Smart - excessive usage notification..

dub45

hightower1 wrote: »

Well if anyone is changing provider or is connecting with an ISP in future perhaps they will ask a little more about the FUP and bear in mind as long as FUP's are around that its only a guideline and subject to change or enforcement at any time.

But why ask about the fup when it can change instantly? And besides that most csrs will most likely not know whats going on. For example the lads on the Smart forums do not appear to have been aware of the details of the proposed changes even though customers had been written to.

So if I had phoned Smart say three weeks ago and been told our fup covers up to xxxx and now I find that it covers yyyyy - What comeback have I got?
So there is no point inquiring! Who's to say what may happen next week? Even what you are downloading now might appear to be ok but might be outlawed retrospectively if someone somewhere in Smart changes his or her mind!

And by the way there is nothing to stop Smart behaving honourably and ceasing advertising unlimited downloads. Just because they 'can' doesnt mean that they have to!

What should be exercising everyone is that this fup is nonsense. Under proper consumer law an isp should be required to detail what the cap is.

Is there any other area where such uncertainty is permitted:rolleyes:

_Sidhe_

dub45 wrote: »

Is there any other area where such uncertainty is permitted:rolleyes:

Well off the top of my head...




Up to 24mb broadband.

Approxamately 40 matches in a box.

Contents may vary.

Good for up to 40 washes - and then in small print on economy cycle with no staining.

3/Meteor/O2/Vodafone mobile Broadband

As Hightower said showing you one model car while advertising a cheaper models price.

mrquiteaguy

Well,
I am back to monitoring what i download.
Something i havent done since i was joined BT and on a 33k modem.

The freedom and fun of being on unlimited has gone and apprehension has replaced it.

I reckon most people who joined Smart at the start moved from Eircom and Bt for better downloading conditions like myself.

Smart were at the leading edge at one time,now sadly no more.
Upc looks like the new leader to me.

Instead of concentrating on speed,Isps should increase their caps.
Smart, by cutting their cap have totally negated their speed increase/price increase.God help the people who paid out for increasing their speed,i feel sorry for them.They paid for an increase in speed and got a cut in their Cap.
It doesnt make sense,

People are talking about how Smart are facing tough times,equally that applies to broadband customers.

People pay out hundreds for their broadband because they feel they are getting value for it.For most that means entertainment/download value.
You deprive them of that and people are going to question their commitment
to staying with their Isp.

Smart by announcing a fixed cap of 170GB have to me,lost some goodwill of their most loyal customers,have lost competitiveness,have lost value for their different broadband packages.

I would question if this is the act of a company going bravely into the future or has no future?.

We all have good memories of Smart.
Smart needs to make some good decisions regarding the company,regarding its customers.I cant see why the two cant be compatible.

chalkitdown

dub45 wrote: »

But why ask about the fup when it can change instantly? And besides that most csrs will most likely not know whats going on. For example the lads on the Smart forums do not appear to have been aware of the details of the proposed changes even though customers had been written to.

So if I had phoned Smart say three weeks ago and been told our fup covers up to xxxx and now I find that it covers yyyyy - What comeback have I got?
So there is no point inquiring! Who's to say what may happen next week? Even what you are downloading now might appear to be ok but might be outlawed retrospectively if someone somewhere in Smart changes his or her mind!

And by the way there is nothing to stop Smart behaving honourably and ceasing advertising unlimited downloads. Just because they 'can' doesnt mean that they have to!

What should be exercising everyone is that this fup is nonsense. Under proper consumer law an isp should be required to detail what the cap is.

Is there any other area where such uncertainty is permitted:rolleyes:

Why can't rational people see that this imposition of T&C's impacts all negatively?

I suppose we could all be Hightowers..., argue shyte and derail a pertinent point, but I think that the imposition of this NEW cap for all Smart customers is radically different to any T&C's that I signed up for three years ago. In fact, the Smart T&C's allow them to change the terms of their current T&C's in any way they see fit. This only protects business not customers, so why responsible people here are supporting this move is baffling to me.
.
The days when Smart were challenging Eircom is long gone. Now it seems the truth is that any money given to Smart is money given to Eircom. They are no longer the champion of the unconnected.

It is quite amazing how unnecessarily overcomplicated this thread has become.

As i see it:
1. We are screwed from the start becasue although the bandwidth capacity is available internally, all irish isps with the exception of upc pay way over the odds for bandwidth transit to foreign carriers. As the average user starts to download/upload more then caps will start to drop progressively to compensate for excessive transit costs.

2. The reason our isps pay more is becasue they are all small players (bt *should* be able to negotiate cheaper peerage/transit than the rest and possibly are but we dont see the benefit). upc have some european presence and this enables them to have bargaining power and pay much much less for transit. hence the very high user cap they impose, which imho is least likely to drop given that the next factor determining caps, their local network, is still very far from saturated (fibre ftw)

So are magnet the only ones not imposing a cap now? , they wont be for much longer. Bandwidth costs will dictate this as average usage steadily increases. Until a major telco with global transit cost bargaining power buys eircom and invests heavily in the copper network we are doomed to ever lowering caps.

_Sidhe_

chalkitdown wrote: »

Why can't rational people see that this imposition of T&C's impacts all negatively?

I suppose we could all be Hightowers..., argue shyte and derail a pertinent point, but I think that the imposition of this NEW cap for all Smart customers is radically different to any T&C's that I signed up for three years ago. In fact, the Smart T&C's allow them to change the terms of their current T&C's in any way they see fit. This only protects business not customers, so why responsible people here are supporting this move is baffling to me.
.
The days when Smart were challenging Eircom is long gone. Now it seems the truth is that any money given to Smart is money given to Eircom. They are no longer the champion of the unconnected.

This is really simple.

Smart's T&C's are the exact same.

No change.

Identical.



They are enforcing a condition that they didn't before.
They haven't changed.

pwd

By advertising heir service as unlimited, and then having an fup described in the terms and conditions, they are using bait and switch tactics imo.

Has anyone cancelled their subscription because of this, before the end of their contract?
If so, did they allow you to cancel the service before the end of the contract without penalty?

Someone referred to the "free calls for life" advertising campaign, and the later disconnections without warning. Just to clarify: Smart did not disconnect the phone lines at that time. They were disconnected by eircom, reasonably enough, because Smart were over six months in arrears with their payments.

hideous ape

The basic problem is that without a clear line in the sand people haven't a clue where that line is...this would not be allowed in almost any other comparable type of business.

Imagine if the mobile phone networks just said, sure tear away there at the old "unlimited" bill pay phone calls but we'll jump in at some undefined point to hit you with a bill for overstepping our unknown mark. You were having a laugh calling Spain for an hour just after you called someone in South Africa.

Imagine if Sky started saying that from now on there would be a Fair Usage Policy to how much time or the amount of a certain type of TV you could watch but that will be undefined. You'll discover this only after the fact. Nuts I watched 20 World Cup matches, now I'm hit with a increased bill for breaking my unknown Sky Sports usage policy. Why did I use up so much of my limit watching crap late night sports...oh well no football or rugby for me.

It's like having a road with a guaranteed "no speed limit" but then legally arresting someone for travelling at 97.3 MPH???

Legally and contractually define it or FUP off!

d22ontour

hideous ape wrote: »

The basic problem is that without a clear line in the sand people haven't a clue where that line is...this would not be allowed in almost any other comparable type of business.

Imagine if the mobile phone networks just said, sure tear away there at the old "unlimited" bill pay phone calls but we'll jump in at some undefined point to hit you with a bill for overstepping our unknown mark. You were having a laugh calling Spain for an hour just after you called someone in South Africa.

Imagine if Sky started saying that from now on there would be a Fair Usage Policy to how much time or the amount of a certain type of TV you could watch but that will be undefined. You'll discover this only after the fact. Nuts I watched 20 World Cup matches, now I'm hit with a increased bill for breaking my unknown Sky Sports usage policy. Why did I use up so much of my limit watching crap late night sports...oh well no football or rugby for me.

It's like having a road with a guaranteed "no speed limit" but then legally arresting someone for travelling at 97.3 MPH???

Legally and contractually define it or FUP off!

Analogy is pretty poor and you know it.


Smart always had a fup no matter how you try to paint it , it was always there.For a couple of years they didn't enforce it but now they choose too.o we have lots of moaning from possibly huge downloaders who don't think 6 gigs a day isn't a fair limit ?There is only so much shiz you can download a day without wasting an ips bandwidth, no ?

6 gigs a day is more than plenty for anyone and just because a select few were greedy enough to download 500gigs+ a month has led us to this scenario.Your pathetic dlin of shiz has forced Smart to take this stance against all of it's customers when in fact it was only a select amount who were bandwidth whorin just because they thought it was ok to do so. :rolleyes:

There isn't enough shiz on the internet to interest me to download over 6 gigs a day, what's your excuse ?

jor el

_Sidhe_ wrote: »

They are enforcing a condition that they didn't before.

They always enforced it, it was just a lot more lenient before. They've changed the FUP, and introduced a definitive cap of 170GB. This is a change.

Anyone annoyed by it should pack up and leave Smart. There are ISPs with larger than 170GB caps.

dub45

jor el wrote: »

They always enforced it, it was just a lot more lenient before. They've changed the FUP, and introduced a definitive cap of 170GB. This is a change.

Anyone annoyed by it should pack up and leave Smart. There are ISPs with larger than 170GB caps.

But what about people who are in the early days of a 12 month contract?
Somebody could have phoned Smart in the last couple of weeks and asked about their fup. The csr says yes we have one but as long as we have been in existence it hasn't been put into practise. 'Grand so', says the new customer 'sign me up'. So the new customer signs up on the basis of historically correct information given by the csr in good faith. Now even while that csr was giving that information things were changing in Smart to which many people were not privvy.

So where does that leave the new customer? It leaves the customer at the beginning of a contract and very unhappy with Smart.

jor el

dub45 wrote: »

But what about people who are in the early days of a 12 month contract?

Well, you could try and argue that this is a change to the T&Cs, it's certainly a modification (and 170GB was never ever mentioned before), therefore nullifying your contract if you don't agree with the new term.

Alternately, keep exceeding the 170GB, and Smart will probably end it for you.

kaimera

jor el wrote: »

Well, you could try and argue that this is a change to the T&Cs, it's certainly a modification (and 170GB was never ever mentioned before), therefore nullifying your contract if you don't agree with the new term.

Alternately, keep exceeding the 170GB, and Smart will probably end it for you.

which we'll be doing it looks like.

fail.

hideous ape

d22ontour wrote: »

Analogy is pretty poor and you know it.


Smart always had a fup no matter how you try to paint it , it was always there.For a couple of years they didn't enforce it but now they choose too.o we have lots of moaning from possibly huge downloaders who don't think 6 gigs a day isn't a fair limit ?There is only so much shiz you can download a day without wasting an ips bandwidth, no ?

6 gigs a day is more than plenty for anyone and just because a select few were greedy enough to download 500gigs+ a month has led us to this scenario.Your pathetic dlin of shiz has forced Smart to take this stance against all of it's customers when in fact it was only a select amount who were bandwidth whorin just because they thought it was ok to do so. :rolleyes:

There isn't enough shiz on the internet to interest me to download over 6 gigs a day, what's your excuse ?

Poor analogies or not your missing the point...I don't care if Smart enforce a 5GB or 5TB limit so long as they clearly state that this service has a set usage policy which cannot exceed 5GB or 5TB. Fine I can read it, I can then decide if thats acceptable to me or not before signing up. What most people are giving out about is that we are expected to sign up to 12 month contracts with no clearly defined limit. It may be 170GB today in three months time it could be 100GB. I kinda like to know what level of service I'm signing a 12 month contract for...don't you?

As for the amount I download each month I think I barely hit 15GB in recent months. This month I think I have probably downloaded 4GB maybe a bit more cause I streamed a few Confederation Cup matches but other than that just browsing. I've never been a heavy downloader but I still want any legally binding contract that I sign to be clearly defined.

_Sidhe_

hideous ape wrote: »

The basic problem is that without a clear line in the sand people haven't a clue where that line is...this would not be allowed in almost any other comparable type of business.

Imagine if the mobile phone networks just said, sure tear away there at the old "unlimited" bill pay phone calls but we'll jump in at some undefined point to hit you with a bill for overstepping our unknown mark. You were having a laugh calling Spain for an hour just after you called someone in South Africa.

Imagine if , now I'm hit with a increased bill for breaking my unknown Sky Sports Sky started saying that from now on there would be a Fair Usage Policy to how much time or the amount of a certain type of TV you could watch but that will be undefined. You'll discover this only after the fact. Nuts I watched 20 World Cup matchesusage policy. Why did I use up so much of my limit watching crap late night sports...oh well no football or rugby for me.

It's like having a road with a guaranteed "no speed limit" but then legally arresting someone for travelling at 97.3 MPH???

Legally and contractually define it or FUP off!

Terrible analogy.

The reason any internet provider is allowed to use FUP's is because they don't charge you for going over.
Just warn.

dub45

_Sidhe_ wrote: »

Terrible analogy.

The reason any internet provider is allowed to use FUP's is because they don't charge you for going over.
Just warn.

Could you point us to where this is written down and tell us who is the authority for it?

watty

This is why Comreg / ASAI must ban Woolly FUPs. If there is a cap it must be defined. I've pointed out from the beginning that "no cap" residential packages with woolly are fantasy.

Unless you are on a zero contention BUSINESS package with no FUP, then really claim "no contention", "Contention free", "Unlimited" or No Cap is not 100% straight.

Some companies have no FUP or Cap "as such", instead they throttle or shape your traffic all the time on a contention basis so that lighter users are not unfairly slowed by your traffic, i.e. the speed depend both on current connection contention and is decreased by your total traffic usage.


Any ISP can pretty much dream up any T&C and FUP they like as long as it doesn't inherently contravene EU /Irish Law. Nothing to do with their choice of ignoring, charging, disconnection, throttling or shaping traffic over some particular amount.

Onikage

You left out "up to 24MB etc" but apart from that, spot on.

But who to go to? ASAI can't ban anything. Comreg can't seem to even define broadband correctly.

Eire_prince

smart hasnt done itself any favours by kicking loyal customers in the teeth over this fiasco, firstly they send out emails to people who reached the quota. was a bolt out of the blue considering smart advertised and contractually entered it into contracts which are legally binding. now to turn and do this without informing it customer of changes to download limits.

I read a posting in their forum some guy gave a good view, he said that it like buying a car and the dealer gave you loads of extra to push the sale, then when he started having a bad time, the guy came and took everything he gave you back. not a good way to do business.

years ago smart took the Broadband market by storm but now sadly they lost the bull share of the market to rivals

watty

Onikage wrote: »

You left out "up to 24MB etc" but apart from that, spot on.

But who to go to? ASAI can't ban anything. Comreg can't seem to even define broadband correctly.

They (ASAI) can ban adverts.

Comreg has greater powers and can create a Statutory Instrument that becomes law when the Minister and Chairman sign it. I have one here only made this last May 2009.

Eire_prince

it is not the first time smart has changed thing in order to suit themself and leaving it customer in mire.

ok to say the FUP was in the T & C's, for years smart has never bothered it backside bout heavy downloaders, then all of a sudden they start this garbage. wondering if it trying to tempt potential investor, oh we got a cap limit we can make money if people goes over it, that how you can get your money back by investing in us, we be like ryanair and charge for goodie made up to be extras.

how bout charging for watching video online

what next to turn round and say we didnt mean there no contention, most of us at smart thinks there is contention.

due to this carry on I have decided like another smart customer to reduce my speed to the lowest speed needed, might end up doing away with the service fed up with constant changes.

one way to look at smart behaviour is an old chinese proverb how long is a piece of string at the end of the day it has a beginning and an end

Spear

http://www.asai.ie/complain.asp

Takes only 1 min to fill in the form. Broadband advertising in general, not just Smart, is terrible in this country and won't be fixed if you don't complain.

Eire_prince

have posted to them ASAI have also reduced my speed as well, it be a sad day if smart doesnt listen to it loyal customers, am actually thinking of stasying with 3 mobiles but upping to their 30GB pack will save me €30 a month and means I can take BB with me and my laptop

JohnC.

Eire_prince wrote: »

have posted to them ASAI have also reduced my speed as well, it be a sad day if smart doesnt listen to it loyal customers, am actually thinking of stasying with 3 mobiles but upping to their 30GB pack will save me €30 a month and means I can take BB with me and my laptop

So in order to fight against a 180GB cap, you are switching to a 30GB cap? And moving from broadband to pretend broadband?

Eire_prince

becoming a lot less competitive and that I never really download that much, but what the use of having loadsa speed if it uses up your allowance quicker.

at the moment I pay €45 for a phoneline and broadband which the phone is never used and I am downloading far less than I thought, now saying if there was a need for unlimited download then I would keep it, but as there no unlimited use,

jor el

4tothefloor wrote: »

hope it's not true as it will be a load of hassle switching :mad:

It's actually surprisingly easy.

Smart have been in financial difficulty, and looking for new backers, for quite a while now. They've been teetering on the brink of bankruptcy since the last debacle. More here.

Spear

Sky and others have been threatening to break into the Irish market for a while, a buyout would be very likely.

Cabaal

Lads, unless it hits the media (if it ever does) any further posts about speculation regarding Smarts future will be deleted

The rumor mill helps nobody!

watty

Spear wrote: »

Sky and others have been threatening to break into the Irish market for a while, a buyout would be very likely.

Smart, Magnet and BT together would be no use to Sky.

Sky have been talking for years, but conditions (eircom exchange & backhaul pricing, not just LLU rental) are not right.

broin

Thanks for the thread, everyone.

I switched from Clearwire (handy when moving flats, cheap, crap) to Smart because of all the positive, enthusiastic threads and recommendations on places like boards.ie. I don't have a tv, download everything, stream radio, play with Linux, download games, and regularly upload and download big PDFs for work, and expected my usage to be comfortably ~200Gb. When I looked at who could provide that for a reasonable price and with good service, Smart looked like the best option.

So two months in to this unlimited agreement, the rug has been pulled out from under me. Very disappointing.

Eire_prince

I reduce my service to the minimal speed possible due to the cap limit, as I am about to move house hopefully, thinking of leaving smart all together.

yesterday I got a phone call from a courier company, saying they have a parcel for me, turns out to be another brick from smart (thomson speedtouch modem), now why would I need another modem when I complain about that modem. ey spear did they send you one as well when you downgraded.

now considering smart has money trouble, is it smart to send out modems via couriers when it not required

jor el

When you downgraded, you may have started a new 12 month contract too. Changes to your plan usually do this. You should check into that if you're planning to move soon.

Boston

I also got this email. I have an unreal amount of loyalty to this company, and I've been with them pretty much since the start. I was with UTV and eircom prior to smart and at the time simply having a reliable service was a god sent. But this email has shaken all that. I thought it was a complete mistake and when I looked at the graphics I found that on two days over the last month I'd downloaded a combined 90 Gigs, on the rest of the days the downloads where pretty much zero/ a gig or so. I've no real idea what caused the excessive download, perhaps something was failing and re-downloading over and over, regardless it demonstrated that smart hadn't actually looked at my usage pattern, but rather had blanket emails me. I am now contemplating switching to magnet or upc, both offer a cheaper, faster service.

partyatmygaff

No difference afaik UPC and Magnet both have FUPs.

But I am genuinely intrigued, how the f*ck do you manage to even download that much???

Downloading say 220GB a month on a computer

Say 20GB were for browsing and were deleted as temporary files so thats out.

200GB per month of downloads? What the hell are you downloading???

Say you delete 20GB of those 200GB as they're updates or other temporary stuff.

180GB per month that you store on your hard drive x 12 months =

2.160 TB per year of stuff that you store for more than a month.

Seriously wtf?

Mountjoy Mugger

Streaming TV - RTE and TV3 - XBOX movies (HD and SD), game updates and demos. Software updates, betas.

Lots, really.

You don't have to be doing warez all the time ye know?

Learn about the internet before you show yourself up!

Boston

partyatmygaff wrote: »

No difference afaik UPC and Magnet both have FUPs.

But I am genuinely intrigued, how the f*ck do you manage to even download that much???

Downloading say 220GB a month on a computer

Say 20GB were for browsing and were deleted as temporary files so thats out.

200GB per month of downloads? What the hell are you downloading???

Say you delete 20GB of those 200GB as they're updates or other temporary stuff.

180GB per month that you store on your hard drive x 12 months =

2.160 TB per year of stuff that you store for more than a month.

Seriously wtf?

I download that much because I don't pay attention to the volume of data I download. Thinking back on it I can probably attribute the 90 Gigs to grabbing a massive SVN repository onto two home computers. I think usuage patterns have changed since the broadband has been introduced in Ireland and as the web itself becomes more multi media intensive. I've personally over a gig of data in my Gmail account. This would have seemed ridiculous in the good old 10MB limit days. Judging by the constant drive to provide more and more bandwidth to the home user, I can only conclude people are using it.

partyatmygaff

I do the same, I'm not computer illiterate like but surely 220GB or something crazy like that would mean you are constantly downloading/streaming all month.


That said, I actually don't know how much I use per month, anyone remember that page you could go and check for BT?

Edit:

Yeah just checked, I'm shocked though, Since 2003 I've only downloaded/uploaded a total of 1.5TB and this month only 20GB 15GB Download / 5GB upload.

There has been traffic on my line for 3454080 minutes aswell which is 57568 hours which is only 2399 24 hour days of downloading/uploading.


Strange

jor el

partyatmygaff wrote: »

I do the same, I'm not computer illiterate like but surely 220GB or something crazy like that would mean you are constantly downloading/streaming all month.

No, depends on the speed. At 20Mbps, you could download 220GB in 24 hours. I do agree that running your broadband at full speed for 24 hours would be excessive, but the limit of 170GB can be used in just 40 minutes a day, for 30 days, at 20MBps.

hightower1

jor el wrote: »

No, depends on the speed. At 20Mbps, you could download 220GB in 24 hours. I do agree that running your broadband at full speed for 24 hours would be excessive, but the limit of 170GB can be used in just 40 minutes a day, for 30 days, at 20MBps.

Although thats worded to sound like something every day its not really, considering you would have to be getting a PERFECT connection with no loss, have an uploading source again running another PERFECT connection and capable of uploading at 20mb, be doing nothing else on your connection that whole time and then doing this every single day for a month?

While the maths are correct the actual use of a residential connection like that is insane.

Boston

So how can they sell a 20Mbit product? Obviously someone needs it? If I had a symmetric line I'd probably be transferring huge files from work to home and back again regularly. My whole usage pattern would change.

stephenc_ie

Boston wrote: »

So how can they sell a 20Mbit product? Obviously someone needs it? If I had a symmetric line I'd probably be transferring huge files from work to home and back again regularly. My whole usage pattern would change.

I think the idea for that type of usage might be to push users like that to the business products - which seem to be well worth the money!

Boston

That all well and good if a company is paying.

Eire_prince

to censorship the forum, all form of criticism re the capping are being deleted and if user repost them they are getting banned for a week and if you post a complaint via the contact us option then you are banned for good, this is what I posted earlier and on each time it was deleted. pity smart cant delete it in here nor ban me
someone is getting touchy

this is the second time that I posted a reply and twice it been removed.

what are smart afraid of, as smart has brought this complaints upon themself, as it is a major change in customers contract, surely smart should have informed everyone of changes to the FUP, rather than just to those who went over the limit.

as this affected all customers, and it a con as broin states and so we all assumed that smart was unlimited download, I to complained to the ASAI and got the generic letter stating an investigation was underway.

but due to the disappointing level of customer service shown by smart in this matter, I have decided to withdraw from smart telecom, it is not the first time smart has shown disregard to customer service and doubt that it be the last time

stephenc_ie

hi john,

as I posted on the smart forum - they exist for support of your smart telecom service. You posted the same message 3 times and it was removed each time for the same reason. You were clearly not understanding this point.

you are correct in that you are completely free to air any opinion that you have on boards.ie.

I wish you well with your new ISP.

Stephen.

Moriarty

jor el wrote: »

.. but the limit of 170GB can be used in just 40 minutes a day, for 30 days, at 20MBps.

Saying that is rather disingenuous in general. Ignoring the existence or not of a FUP, or terms and conditions etc specific to this case for a moment.. I'm sure you could rack up a small fortune in kilowatt hours with the ESB connection in to your home over a couple of hours if you were so inclined, but that's not how the network is designed to be used.

The idea of higher bandwidth services is mainly so that you don't end up waiting for your broadband to catch up with what you're doing. The majority of net users don't download large amounts of data per day or per month and that's what these products are designed around - that's a reasonable assumption on the part of service providers. High bandwidth broadband is being offered for fast downloads of smallish amounts of data so that the internet can be used in real time (stream music or youtube videos or video chat, or grab school/college/work-related stuff, or using bandwidth intensive web applications.. the list goes on) by a couple of people in the house at the same time, without having to go and make a cup of tea in the middle of doing whatever you want to do.

Home broadband services in general aren't designed to appeal to "heavy users". The reason home broadband is so cheap is because the service providers can contend the service in the access network, as that's the most expensive side of the network to maintain and upgrade comparatively. If you remove their ability to contend the access network because everyone is constantly saturating their broadband connection, you increase the cost of providing the service greatly. Those costs will always be passed on in one way or another.

bk

I disagree Moriarty, most other developed western countries manage to deliver high quality, high speed and high usage broadband services to consumers so why can't we?

You have fibre to the home, with unlimited caps all over Europe and the US, without any issues and typically for less then we pay.

It seems that we have gotten so used to being screwed here in Ireland, we now think it is the norm for everyone.

We should be demanding better, not apologising for the bad actions of a company.

jor el

Moriarty wrote: »

Saying that is rather disingenuous in general.

I don't agree. A broadband service that is in excess of 10Mbps is ideal for those who want to download large files, such as HD video, as you can get it quickly. Having a fast speed means you can download more of them on a daily/weekly/monthly basis, and will require more and more bandwidth. Putting a low cap (relative to the speed) is a problem, in my opinion.

I know FUPs and caps are in place so as to make the service usable by all, and to prevent anyone from hogging all the bandwidth, but maxing your 20Mbps line for 40 minutes a day is not going to effect anyone else, or even for four 10 minute stints in the day.

I don't think anyone needs 20Mbps for streaming services like RTE Player, Youtube, etc either. Why offer something that you don't want people to use. You get the same experience and same cap from a lower speed product, at a cheaper price.

Cabaal

Moriarty wrote: »

. I'm sure you could rack up a small fortune in kilowatt hours with the ESB connection in to your home over a couple of hours if you were so inclined, but that's not how the network is designed to be used..

Interesting one to compare alright, I believe the ESB T&C's actually state that if you exceed a certain amount of usage its in breach of the T&C's.

Is this not a FUP also?
I don't see anyone complaining about the ESB, but then the average user will never hit this type of usage the same as the average DSL user won't hit 500GB or even 300GB

Mountjoy Mugger

I love this expression "the average user".

IMO, the average user won't pay for the fastest package available, but all are stuck with the same FUP.

Eire_prince

Quote:
Originally Posted by Moriarty
. I'm sure you could rack up a small fortune in kilowatt hours with the ESB connection in to your home over a couple of hours if you were so inclined, but that's not how the network is designed to be used..

Interesting one to compare alright, I believe the ESB T&C's actually state that if you exceed a certain amount of usage its in breach of the T&C's.

but at the end of the day smart said unlimited broadband download for a flat rate. full stop this says no matter how much you download we wont charge you an excessive usage fee. and they state that they dont throttle your speed.

now for esb they dont have unlimited consumption flat fee, therefore you pay for what you use, even if you have night saver tariff you actually pay for it slightly higher in standing chargew so at the end of the day ESB actually makes some of the moeny they give in you savings.

I phoned eircom last night to switch back, they say if you have an UAN they are switching for free, so will saving 130 for the reconnection charge as if I was dumping smart