you to be able to see the limits because they are afraid people would actually use their allocated bandwidth instead of being scared of some secret value they can't see. This is probably the same reason they don't have automatic speed limiters once you reach a certain usage because then there is no hidden line to cross. Again, they are afraid that people would actually use the bandwidth they paid for.
Thanks Slashdot, two chances to plug http://superawesomebroadband.com/ in two days.
"Unlimited connections on static IPs. No download or upload limits. No port blocking, no packet shaping, no transparent web caches, no 'fair usage' policy, no logging, no Phorm, no ad-serving, no small print. Rolling 1 month contract. No lock in period. Direct Engineer Support 24 hours a day, every day. Good, not cheap. £60 /month"
Super Awesome Broadband
...they can do as one of our ISPs did before we completely rejected the idea of gigabyte limits - full speed until you hit your quota, then drop the speed to 64kpbs (ISDN speed) for the reminder of the month. No abuse or threats of disconnection, you simply can't milk it past the limit and it's enough for people to do basic stuff. Unless they actively call support and ask why the line is slow, you don't have to bother with them. Even the people that are utterly clueless about how much they use or what the limit is probably realize that they just hit it. In our case the quotas were quite well communicated though, our consumer protection agency can get rather nasty otherwise.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Whenever you see an ad claiming "unlimited" from an ISP you know limits in the small print, i.e. BT, Talk talk, Virgin, Tiscali etc. Send in a complaint.
http://www.asa.org.uk/asa/how_to_complain/complaints_form/
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
In Soviet Russia, you confuse broadband!
Always proofread carefully to see if you any words out.
It proves that limited plans are a bad idea. They allow ISPs to charge more for data even as the cost of transmitting that data plummets.
They provide a very 2002 view of the internet and the way that it's connected.
They allow ISPs effectively to limit new services such as Internet Radio, Streaming video, video rentals, etc. simply for those who do more than look at email and surf the web (which you'd have to effectively retarded to spend $40-50/month for access to a paltry 1-2GB per month; you might as well use dial-up).
They're a bad idea because they allow ISP to delay upgrading their infrastructure.
Rate limits don't lower any price, they simply allow the company to raise prices to those who use more than looking at emails and surfing the net. Much like ISPs used to limit your modem connections to 30-60 hours a month; it's not tenable and sustainable.
I'm with Nildram (owned by Pipex, owned by Tiscali), 'cos it was the only free to setup broadband without a 12 month contract. I get a clearly advertised 25Gb on-peak allowance, which is followed by a downstream throtle to 64k. I get a webpage where I can see my monthly usage (on and off peak), even split by day and up/down stream if I like. I think I'd get an email alert if I was close to using it up too, but I've yet to top 10Gb. I wish all ISPs had to be this transparent about exactly what they're offering. It would make consumer's lives soo much easier.
Get free bitcoins: http://freebitco.in
However what really happened is our 'higher contention' meant our whole netlink was virtually unusuable during that time. Which if you assume their goal is minimizing costs by keeping transit bandwidth down, and thus oppressing their 'high' users, makes a lot of sense.
*shrug*. I can understand the reason for a bandwidth limit, but FUP limiting 'unlimited' services, is just plain fraud. Complaint to the ASA, and get the ad pulled, and maybe we'll start seeing an end to this outright deceit.
This is a problem in the US too. The user agreements are convoluted and there isn't a telecommunications consumers bill of rights, so it's hard to know exactly what you're getting. My brother recently got a Netflix Roku box that lets you stream movies, but the cable company is threatening to charge him as a commercial user because he's been consistently exceeding his allotted bandwidth.
Once you transgress this limit - whatever it happens to be, you get a letter (or email) telling you that you've broken the rules and if you do it again, you'll be cut off. However, this is completely arbitrary and un-testable as normal users have no means of challenging the veracity of the claim, nor of knowing in advance what this unspoken limit was.
So confused? yes, but confused that the ISPs are able to get away with such blatant mis-selling and arbitrary and un-appealable activites.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
I am not aware of any usage limitations on roads. I've never been told, "sorry, you have driven too much today, go home for a bit".
For one thing, road use is metered: governments tax road fuels. For another, governments limit vehicle size and weight on public roads.
i think it would be completely fair to simply throttle users a bit - say your first 50gig is at top speed (e.g. 16megabit), the next 50 gig's speed is reduced to, say, 10 megabit.
i think there is a basic logic error here in that the ISPs are using a total gigabyte usage as a metric but bandwidth is a byte per second measurement.
and i agree with the guy above- the tags on the article leave a lot to be desired "comcast & uksucks" are irrelevant
Seconded. I get the feeling that a lot of the USians are getting sick of anti-americanism and (maybe not consciously) trying to find a way to fight back.
Back on topic, there are plenty of good ISPs here that just resell bandwidth packages. Most of them are small enough that the costs of adding extra hardware to keep track of bandwidth use would be a large fraction of their income and so they don't bother. I don't think there is a single large ISP that is worth giving your money to anymore, and even if the advertising standards agency fixed this, there would still be dozens of ways that they attempt to screw you over.
I thought caps were only supposed to affect the top 1% of users who abuse the system and destroy its usefulness for the remaining 99% of the good citizens. 1 million people breaking through the cap in a year sounds like 1% for very large values of 1.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Here in Brasil, we have some sane regulating agencies, and noone advertises unlimited bandwidth. Mine has a monthly cap of 20 GiB (yes, very little, but I paid less for it, and I can buy additional quotas as needed). We even have companies that let you have low speed at business hours (when bandwidth is expensive) and high speeds at night, when I let my BitTorrent running.
It isn't that hard, you know, charging the real cost instead of punishing the users for using your service in an unprofitable way.
What I can't understand is why the ISPs can't charge per GiB, with low prices when the network is idle, and high prices when it's busy. Like the telcoms do, for, 30 years?
That way they could just expand their infrastructure, like the telcoms do, instead of rationating their service.
entropy happens
I'm curious, with Comcast's 250 Gig monthly cap, surely they have some incredibly convenient & easy way to check on their website my home has used, right? What's the URL by chance?
Now before anyone answers with some bizarre homebrew method for figuring out bw usage:
1) I'm not buying a new router that I could do some sort of firmware upgrade to add a bw monitor. While nice, I'm not going out of my way to do it.
2) I'm using multiple systems at home, so a TSR app won't cut it
3) Comcast won't believe for a second how much some 3rd party bw monitor says I used, no more than my bank will believe I have a xyz dollars in my account because Quicken says so.
Note: I work for Sky.
Sky in the UK offer unlimited broadband with no fair use policy, and no traffic shaping on certain conditions.
You *MUST* be a LLU customer. This means you connect directly to Sky owned equipment in your local exchange. We currently have about 70% population LLU coverage, and it is growing slowly (as it just isn't economical to LLU up some of the more remote exchanges). You also *MUST* be paying for MAX, the highest speed and obviously the most expensive product.
Note, if you are NOT an LLU customer, we will still sell you broadband. However it *WILL* come with a FUP, and traffic shaping will be used to enforce that FUP (if you go over your limits that are clearly explained in the offer, we will mess with your connection). This is because out of LLU areas we have to resale a BT wholesale connection (like most ISP's in the UK).
While we had to invest far more in getting this network setup, it now costs us A LOT less per mbit than through BT.
If you don't know if you are on LLU or not, or if you can get LLU or not, samknows.com is an excellent site with information on what products from all providers are available in your area.
The worst offenders are surely ADSL providers, because in my experience, they barely provide anything that could be called a service below the download limit to begin with.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
When I moved to a new flat last year, I did my research and eventually signed up for one of the Entanet resellers. When I tell people I'm paying £20/month for 30GB peak (8am-10pm weekdays) and 300GB offpeak (all other times, including all weekend) they look at me as if I have a screw loose and invariably ask why I didn't got with Provider X who is half the price and "unlimited".
The problem, I explain, is that every provider I've looked at that offered "unlimited" had a FUP and from a site on the web (which i've sadly lost) I found out that that FUP could be down to as low as 5GB per month.
In the year I've had the broadband (living on my own), I've only managed to get at most 15GB peak and 70GB offpeak in a month. It's true I don't work from home, don't stream music or video during peak hours and download really big files offpeak - but I've not found it to severly impact my browsing abilities. Hell, I'll happily suck down a 500MB update in peak - simply because I have tonnes of it to go around.
Thankfully Entanet offer a nice set of tools to monitor my usage, so if I start to get near their limits (due to changes in the way I use the web) then I'll re-evaluate the options again. It's not like I'm tied in, I only have a months notice period.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Who said anything about illegal P2P. The fact is, that there is a difference between home use, and what is essentially business class UPLOADING. That is the problem with P2P. We are not all supposed to have unlimited Uploading.
Does anyone have any idea how much information PROVIDERS are charged for bandwidth? And why P2P is essentially massive theft of service?
Even IPTV or VOIP doesn't hit the network as hard. P2P just breaks the entire model, for everyone.
Was this:
People in the UK either don't read the contracts they sign, don't question things they don't understand (the fine print), and just sign, so they can get on the internet.
Same thing as the mortgage scandal on this side of the pond.
I'm not into government intervention.... I'm into an educated populace. If people actually READ what the FUCK they are signing, people wouldn't be signing these contracts. If enough people don't sign on to the crap, the companies go out of business.
Other companies will step up, if it shows enough profit to be made, to allow people to actually use their pipes. Yes, you might have to spend a bit more, but in the long run, more people are happy, and companies like the ones mentioned in the article would be, losing.... Business, customers, etc.
Simple, people, quit being sheeple and letting companies push you around by YOUR BEING IGNORANT.
I read my contracts before I sign them. I'd be a fucking idiot not to. If I don't agree with something, I scratch it out, and submit it. If it comes back changed again, I have to agree to it. If the company doesn't send anything back changed, my contract stands. Doesn't mean I'll win in a court of law everytime, but it does mean I've actually STUCK TO MY GUNS and actually decided to THINK for myself.
Seriously, READ THE FUCKING PAPERS YOUR SIGNING. Simple, to the point, and won't happen, since that would require people to be literate :(
The general populace is stupid. New news at 11. :(
--Toll_Free
I'm with BT (British Telecom). They publish their cap, but they will not allow me any way of telling how much how much data has been downloaded. The whole family uses the PC, from the 6-year old upwards, so it is literally impossible to tell how much data is being transmitted by streaming video etc. Crazy. They will put up my monthly charge if I exceed their limit, but they won't tell me what I'm using!
Unicorn Setu. "Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines".
Thats's EXACTLY what they're designed to do. How do you expect them to make money? Tell us the truth? Pfff, subjective...
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
Yup. Cancelled my Virgin broadband account recently, and it took about fifteen minutes to get through the laundry list of reasons. The staff member who dealt with the cancellation agreed with more or less every point on it, too. Finally he admitted that two-thirds of the staff had moved, mostly to Be.
Funny thing, apparently they've actually given up on Phorm due to customer complaints, have reversed their policy of making customers pay to report faults due to customer complaints, etc. The problem of course is that they didn't get around to reporting this to their customers, who continue to quit in droves. That said, it was their broadband limits that caused me to finally give up on them; they have incredibly low download limits at various times of the day. On one occasion I made the mistake of leaving streamed video turned on throughout the afternoon and they throttled the connection down to 'cannot even read email'.
In short, Virgin are total arseholes and Richard Branson needs a new brand name. This usage has somehow managed to tarnish the name even more than Virgin trains, which is an amazing accomplishment in and of itself.
>>>what is essentially business class UPLOADING..... why P2P is essentially massive theft of service?
If you're feeling guilty, call your ISP and ask for a business-level connection. They'll be happy to charge you $100 a month for no cap usage.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
why are companies allowed to describe something as unlimited when it's limited.
Because it is unlimited. Back in the days of dialup, you would buy access in terms of minutes, or hours use per month. Now you can use your connection full time, twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, all month long. There are no more time limits. Hence, the account is unlimited.
That doesn't mean there are no bandwith or traffic volume restrictions, though.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
The Internet is peer to peer. An internet node is not simply an "information provider" nor an "information consumer"; it is both simultaneously. If ISPs assumed otherwise, they made an error, and that error does not make anyone else's perfectly normal activities "theft of service".
If you're looking for a model with information providers and consumers, look to television or radio. The Internet ain't it.
I'm on Verizon Mobile Brodband (EVDO) here in the USA, and it's limited to 5,000 megabytes (5GB) per month. That's about 166 megabytes per day. Just normal web browsing can easily use that much, plus with a PS3 the system or games are always wanting to download updates.
It's a reasonably fast connection, about 1.5 megabits, but I just can't USE the damn thing.
And of course my only other Internet options are dial-up or satellite.
Be happy, here in the Canary Islands (and I suspect the whole freaking Spain), 320kbps is all you got for upload.
There is no other ADSL option, so companies with more then 5 PC needs to pay for extra lines.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
I dunno about that. From the sounds of things (and I'm an American so I have no direct experience, we have our own broadband woes, but they're different) it sounds like a lot of these ISPs throttle at 20-30 GB a month. That isn't very much at all. I'm living in a hotel for a couple of weeks and I missed Numb3rs last week. Lacking a DVR I decided to drop the $2 and buy it from iTunes (the Internet connection at my Hotel is fairly flaky, and the free stream from CBS.com seemed like a risky endeavor). I was surprised to see it was 500+ MB. Luckily this wasn't a problem since I wasn't streaming... I just let it download all night, but that means that 40 TV shows on iTunes = a 20 GB cap. 40 shows is a lot of course, but one assumes that the person downloading TV shows also got e-mail, OS updates, software updates, some non-TV related web browsing, etc. The last WoW update was 1.5 GB all by itself... I'm starting to see where even a non-power users could exceed a 20GB limit pretty easily at least on occasion. Iwouldn't be half surprised to find that I've hit 10-15 GB this month in the freaking slow ass hotel room between WoW update, huge iTunes update, iPhone OS update and a couple of TV shows, plus web browsing and such. I may normally be considered a power user, but I've seriously cut back because of the lack of speed, but I still could have flubbed some limit just because of circumstances this month.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
What about legitimate internet video? I guess you just *have to* use services provided by your ISP or it's "partners?"
What about "tele-commuters?" Plenty of industries work with largish files and move them back and forth regularly (fMRI images anyone?).
There are plenty of uses for quality internet providers, it's just too bad they can't differentiate themselves from the fake "unlimited" providers.
"Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns" -Journal of Political Econom
Nearly all the networks let you stream their shows for free, sites like Huluu have content that is either free or paid that you can legally access and is of varying quality up and including quite good. iTunes and Netflix let you legally download most TV shows and many movies for quite reasonable fees. Even youtube isn't a complete waste of time, though the video quality is pretty miserly even when the content is decent.
I've only really realized myself in the last few months but the content revolution is arriving and has arrived to some extent. With a decently fast and low latency connection you can stream just about any show on television legally and free of charge, for a few bucks you can download it and watch at leisure, and Internet "pure" content is getting there too (I didn't think Dr. Horrible was as awesome as some people paint it, but it was reasonably entertaining for a freely available fairly inexpensive production. I'll probably buy the DVD when it comes out just to support the concept.)
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Bzzz.
The ISPs have to rent T-100 or T-1000 lines to connect their local network to the rest of the world. Those lines are provided by somebody, and billed to the local neighborhood ISP. So the original question, "How much do ISPs pay?" was a legitimate question.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
40 hours of TV is not a lot at all. That is less than an hour and a half of TV a day. Not outragous for a single person, but many households have 3 or 4 people in them. If you have 4 people in your house, 40 shows becomes 10 shows a month per person. That is hardly anything.
Your right of course. I'm just noting that most people seem to miss the fact that there tends to be more than one person in a household.
I wasn't so much meaning that 40 hours was a lot of TV per se, as you say, it's not really unreasonable. I more meant that is was a lot to be downloading from iTunes at $2 a show. I probably watch 30-40 hours of TV a month, but I wouldn't buy 30-40 hours at $2 an hour. Your point about multi-person households is very valid though. My wife plays WoW too, if the last update had come out a few weeks ago, or in a week or so, we'd have combined for ~3GB just in game update between us. Plus both of us would have need iTunes updates, OS updates, etc. I'm about to do a Fedora Core DVD download this weekend to, to build a new file server. It'll probably take all damned weekend on the hotel connection, but I want to have the server build when we move into our new place next week.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
There is absolutely no reason why the practice of placing limits on advertised unlimited broadband should be legal.
It should be banned now and anyone currently in a contract with a company advertising unlimited broadband should be given what the company advertised until their contract is up.
I prefer a T-888 myself. More formidable than a T-100, easier to reprogram than a T-1000.
Since that wasn't the original question (ISP is "Information Service Provider", not "Information Provider"), this is a non sequitur.
From the linked website:
"uSwitch.com has agreed deals with some suppliers across all our services to receive a small commission payment when a customer chooses to switch or apply for a product through us."
It's not news, it's, er ... Slashdot.
I'm with BT, with their option 3 "unlimited" tariff.
Does anyone know what the limit is before you come under their fair usage policy?
Because I do not, BT's call centres do not, other forums on the web do not.
I download between 10-15GB per month, some months I get capped to 250kb/s on ports such as http, various ports used for video such as used by Youtube, and more. Some ports such as 8080 or 21 do not get any throttling, and I can download at the 5Mb/s that my IP profile with BT's BRAS is set to.
I'm yet to ever get the BBC's iPlayer to play without pausing every 20 seconds during peak hours.
...where i just moved from Canada my Internet connection is the envy of my nerd friend back home: i pay about 30 dollars a month, I can upload at 9mb/s and download at 20mb/s... The ratio on my private torrent trackers are all in the black now to say the least. Since the 12 of october when I started running a little app called bitmeter to track my usage I have uploaded 229 GB (though 70gb of that was just one one day) in about 13 days and no nasty letters or slow downs. My laptop's cpu gets taxed pretty heavy and the machine starts to bog down when utorrent starts sending out data higher than 7mb/s; my little 1.4 celeron M is in need of an upgrade (though when i run my linux partition it goes a little better - I think the virus scanner is what bogs the cpu down scanning all the incoming and outgoing data...).
I am a UK user, and I am begining to worry that Windows and Firefox updates might exceed my "fair use" limits.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
a World Wide law that states (in part)
If you advertise X speed or "up to X speed" and "unlimited" then your system must be able to sustain
Y% of that speed minimum for Z% of your customers W% of the time minimum.
also no protcol based throttling packet sniffing except in the cases where QOS says "I need this to be fast"
Notes Y Z and W should all be in the upper eighties
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
let's all go back to aol.