BT is cracking down on heavy Internet users who are habitually breaking its monthly download limit, suggesting that they either pay more or shop elsewhere for their Internet access.
BT has agreements in place with users of its ADSL broadband service that limit them to up to 40GB of downloads per month. However, although the incumbent telecommunications company claims to be relaxed on occasional breaches of this limit–and has no automatic blocking in place once a limit is exceeded–it reports that some customers are taking liberties and regularly downloading up to 200GB each month.
“I think it’s fair to characterize these people as broadband hogs. You would have to be downloading pretty much all day, everyday, to manage that level of downloading,” a BT representative told Silicon.com.
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I’m glad I switched to telewest broadband. They just doubled the speed for free from 2meg to 4 meg yesterday and they have no downlaod quotas.
I used to go through the 30 gig limit in about a week anyways with BT. They just want everyone to use it for web browsing and email. Ha!
Bandwidth limits is NOT the way to go. Use load balancing and charge them per bit passed. Please. Cutting someone off after a month is much crueler than just choking their bandwidth continuously.
Plus what did mister big wig BT representative say about people who are “pretty much” uploading all day? You want to punish benevolent contributing uploaders just as much as nasty non-hygenic leechers? If BT (and every company) would just set it so your maximum upload and download rate are the same then that would solve their problem right there. Give you a pipe based on what you pay and let you decide what data you want to send out or draw in. 200K/s download? No problem you pay for that! 100K/s upload? Great! You can only download at 100K/s then though. 20K/s upload? That leaves you with 160K/s free to download! Nobody cuts a loss nobody’s getting screwed over and everybody walks home smiling right?
ATTENTION USER. YOU HAVE EXCEEDED THE SECRET MONTHLY BANDWIDTH LIMIT WE SET BECAUSE WE CHARGED LESS TO FOOL YOU INTO PURCHASING OUR SERVICE. YOU WILL NOW BE CHARGED A $50 SURCHARGE FOR EVERY BIT YOU PASS ABOVE THE LIMIT DESCRIBED IN SECTION 3 SUBPARAGRAPH A ARTICLE 4.2.11 OF YOUR END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT WE ADDED LAST WEEK WITHOUT NOTIFYING YOU.
EDIT: my math sucks
instead of limiting b/w just the more they use decrees their speed
That’s what NTL do they have 1MB + 2MB unlimited but their 10MB service has a 75GB “cap” – it isn’t strict but if you go abit over the top lets say 500GB they put your speed down to 512K for the rest of that month then back up to 10MB the next month which is something BT should do.