BT is cracking down on heavy Internet users who are habitually breaking its monthly download limit, suggesting they either pay more or shop elsewhere for their Internet access.
BT has agreements in place with users of its ADSL broadband service that limit them to 40GB of downloads per month. However, although the telco claims to be relaxed on occasional breaches of this limit — and has no automatic blocking in place once a limit is exceeded — it reports some users are taking liberties and regularly downloading up to 200GB each month.
A spokesman for BT told ZDNet UK sister site silicon.com: "I think it's fair to characterise these people as broadband hogs. You would have to be downloading pretty much all day everyday to manage that level of downloading."
Now BT has said enough is enough and has contacted 3,200 customers identified as excessive users. The letters offer customers the chance to pay for their excess bandwidth consumption or seek service from another provider.
Last October BT sent a similar letter to 1,800 users and while "a small percentage" of users agreed to a new payment plan to cover their monster downloads, the majority saw their contracts with BT terminated. The spokesman suggested "it would probably be fair to extrapolate out those results" in terms of a prediction regarding the likely outcome of the current crackdown.
Such high levels of downloading are certainly far from typical for the average user and are likely to indicate a heavy diet of large media files such as music or movies.
Talkback
If the people are signing up for flat rate, how can there be a 40GB limit? Surely flat rate is just that?
I beta test a couple of products and with my normal surfing and the downloading of the beta images, I easily exceed 50GB.
T-Online are now offering TV over IP, so that could easily up the amount to hundreds of GB a month...
Clamping down isnt enough
Lets be realistic 99% of users who go over 40Gb in a month are probably doing something illegal.
I can guarantee if BT threatened to release those names to the police there would be a lot more bandwidth to go around
Or just streaming a hell of a lot of video.
Pay for the bandwidth or move to another ISP who doesn't impose a download limit. Decisions decisions.
BT clearly doesn't limit the download rate of bandwidth hogs, if they did then they'd solve that problem.
If BT are griping now? What will happen when the bandwidth gets to 10Mbs+ and users start watching TV on their PCs? The bandwidth use will go through the roof. Will BT start doing the same thing?
Speaking of bandwidth, when will BT bite the bullet and start digging up the roads to install fibre optics to every home? As it appears to me, that BT are intentionally dragging their feet about putting in fibre optics. Copper lines just doesn't have the capabilities for really high bandwidth.
I'm probably being cynical, but it would appear that BT have slowed down the network infrastructure upgrade so they can milk as much money out of the other ISPs and the public.
As it doesn't need to do much R&D, as other countries around the world have already got systems running at over 100Mbs (South Korea for example). So BT have no excuse to do this upgrade, and the government has no excuse about letting BT do the upgrade. As the government keep saying that we are 'Internet Britain', or does it take a third world country to have a better system running before it gets done in this country?
Phew ! ! ! rant over
And can we suppose that BT will begin sending out rebates to the people who pay for 40, but only use 5? The whole point of flat rate is not to get caught up in traffic measurement and complex price plans.
Quoted
'And can we suppose that BT will begin sending out rebates to the people who pay for 40, but only use 5? The whole point of flat rate is not to get caught up in traffic measurement and complex price plans. '
I think the point is 99% users probalby use less than 1 GB, its just not a sustainble model to charge the size amount to one person who uses 100 times the amount of another