ISP's not using the 'Fair Usage Policy' ?

[sWiZzLe]

Im just wondering if anyone knows which ISP's do not use the 'Fair Usage Policy'?

I get the feeling that broadband has been stretched too far. When we had 2 and 4mb everything was fine, we could use our full bandwidth without any complaints

Then along came 8mb and we assume that we can use all of it when ever we wanted because thats what we're paying for, but apparently we can't!

What is the Fair Usage Policy on the 'unlimited' Option 3?

BT Total Broadband's Fair Usage Policy is designed to make sure that the very few excessive users on the Option 3 Unlimited product do not use their service at the detriment of other customers.

BT will monitor network performance and may restrict the amount of bandwidth available to very heavy users during peak time to ensure that the majority of the customer base has a good customer experience. There will be no restriction imposed outside of these peak times.

If you don't use Peer-to-Peer or file sharing software or if you don't download very large files continuously at peak times, then it is very unlikely you will be affected by this policy.

Does this mean I can’t use Peer-to-Peer (P2P) applications?

No, we are not stopping people using any P2P service. We are simply ensuring that bandwidth is shared fairly between all customers at peak times, generally in the evenings. Outside of these times P2P will have full bandwidth access. It is worth noting that P2P is not a time-sensitive application.

A minority of users (around 2%) far exceed all others in terms of bandwidth demand, some using 600 GB per month. We have taken the decision to limit bandwidth available to these users at peak times.

What do you mean by "limiting the bandwidth"? What will you do?

We will apply speed restrictions that limit the available downstream capacity for certain applications during the period when we experience peak network bandwidth demand.

In particular, our data shows us that P2P activity for certain heavy users consumes a disproportionate amount of available bandwidth and this will be the focus of some of our controls.

Is this the road all ISP's are going to be heading down at some point because they can't actually provide us with the bandwidth they're offering?

 

[Tute]

This is what really bothers me about any FUP/AUP.

When broadband first took off, you could pay for a service that gave you what you paid for. For example, I started on Blueyonder 2MB - and that's what I got. A constant 2MB, no matter when, no matter what.

Now, everything is dictated by this stupid "AUP". ISPs are throttling anything they can basically get away with - FTP, P2P, and the connection speed jumps around like a yo-yo.

Now, they claim this is to "ensure that the majority of the customer base has a good customer experience". Well you know what, there's another way to ensure this - upgrade your ******* infrastructure!!!

More and more people are signing up to broadband - so why aren't the ISPs upgrading their networks to cope with the demand? They're just leaving it as it is, and trying to save a few bucks by stifling the loyal users.

There's no excuse. They're making more money out of having more people on their accounts, so why not have the equipment to cope?

I really hope someone finds a loophole in the AUP, takes one of the big ISPs to court, and proverbialy gives them a good shafting from behind. It'd be no more than most of them deserve.

(Yes, i'm very angry about this).

 

[Jaffa_Cake]

BT Total Broadband's Fair Usage Policy is designed to make sure that the very few excessive users on the Option 3 Unlimited product do not use their service at the detriment of other customers.

Tbh I use P2p 4 times a month on average. I probobly use 40gb bandwidth a month.

They still limit me, I just got off cap, dling at 8kb/s suddenly jumped to 300kb/s. Same with upload ( to 46kb/s ).

Im just as pee'd as Tute and I feel exactly the same as you.

This brings me back to a situation a friend of mine had a while ago. A hosting company 'that shall remain anonymous' was offering very cheap hosting. After signing up for the account he received an email informing him that file storage was not allowed due to overselling and the fact they could get away with this was the 'management reserves the right to update the terms and conditions at anytime without warning'

BT just stopped replying to my complaints and I will take it to the ISPA.

 

[sWiZzLe]

A warning to people moving to Be:

If it’s felt that any Be unlimited or Pro member’s Internet activities are so excessive that other members are detrimentally affected, Be may give the member generating the excessive web traffic a written warning (by email or otherwise). In extreme circumstances, should the levels of activity not immediately decrease after the warning, Be may terminate that member’s services.

At least with BT you still get to keep your connection, im begining to wonder whether its even worth the hassle switching to another isp

 

[HangTime]

The problem is that heavy users cost the ISPs money (for BTW ADSL products at least) - more money than their monthly subscription. Upgrading their infrastructure wouldn't necessarily help per se; the FUP is as much to discourage people from losing them too much money as it is to maintain a high quality of service for all.

I think people need to wake up and realise that caps on cheap broadband services are here to stay. Apart from anything else, any (major) isp which doesn't have some kind of cap or FUP would get jumped on by all the hardcore leechers, so it would be suicide to 'buck the trend' and offer a high-speed, unlimited connection. Sure, they would bring in a lot of new subscribers, but not the sort of subs they want. I think Plusnet are a good case in point, they grabbed loads of people from the likes of Nildram when they introduced caps - but it was unsustainable.

People looking for a good FUP on a non-LLU exchange could do a lot worse than Nildram. They offer 8mbit with 50gig limit per month between 8am and midnight. This means that you can download well over 200gig a month which should be more than enough for any home user. You also carry over any unused bandwidth to the next month, so potentially you could have as much as 100gig peak bandwidth.

 

[Phil99]

Unless something has changed (or my understanding is wrong):

Most ISPs use BT Wholesale for the connection between you and them (BT equipment in the exchange etc), so the ISP pays BTw for the connection/backhaul etc.

OFCOM have made BTw's prices artificially high to allow LLU ISPs to compete

ISPs can't upgrade capacity a lot due to it costing too much, so they move to LLU in some areas, which is cheaper and is why LLU ISPs can offer packages with either high usage limits or even none at all.

In the past 12-18 months speeds have increased by up to 4x, but as far as I'm aware the cost of the bandwidth to the ISP hasn't dropped to 1/4 of the price it was 18 months ago.

I'm not keen on FUP/AUPs at all, but at the moment it's not quite as simple/easy as just buying more and more capacity unless customers are willing to pay for it (which on the whole they're not).

 

[Tute]

But it's not "cheap" at all - BT option 3 is £18.99/month.

Blueyonder used to cost me £22.99/month.

£3/month cheaper for a connection which, even at it's best, is no faster than my old one, has a ridiculous FUP, and drops all the time.

It's almost like broadband has moved backwards in the last 10 or so years.

 

[phi1]

UKFSN doesnt cap i don't think

 

[sWiZzLe]

UKFSN doesnt cap i don't think

If thats the case, then everyone will flood to UKFSN and it wouldn't suprise me if, in a few months FUP gets implemented

 

[phi1]

If thats the case, then everyone will flood to UKFSN and it wouldn't suprise me if, in a few months FUP gets implemented

No, They have been doing it for ages.. you get what you pay for..

for 19.99 you get

30gb peak
300gb off peak..

8mb no FUP ect...

 

[tolien]

UKFSN, and most of the Enta resellers do cap, but don't have traffic shaping on top of that (beyond the throttling Enta uses to maintain usable loads on their Centrals but at last count it only went to 2Mbps, beyond that everything goes nuts).

But it's not "cheap" at all - BT option 3 is £18.99/month.

Compared to the prices for home500 at the beginning, £19 a month is a hell of a drop in price for up to 16 times the speed, and as a ratio of the rental on a BT Central, you're not going to buy much:

On £18.99, £2.83 goes to the VAT man, leaving £16.16.
£16.16 for a year is £193.94.
The port rental is £91.56 ex VAT a year, leaving £102.38.
Rental of a 155Mbps BT Central is £271800 ex VAT a year.
So you're buying 0.000377 of a 155Mbps Central - 58kbps.

Obviously there's staff costs, connection fees, free modems etc. to come out of that money. BT Retail use Central Plus which makes the arithmetic more complicated (access and internet components), but the idea's still valid, even if the numbers aren't exactly right.
Not every ISP is so heavily shaped as BT (charges more/doesn't run daft offers every five minutes, has smaller allowances, doesn't give away "free" rubbish a la the Home Hub), or is at least more honest about doing it than BT.

Cable's a totally different ball game, so most of the above doesn't apply - beyond the fact that what you're paying only buys a tiny share of what you'd need for everyone to get anywhere near full rate 24/7.

 

[Tute]

That's fine Tolien, I understand that £19 probably doesn't go far with BT. However if Cable is so much cheaper then why aren't all the ADSL ISPs jumping over to that instead?

I mean Blueyonder was absolutely fantastic, you didn't have to have a phone line, the speed was solid and reliable, and despite people telling me it wasn't so good for latencies (not sure if that's true or not) it didn't stop me gaming on a very decent ping.

And why aren't there more packages offered to Home customers? I'd be prepared to pay more just to avoid their stupid traffic shaping, and to have a more reliable service. It just strikes me that BT are stuffing everyone onto Option 3, traffic shaping them to hell and back, with basically no other option.

I really don't want to have to change ISP.

 

[Trifid]

That's fine Tolien, I understand that £19 probably doesn't go far with BT. However if Cable is so much cheaper then why aren't all the ADSL ISPs jumping over to that instead?

Because then it will not be cable.

You can pay more for a non-traffic shaped connection. http://idnet.co.uk/broadband/default.jsp

For me a Enta based connection works well but I can accept max technology for what it is. 2Mbps plus more during the day and the knowledge that I will need to get another hard drive before I will run out of allowance.

If thats the case, then everyone will flood to UKFSN and it wouldn't suprise me if, in a few months FUP gets implemented

Entanet is upgrading at a fast rate to cope. They are adding 155Mbps every month with 3 more centrals ordered for this year.

 

[chimaera]

Personally i don't see whats wrong with the stance the ISP's are taking, if my next door neighbour is downloading 600GB a month which is causing my connection to be affected i'd be mighty peeved.

What is wrong is if they're using traffic shaping on ANY downloads, just because someone happens to be downloading during peak time they shouldn't get hit if its a one off d/l.

Personally i find that the people who complain the most about FUPs are the heavy 24hr download-box users who have caused them to be introduced in the first place. As is usually the case with most policies like this, the minority has buggered it up for the rest of us.

If i'm downloading a lot then i run it overnight when it wont affect others, it doesn't take much effort to be a considerate user really.

 

[Tute]

Actually I don't download large files at all, maybe 3 files a month at around 300GB (game demos) but sometimes it's less than that.

if my next door neighbour is downloading 600GB a month which is causing my connection to be affected i'd be mighty peeved.

Peeved at who? The neighbour who is just using their connection or the ISP trying to save a few quid and not keeping their network prepared in case, well, you know, people "use" it - heaven forbid!!!

 

[marc2003]

so because they let a few idiots download 20gb a day, every day for a month, we are all getting punished by getting http downloads throttled to hell and back in the evenings. nice one bt...

 

[tolien]

However if Cable is so much cheaper then why aren't all the ADSL ISPs jumping over to that instead?

Because most ISPs are chasing LLU instead, the ISPs don't have the money to spend cabling up the country, half the country can't get cable, and Virgin Media doesn't want to sell wholesale access to their network like BT were forced to, though they've started doing it with C&W (time'll tell how that goes).

And why aren't there more packages offered to Home customers?

Because most home customers won't pay the sort of prices you'd need to. From the numbers I posted earlier, to be able to guarantee 8Mbps on a Central you'd need to pay £1169 a month.
Obviously some ISPs can get away with charging less and having less/no shaping, but there's a lot of guesswork involved, and they're banking on most of the users barely doing anything at the same time.

just because someone happens to be downloading during peak time they shouldn't get hit if its a one off d/l.

If enough users did their downloading outside the peak time, there wouldn't be a need for shaping. You don't have to be a heavy user to be part of the problem.

Peeved at who? The neighbour who is just using their connection or the ISP trying to save a few quid and not keeping their network prepared in case, well, you know, people "use" it - heaven forbid!!!

The ISPs did a crap job of selling it in the beginning (selling "unlimited" and not explaining properly that it's a shared resource), but there's no way any ISP could afford to buy capacity to the extent you're after.

Doing 600GB a month is a bit more than just "using" the connection - it's 8Mbps maxed out from 1700-2300 (roughly peak time for most ISPs) for a month. Without traffic shaping, a handful of users like that would see the rest getting nothing - not just slower downloads, you'd get so much packet loss that nothing would work at all and you'd have pings in the seconds.

 

[GSDog]

I welcome the fact that ISP's are capping users who download ridiculous amounts, like 600GB a month.
What I don't like is the fact they are capping fair users who barely download anything, like myself. I don't download movies, music, etc. I just browse the web, download the odd demo, play online games, do emails, etc. but they are capping me.
I wish they would leave their fair customers alone and keep throttling the HEAVY users.

 

[Tute]

Well I can't understand what happened to the paying for heavy usage that BT used to do.

If you went over your cap you had to pay extra per GB.

Why not do that?

 

[csmager]

I welcome the fact that ISP's are capping users who download ridiculous amounts, like 600GB a month.
What I don't like is the fact they are capping fair users who barely download anything, like myself. I don't download movies, music, etc. I just browse the web, download the odd demo, play online games, do emails, etc. but they are capping me.
I wish they would leave their fair customers alone and keep throttling the HEAVY users.

The thing is, what you use over a long period (a month) is highly irrelevant. It's what you're using per second that is extremely important.

If you imagine the bandwidth you're sharing as a water pipe. Even if you rarely do anything, but you suddenly download at full speed (turn on the tap fully), then everyone else will get less bandwidth (water pressure).

You can't be 'nice' to low users at peak times, as it still affects everyone just as much as the heavy users. The only option is traffic shaping, or bigger/more pipes. Slowing usenet/p2p or long-period http downloads is far preferable to incredibly slow or non-working web browsing - which is what would happen without it.