BT goes after broadband hogs.

Analoguesat

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BT is targeting customers who it says are regularly breaking their monthly broadband download limits.
The telecoms company has sent letters to more than 3,000 customers it has identified as excessive users.

They will be given the choice to pay for their high use or risk losing their connection altogether.

The company will not say how many people have already been cut off, but said they were downloading between 100 and 200 gigabytes per month.

Movie downloads

BT offers a range of different packages with monthly download limits of between two and 40GB.

Their guidelines say they will not take any action against people who occasionally exceed the monthly usage.

However, for those that regularly go over their limits, BT says it will contact the customer to suggest a product more suitable to their needs.

The telecoms giant said that the number of customers it has sent letters to represents a very small proportion of BT broadband users.

It defended its actions, saying that it has to buy bandwidth.

"If a small percentage of users are using far in excess of others, it distorts the amount of bandwidth we have to buy, which increases the costs for everyone".

Andrew Craig of Web User magazine says that 100 to 200GB a month was excessive for a personal user.

"These are generally people who are constantly downloading and uploading movies on file-sharing websites," he told the BBC.

There are now more than 10 million broadband connections in the UK, according to telecoms watchdog Ofcom.

source - bbc news
 

_stu_

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Analoguesat said:
"If a small percentage of users are using far in excess of others, it distorts the amount of bandwidth we have to buy, which increases the costs for everyone".

Unfortunately this is very true, and personally I do not wish to pay for the bandwidth used by people who are just plain greedy. They have abused the trust placed in them by ISPs who offer 'unlimited' downloads to the point where rules have to be imposed on them.

Given that to download 200MBs/month would require a 2MB line downloading at full speed for about 10 days each month, or around 8 hours a day, then either these greedy downloaders do not sleep or don't watch/listen to/play have the things they download.

Having seen the emotions this subject stirs up on other forums, I fully expect to be flamed, but I've been there and done that and have no sympathy for the l33chers.
 

rolfw

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You won't get flamed here _stu_,

A) because it is not allowed :)

and

:cool: because probably many people agree with you. :)

If someone is downloading 200GBs per month, then they are almost certainly doing something for commercial gain, downloading illegal copyright material, or more likely both, if they want to do it, then as BT say, they have to pay for the privilege and not steal the contended bandwidth from other "normal" users.

It was exactly the same with satellite broadband, it was advertised as 512kbits but there were people who had it running 24hrs per day at that rate, thus killing the system for everyone else.
 

BGonaSTICK

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It's not unreasonable to pay for what you use, but most ISP's originally just sold thier accounts as 'unlimited' with nothing in the small print about excessive use. I know this to be true as I check every word of the ones I've ever used.

That's the ISP's fault, and they are all now having to introduce more small print to save their arses. Whilst that also sucks to a certain extent if you already have an unlimited agreement, it's certainly a more fair way of going about it for new and existing lightweight users.

It's unfair that light users fund bandwidth-hogging users, but blame the ISP's not the users. Fair enough if BT have now introduced the 'excessive' small print and people are still breaking the rules - they should get kicked, but it just goes to show that the T&C's are intransigent for end users, but completely flexible for the corps. :mad:

STICK
 

wod

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i never seem to go over 10gig per month on my adsl so its obivous that users transfering over 100gig are downloading illegal material

if they need that amount of bandwidth then a business account would be better for them something like sdsl
 
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