Dred again,
Hello people had an email from a talktalk customer who insists he can use limewire. I was told by talktalk that theywere shaping my bandwidth so why me and not others god only knows! My advice to users of P2P, take it easy on the downloading ifyou go over there limit (which they will never tell you) they will not allow P2P ever again. There download allowance per mth is 40GB, crap! Before they shaped me the previous mth i downloaded approx 750 MB. Be warned!!!

yours ................... Dave

Dred

Isn't Talktalk the Carphone warehouse broadband offering, which was advertised as unlimited and free?


UK Bob

Yes I think it is CW's thing.

This is the thing in general though isn't it? Unlimited broadband (in the UK at least) sometimes is properly unlimited but more often than not it is limited/restricted. Nearly all the Unlimited packages have "fair use policies" which amount to restrictions/limitations. They vary. For example Orange's Unlimited has a fair use restriction which goes something like this: If you use your connection excessively, we'll warn you, if you continue to use it excessively we'll terminate your contract. I asked them to actually quantify "excessive use" and this was their response to that request verbatum:

If we consider your internet usage to be excessive (Ie downloading
and uploading files constantly 24/7) we will contact you to advise
cutting down on your usage. If you continue to use the internet to
excess your account will be cancelled.

They've still failed to put it into numbers really, apart from if you were take that literally it'd mean it's OK to download continually apart from say 30 seconds a day. Other companies make it much clearer. I can't remember which company's Unlimited this fair use policy was: outside peak time (6pm - midnight) genuinely unlimited. Inside peak hours a maximum amount of GB downloads per month -- amount depending on which option you choose, therefore amount you pay.

One of the cable companies, NTL I think, offer a truly unlimited service which is 10 mbps (or whatever the acronym is) but that's £35 per month.

If you're in London or Birmingham I think it is there's Be -- that's the company name. 24 mbps for £24 per month and that is properly unlimeted apparently. The service has pretty much nothing else with it -- newsgroups[*], email etc. This is more the sort of thing we want I think -- pure speed no restriction for a bit more if necessary. Obviously very limited coverage though -- I can't get it.
[*] newsgroups, access to all/most of them (binaries I'm talking about), don't generally seem to be available with broadband connections from what I can tell.


The question is: does anyone know of a reasonable priced, non restricted broadband service outside London in the UK? I don't think such a thing exists. I think broadband services are shite in the UK. I think we're worse off than a lot of other countries -- which is amazing because the UK is plenty well off enough and is small and highly populated. I blame BT. When will they go bankrupt? That'll be a good day.

Another very annoying restriction (a crap service on purpose, by choice of the companies) IMO is the dynamic IP address rather than fixed one to stop you operating a server. Serving material to people is good -- don't put things in the way to stop us doing that FFS. Not good.

And another thing, which I think is standard for all broadband, not just the UK: why is upload so much slower than download?