Unlimited broadband: BT says ‘goodbye’ to fair usage policies

Forgot to mention that there is obviously another download limit (of 7GB) through the day which will trigger ANOTHER 5 hour clampdown.

As I said, the limits don’t affect me much but the deceit is hateful.

Well stop being a cheapskate and get the XXL which has no limitations no traffic management. You pay for what you get!

Unfortunately the comment below if wrong. Virgin Media actually DO apply a fair usage policy, even to the XXL customers. You just get a higher limit….

Parp you need to check your facts. Virgin Media have traffic management on all packages. One of the 100mb services and the 120mb have no form of download limits but they still slow down peer to peer.

Actually I’m wrong all Virgin Media services have download caps which result in speeds being reduced along with traffic management.

Nonsense. I pay £40 a month on my phone line + broadband specifically so that I can use that download speed as much as I like, as a gamer – and at that kind of cost, to impose restrictions is simply absurd. Providing unlimited service is not nearly as difficult as the telecom companies would love us to believe, and I’m glad to see BT set this shit straight.

That’s never going to work. For example, if I watch 2 films in an evening in highest quality on netfilx, that can be more than 2GB per hours for an HD film. So if both films are of average length, im already up to around 8GB of data. Now add in my girlfriend and our housemate. If we’re all watching programs, downloading games (Steam for example, will use about 70GB of download to install all of my commonly used games. Because of Virgins fair usage policies, I can only re-install steam after 11pm.

In terms of pricing, Virgin Media still make a huge % on the subscription charges compared to the cost of the bandwidth costs to themselves. It has been widely admitted that fair usage policies are there to fatten the profit margin and have nothing to do with network stability.

As for mobile networks, i’ve been with virgin and O2 and neither of them have a daily policy. If you buy 500MB you can use it as and when you see fit. If you want to blow the entire 500MB in a day, you can.

“The same issue applies to Mobile Data where you can find in the small print that 500MB per month actually has quite small daily limits.”

3 Mobile do not restrict your data usage. When my internet was down, I used my phone as a hotspot and still streamed videos / downloaded through steam etc.

Their ‘all-you-can-eat’ data policy means just that.

@Matt Agreed. That’s why I went with 3 Mobile when I got my Nexus 4. Being able to tether to my tablet or laptop and not be concerned with data usage is great.

This is the Virgin Media traffic management policy.

they also throttle the speed of certain protocols irrespective of usage.

As I said I have NEVER been limited all the years I have used Virgin – and I check often. If you monopolise the entire bandwidth – I’m sorry you should be limited for the sake of other users.

I am also with Virgin on 30mb broadband, and some days I download up to around 30gb. I have never experienced any throttling of my connection at all.

Rob , so all that is really needed is redefining “unlimited” to mean what most people always thought it meant – unlimited !!
Just needs ASA to show some common sense.
The market place then would provide a range of properly defined usage packages .

Rob

I certainly support the removal of fair usage policies hidden in T&Cs if the service is referred to as ‘unlimited’. Let us hope that BT has planned for how much their customers might increase their use of broadband and for other contingencies, so that we do not see prices being pushed up during contract periods. We have seen enough of this with the mobile phone companies.

With many still experiencing low broadband speeds, especially at peak times, and some still on dial-up modems because no broadband service is available, I am not convinced that unlimited broadband should necessarily be the priority.

It’s offered due to the completely negligable cost of transferring data. Adding throughput (transferring more bits in a given amount of time) is expensive and running lines to carry data to someone’e house is expensive. However, there is practically 0 cost difference between carrying 20GB of data at 20mb/s compared to carrying 20mb of data at 20mb/s.

Basically, once the cable company finishes running the lines to your house, no matter how mch or little you use your internet, it won’t make so much as a blip in their costs until they need to carry more data per second. That’s why you see ‘unlimited’ plans, because it doesn’t cost them an extra dollar to give you unlimited compared to capped usage.

It’s been proven time and time again that there are far more effective ways of managing peak bandwidth usage (what actually drives the need sto expensive capacity upgrades) than monthly data caps. The caps you usually see are either failures of the ISP’s ability to plan or a blatant cash grab since it’s in no way related to what actually drives their costs.

With Virgin Media having been bought yesterday by Liberty Global, you may get new ToS conditions? Not sure if they will keep their Fair Usage policy, make it worse or scrap it all together.

Would be interested to know what they are planning on doing.

Alk, which post are you referring to? I am on Plusnet and am interested in Unlimited. Thank you.

Ben, these 2 blog posts should help you change your package:
http://community.plus.net/blog/2012/12/19/unlimited-broadband-is-here/
http://community.plus.net/blog/2012/12/21/its-unlimited-why-is-it-still-traffic-managed/

So Plusnet Unlimited is still traffic managed? They say they aren’t “deliberately slowing down particular applications” but if the application you happen to be using is one of those that is running at the lower priority then either it IS effectively running slower or the management process would seem to be a bit of a waste of effort. The example Plusnet give is that “NASA videos will take a few more minutes to download”, surely that IS slower! I wonder if BT have the same rules?

I think they are trying to distinguish themselves from other ISPs in that they do not rate limit (throttle) the speed of particular types of traffic with the Unlimited package (you will see from their “download speeds” page that all applications on the unlimited package run at line speed). Instead, prioritising particular traffic on their network (I imagine it is some implementation of Quality of Service).
As regards BT, they have a page here: http://bt.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/10495/~/broadband-usage-policy
Compare that to Plusnet’s: https://www.plus.net/support/broadband/speed_guide/broadband_experience.shtml
Note the entry on Section 2 relating to ***.
Plusnet’s says: “*** If no entry is shown against a particular traffic type, no traffic management is typically applied to it.”
BT’s says: “***If no entry is shown against a particular traffic type, no traffic management is typically applied to it, though overall network management rules shall apply.”

No info on BT’s page as to what the “overall network management rules” are, but perhaps there is something in that.

According to that page the ONLY traffic management that BT currently apply on their NON-unlimited products is P2P. I find that surprising.

Also, on this page:
http://bt.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/32955/c/346
BT define an ‘unlimited’ usage allowance as “This means that you can use the internet as much as you want and will never be charged for additional usage.” Charged? Being charged isn’t usually the problem, being ‘managed’ or otherwise slowed down is the problem.

What package are you on? I’m in N17 and on the 30meg service. I’m part of the Sam Knows/ Ofcom speed survey so have a special box that runs tests during the 24 hour period. A year ago I was getting pretty much the advertised speed at the time, but these days it’s more like 25 at most. Plus domain name resolving time is up which is a different issue.

There are days when it seems to grind to a halt, but unplugging the modem, waiting then restarting always gets it going again (unless there are other issues).

With all the upgrades they are doing (part of the speed doubling) hopefully we should see extra capacity return, but upgrades for my area are already a year behind.