D&C GLug - Home Page

[ Date Index ] [ Thread Index ] [ <= Previous by date / thread ] [ Next by date / thread => ]

Re: [LUG] Which ISP?

 

On Wednesday 28 February 2007 12:19, Neil Williams wrote:

> Limited broadband has all but disappeared, despite the adverts that try
> to say it is commonplace. If you pay monthly, you shouldn't put up with
> broadband limits - the only issue is contention, how many other
> subscribers share your connection upstream.

Has it? Well, perhaps in name - but in practice, many of the larger ISPs 
(Pipex for example) use traffic shaping to essentially limit broadband. I 
have a theoretically unlimited Pipex account.
>>From 5pm to 11pm, there is a limit of ONE gig per week! It runs Thursday to 
Thursday apparently. If you go over the 1gig per week at those "peak" times, 
you fall foul of their sneakily updated Fair Use Policy and you are placed on 
a "naughty boy" series of servers which have dreadful speeds for a week to 
teach you a lesson!
Unbelieveable, but they treat you like a schoolchild for actually using the 
connection which you pay for - and we are not talking excessive p2p or 
anything - just one gig download in a week - so thats maybe a Debian iso and 
a few streaming vids or something and you are restricted for the next week.
They also throttle p2p - a maximum of around 20kb/s regardless of your line 
speed. 
No idea about other ISPs on that front, but many still have download limits as 
far as I am aware - BT for instance. Yes, you can pay more to get genuine 
unlimited bandwidth - Zen do it I know.

-- 
The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG
http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list
FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html