Unlimited

Rhys · 6 Jun 2008 at 15:42

unlimited

• adjective not limited or restricted; infinite.

How can ISP's use this term without actually sticking to its definition.

They may as well use the term "FREE* UNLIMITED* Broadband*"

*free = £50 a month
*unlimited = 1mb a month
*broadband = 56k

rpstewart · 6 Jun 2008 at 15:45

The quote I heard from one ISP boss was that it was unlimited in that there were no limits on when you could use it or for how long.

Trifid · 6 Jun 2008 at 16:20

rpstewart said:
The quote I heard from one ISP boss was that it was unlimited in that there were no limits on when you could use it or for how long.

And that there are no more charges over your base rate per month.

growse · 6 Jun 2008 at 16:24

Simple, the amount of data you download can never be "unlimited". For that, you'd need an infinitely fast connection.

It's unlimited in that there is no hard cap on how much you can download. You can't download 50 GB of data and then no more for that month. You can still download data after that, but the speed might change.

I'm not saying it's right, I personally think it's misleading, as they're changing your service based on arbitrary numbers, but they'll defend it by saying that they'll never stop you downloading data, just change the speed at which you can.

Dist · 6 Jun 2008 at 20:41

Personaly i dont see companies like VM as misleading. Unlimited broadband at speeds up to 20Mb to me sounds like you can download as much as you want and your speed will be somewhere between 0 and 20Mb, which is perfectly true to what they offer. Although i have read that they plan to start sending out warnings to the extremely high downloaders (like those who download/upload tens or hundreds of GB a month).

queamin · 6 Jun 2008 at 21:28

Dist said:
Personaly i dont see companies like VM as misleading. Unlimited broadband at speeds up to 20Mb to me sounds like you can download as much as you want and your speed will be somewhere between 0 and 20Mb, which is perfectly true to what they offer. Although i have read that they plan to start sending out warnings to the extremely high downloaders (like those who download/upload tens or hundreds of GB a month).

posted on another thread by Von

They will be stopped soon by law from doing that. There is a lot of movement in European Parliament regarding these issues recently, and basically some time this year there will be ammendment to legislation about service levels which should put an end to ISPs tampering, throttling and limiting access. Worst case scenario - and I mean worst case, if just about everything else in legislation falls through - it will force ISPs to specifically mark products for what they are - so there will be no more unlimited limits and 20Mbit lines with 512k caps. Best case scenario - the ISPs will be finally fully regulated, like media, power or water services - there will be no "it's our router and all your internettings belong to us" malarky ever again and ISPs will have to maintain equal level of standards across entire continent or perish if they are not willing to.

Generally things are looking good for internet users in European Parliament - last month MEPs voted decidedly against so called "three strike deal", which was already adopted by several ISPs in UK and was really pushed for by French government - basically idea that ISPs should work on behalf of music and film industries and police questionable internet usage. According to Frenchies, ISPs were to give you three warnings if they found you downloading mp3s or torrents and then blacklist you, cutting off your access. MEPs voted against both proposed legislations about internet policing and "industry" was basically told to get lost - there will be no P2P blocking or snooping on what people use as, I quote these are "measures conflicting with civil liberties and human rights and with the principles of proportionality, effectiveness and dissuasiveness (..) of Internet access".

with luck it will go though i am with vm and hardly download anything so i not a heavy user

tolien · 6 Jun 2008 at 22:17

If traffic management is taken off the table, the only other options are to increase prices significantly to pay for huge increases in capacity and/or let connections max out at peak times, resulting in obscene packet loss and 4 figure pings.

ISPs will have to maintain equal level of standards across entire continent or perish if they are not willing to.

So ADSL's going to have to offer equal speeds whether you live on top of the exchange or 5 miles away? Who's going to be paying for this multi-billion pound investment?

Part of the problem is education: users need to understand that they won't get constant speeds 24/7 without paying a hell of a lot more than they are and that they can't expect to do their downloading at peak time, because they're using a shared resource. You wouldn't stand for the house next door using so much power that have the county was left in the dark.

tem07 · 6 Jun 2008 at 22:40

o2 has real unlimited...
They tell you that if you do start affecting other people's internet connections whatever by downloading too much you will be told.