Ntl Cutting Off High Usage Users

TCP/IP

If you got a disconnection letter how are you going to keep them also I wonder what would happen if my other half rang NTL and ordered broadband is the house forever baned or is it just me

Sponge Bob

TCP/IP, if you live in number 16 simply move to <cough> 16a

BendiBus

Vadrefjorde wrote:

I think rather than being punished, zwyrolek should be commended for his honesty and record breaking (for an irish home connection) achievement lol .

I wouldn't be surprised if he actually slipped the net and they continued cutting off users for 1 - 2 gigs over the cap.

Maybe the Chello download counter only counts to 99.99Gb and rolls over every 100Gb. So it looks to them like zwyrolek has only downloaded 6Gb

Lenny

haven't had time to do much downloaded the last three months, but before that i was doing 80-100 a month and never got a letter..
yesterday i downloaded 9 gigs but i've only totaled 16 this month so not much to worry about it is downloaded a fiar bit in short time?

KELTICKNIGHTT

here a link to a software where measures upstream an down an few other things,

http://ispmonitor.be/

JNive

nothin you install can be accurate enough, as they measure it on their end, you measure it on your end, and the amounts WILL differ. you might say, sure a few gigs wont matter, except when you download 41.5 GB ( with 40GB Cap ) are told you are abusing the line and will be cut off.

another interesting note, when they say you downloaded 41.5GB i would not be surprised if they were actually saying you have downloaded 41,500,000,000 bytes ( which is actually 38.6 GB )

soiaf

I know some of you wanted to see the content of the letter that NTL sent. This is a copy of the text I got. I'm on the 6 Mb/s package, so my limit is 40GB. Obviously this is a 'final notice' letter rather than the 'you are going to be disconnected' letter.
I respect the fact that NTL have download caps and I try to keep my usage within the 40GB limits (but obviously I didn't do a good enough job) - but in my view this letter was quite insulting, especially as NTL have no mechanism for checking my actual usage online.

+++

Important Information- Final Notice -

Dear Customer

We are writing to you again because, unfortunately, some of our broadband customers in your area have been experiencing deterioration in the service we offer them. We have found that this is usually caused by a small number of our broadband customers who continually upload and download extremely large files, which has a detrimental effect on our network.

Our systems show us that you have been continuously exceeding the acceptable usage guidelines for Broadband Max, which is up to 40GB downstream of data transfer monthly. During the month of August you downloaded in excess of 41.72GB.

Therefore, for the sake of all our broadband customers, we must request that you reduce the downstream bandwidth utilised through your cable modem. If you continue to exceed the usage allowance for Broadband Max you will automatically be disconnected. We do not wish to impose these restrictions however we are determined to offer all of our customers a quality Broadband service.

Our broadband service is intended for normal recreational or educational use by individuals and families. Customers who use the services excessively, i.e. beyond the acceptable level of a normal home user, will reduce the performance of the network for other customers.

Thank you for your co-operation in this matter and please do not hesitate to contact us on 1800 924 424 if you require further information.


Yours sincerely

Niall McNally
Customer Service Director

PS: To view the Acceptable Usage Policy for ntl visit www.ntlworld.ie

PixelTrawler

Its 2006... and its a 6 meg line...

It really is time for them to take their head out of their collective asses and increase the 2 year old (approx) 40 gig cap to something resembling an appropriate cap...

oh and provide a bloody way to monitor it if they are going to be so strict...

CiaranC

Theres no way they'll increase the cap, and this isnt being done out of ignorance. Its very deliberate.

There was no issue with contention when we were on the old NTL network. We are the same users doing the same transfer as we always were.

They are combatting the shortcomings of the new setup by removing people doing any kind of transfer at all at the local level. They want only people who dont actually need and wont actually use a 6mb connection on their service, like all irish ISPs.

PixelTrawler

Yeah you're sadly very probably right

Its a fantastic business model though, kicking users off for life and whittling down your market share:rolleyes:

- think of the lost revenue and potential revenue from charging for a higher cap....

DemonOfTheFall

I think they cut me off at 6pm on friday. The modem lost sync all of a sudden and won't reconnect. Thats a big pain in the hole, since they didnt even say they would cut me off. I was only on final notice

tabatha

how many gigs are you allowed download on a 3meg connection?

SeanW

You guys should all go to Esat BT and get their broadband+talk package. It's availale nationwide, price is good you get line rental for €10 (good with the 2MB or 3MB package). The network is dead reliable with zero packet loss. I've never experienced any slowdown because of contention even though it's like 24:1 or something. I guess there aren't that many power users out here.

The only thing that some of you guys might not like are the download caps, on the 2MB service mine is 20GB up and 20GB down.

HeadOfTheManor

aw, poor you lot, you are really hard done by aint ye.....how about we take
a look at the other main providers, shall we?

Smart - excessive users will be contacted and restrictions will be used if
the activity persists - this sounds familiar, doesnt it

Esat - 30Gb then 3c per Mb over - that could work out expensive

Eircom - 30Gb then 3.6c per Mb over - thats could be even MORE expensive for
ye

UTV - 20Gb then 3.5c per Mb over - only 20Gb? ouch

looking at this ill just stick with my NTL connection thank you very much,
and watch it improve each and every day as abusers get cut off, IM LOVIN IT!

Mutant_Fruit

looking at this ill just stick with my NTL connection thank you very much, and watch it improve each and every day as abusers get cut off, IM LOVIN IT!

OMG! Look, someone went < 5% over their cap... CUT THEM OFF! :rolleyes:

HeadOfTheManor

Mutant_Fruit wrote:

OMG! Look, someone went < 5% over their cap... CUT THEM OFF! :rolleyes:

a cap is a cap, going over it is breach of contract

try telling a cop "i was ONLY 5% over the speed limit" and see what he says

Mutant_Fruit

try telling a cop "i was ONLY 5% over the speed limit" and see what he says

I can really imagine a cop pulling you over for 52.5 km/hr. But at least i have an accurate (ish) way of monitoring my own speed. Do NTL provide an accurate (ish) way of monitoring how much you've transferred? If they don't, i think only going 5% over would be bloody great going. Try sticking some paper over your speedometer and trying to go the speed limit. (Note: don't do this on public roads :rolleyes:).

A guy caught going 5km/Hr over the speed limit gets a warning (in the form of penalty points). A guy caught going 100km/Hr over the speedlimit gets jailed/banned from driving (well, he should).

Are you telling me that a guy who goes 3gb over the allowance deserves the same treatment as a guy who goes 300gb over the allowance?

Vadrefjorde

HeadOfTheManor wrote:

looking at this ill just stick with my NTL connection thank you very much,
and watch it improve each and every day as abusers get cut off, IM LOVIN IT!

Yes of course you are right. It will improve beyond belief now that DemonOfTheFall is not pillaging the bandwith and raping it by a whole 7 gigs!!
At least someone is buying the NTL "spin" on contention and heavy downloaders causing the problems they are having.
Fortunately the majority on here have the good sense to see beyond that and are well aware of the real issues. I've left NTL as well of my own choice so your connection should go in to hyperspeed now that i'm no longer using the 20 gigs or so a month!

bk

I have to ask the question, is 40GB a sufficient cap.

I think the answer is clearly no.

Let me put it this way, if you use your 6mb/s connection at full whack, you will break the cap after just about 15 hours.

15 hours!!!!!

That is simply ridiculous and it begs the question, why even bother get the 6mb/s product.

It is like buying a colour TV and only being allowed to watch it in black and`white.

rogue-entity

I have to ask again, how in Gods name do you manage to exceed a 20Gig Cap let alone 40? I mean, unless you are (illegally) downloading loads of movies and music from bittorrent/p2p services, I honestly cannot see how you could download so much. I had my broadband a/c for 11 months and have only managed to pull down 59.88GB (roughly 5Gigs a month).

Buceph

It was posted here before, but check out pandora.com. It's a site that tailors music based on the songs you say you like. It's completely legal, and free. If my dl allowance allowed it I'd have it on 24/7. And it's the same with any radio station.

juliuspret

rogue-entity wrote:

I have to ask again, how in Gods name do you manage to exceed a 20Gig Cap let alone 40? I mean, unless you are (illegally) downloading loads of movies and music from bittorrent/p2p services, I honestly cannot see how you could download so much. I had my broadband a/c for 11 months and have only managed to pull down 59.88GB (roughly 5Gigs a month).

Fair play!

You do realise that 2 years ago eircoms basic broadband had a CAP of 4GB a month!!!
In other words if you were downloading as much as now 2 years ago then YOU too would be breaking the CAP.

Now please tell me in two years time that our current CAPs are fair!

Mutant_Fruit

rogue-entity wrote:

I have to ask again, how in Gods name do you manage to exceed a 20Gig Cap let alone 40? I mean, unless you are (illegally) downloading loads of movies and music from bittorrent/p2p services, I honestly cannot see how you could download so much. I had my broadband a/c for 11 months and have only managed to pull down 59.88GB (roughly 5Gigs a month).

Why is it that people can't understand that different people have differing needs.

My connection is currently capped by Digiweb, yes we were warned, no we didn't get the warning emails in time (NTL email account was down for a while) so i'm perfectly ok with that (well, my sister got a little shouted at as i had explicitly warned her about this a few weeks beforehand :P).

Now, with my connection that's capped to 15kB/sec both ways and becomes unusuable for browsing if i try to download, i have done next to no downloading in the last 18 days or so. Nothing above a few megs. Yet i've still used over 1.26 gigs of allowance. Want to guess how that happened? Yup, it's not torrents amazingly enough.

But besides that, when my connection does get restored to normal again, my usage is once again go well over 1.26 gigs a week, why? Because i *need* to transfer that amount. Just because you only need 5 gigs a month doesn't mean i don't need 5 a week.

If you really don't need 40 gigs a month, then go to a product with a lower cap and leave some allowance for the rest of your fellow users. It's not fair that you hog all that allowance that you don't need.:rolleyes:

NCS

20Gb is very, very easily exceeded through legal downloads alone. I visit several sites offering public domain movies, documentaries and the like. Generally they would be compressed from DVD quality but still, around 90mins to 2 hours video would be around 700Mb or more. If they're uncompressed, that's 4Gb per film. Throw in casual browsing which can easily be 100Mb or more per day and that's another 3Gb gone.

Caps will soon be an anachronism since the media barons are putting pressure on ISPs to deliver TV and PPV content over broadband and there's no way consumers will settle for the days of 56k realplayer playback. For ISPs to be demonising people for making fair usage of the service they're paying for is simple abrogation of their responsibility to either improve their own service or force the hand of those in charge of the infrastructure delivering it.

Blaster99

I somehow don't think making sure people can download TV and movies is a priority for NTL.

CiaranC

I think its hilarious that people come out and say we shouldnt be using the service we are paying for, that we are 'abusers' (doing 50 GB a month!) and that they cant understand how we do that much transfer?

I dont think these people understand the concept of 'broadband'. They have been conned by the marketing spin. For example, Eircom advertise 'ten times the speed of dial-up' - that essentially means ten times the volume of transfer in (roughly) the same amount of time. Of course, the same rationale means that a file of similar size will download much quicker on broadband. Except we have guys here that do less than 5GB transfer a month - they dont download anything! So what do they have broadband for?

Irish ISPs must be full of clueless kids playing counterstrike, boasting to each other about their 6MB broadband that is completely pointless, as they would get almost the exact same performance with a 512k connection. Ditto for web browsing, email, IM, etc, etc, etc

*edit* its already been pointed out that using the service to its capacity for any 16 of the 720 hours in the month will cause breach of the cap. How anyone can defend such a policy is beyond me.

*edit2* Ive just realised that throttling your connection to ISDN speeds (128KB) and maxing that over the month will put you just short of the cap too. Crazy.

So there you have it folks, in order to ensure you dont breach your cap, throttle your connection to 128KB. Works out about about 16KB/Sec.

http://www.martindalecenter.com/AATimeCalc.html

Vadrefjorde

CiaranC wrote:

Irish ISPs must be full of clueless kids playing counterstrike, boasting to each other about their 6MB broadband that is completely pointless, as they would get almost the exact same performance with a 512k connection. Ditto for web browsing, email, IM, etc, etc, etc

Yes you've got it in one. The same people sign up for 6 Meg in the hope that their webpages will load in 1.6 seconds instead of 1.9 seconds... Unfortunately they are probably the majority of NTL's customer base and are quite happy to leave their head stuck in the sand.

FrankGrimes

Vadrefjorde wrote:

Yes you've got it in one. The same people sign up for 6 Meg in the hope that their webpages will load in 1.6 seconds instead of 1.9 seconds... Unfortunately they are probably the majority of NTL's customer base and are quite happy to leave their head stuck in the sand.

Just want to second that opinion, it's all the people who only use their broadband for web browsing and are suckered in by media spin to somehow assume that anyone downloading large amounts of data must be downloading illegal material. These people don't fully understand what the internet has to offer and are not only wasting their money with broadband (the most basic broadband packages would do for most of these people), but are actually making life worse for those of us who want to capitalise on the potential of our 6mb connections, as the ISPs reckon they can get away with outdated caps as most of these people still think they're massive caps cos they just don't get it.

The 'it must be illegal downloading if you're going over your cap' argument is a very ignorant one. For example, xbox live demos and HD trailers could run you 50GB a month alone easily, and the amount of free broadcasts out there is phenomenal.

DemonOfTheFall

If you go on Steam and watch a few trailers then download a demo or 2 you've used 5 gigs before you even realise it.

The demo of dark messiah of might and magic is 2.5 Gigs. A couple of HD trailers is another gig. That's what you could download in an hour or 2 just sitting at the PC.

Pretty easy to hammer the connectino without illegalities

PixelTrawler

Totally agree - xbox demos, pc demos, full pc games from direct2drive, emusic service, hd videos, large software downloads (linux/microsoft etc), skype / voip, streaming video, youtube browsing - all these legal activities eat bandwidth...

Its easy to break the cap legally on ntl.

NTL say their product is designed for educational / recreational activities - well doesnt that pretty much covers the above activities - and none of it illegal.

This idea that 'high' downloaders are abusers is spin and should be recognised and rejected by users. If people only want to download 5 gig a month and are on a 40gig product well then you're on the wrong product... ( Rogue, you're the chairman and admin of a networking society! surely you know theres plenty of ways to chew bandwidth legally )

People on this thread are paying a premium for the 'max' product as they want a fast line and wantthe freedom to use it...

( Im not talking about people hitting in excess of 100 or 150 gig torrenting like mad - although i accept this can be legal too - just people who want to use their fast line for the educational / recreational activities that ntl says its designed for )

Dont forget Apple, Amazon etc are starting to sell movies online now and these will eat bandwidth...