do UPC charge for going over the limit

CorkMan

My cousin is over and downloaded 8GB while I was out to his hard drive.

Do UPC charge if I go over a bit at the end of the month? Are they strict?

stanley1

what package are you on?

CorkMan

5mb, 40gb download limit.

CrazyRabbit

CorkMan wrote: »

My cousin is over and downloaded 8GB while I was out to his hard drive.

Do UPC charge if I go over a bit at the end of the month? Are they strict?

FYI...it's not a 'monthly' limit, but a 'previous 30 days' limit.

Not sure if they charge anything over the limit on the lower end packages. I'm on the 30mb package and have on occasion downloaded over 600gb in approx one month. Not a single comment from UPC about it though.

(P.S. not it wasn't 600gb of porn)

Burgo

Im on the 10 meg with them, went over the 250gig limit one month and got a letter stating if it happens again I would be bumped up to the next package,which was the 20meg at the time, no i have gone over it once or twice since then and haven't heard anything about it.

vibe666

the DSL providers usually do rolling 30 day limits, but (at least on the 20/30mbps package) UPC measure from the start to the end of the month.

as for charging, who knows. they usually send out a letter warning of overuse and that they'll bump you to the next highest package which is obviously extra per month AND costs you a €10 upgrade fee.

afaik, you can get it downgraded again for the following month, but that's another €10 fee afaik, so you pay the extra for the month and 20 quid on top of that to get back to where you started.

this is just what i've picked up from other threads though, it might not be totally accurate as my experience started and ended with that first letter in the first month they introduced the 250gb FUP to the top package and since then i've kept (more or less) below it.

Myrddin

CrazyRabbit wrote: »

FYI...it's not a 'monthly' limit, but a 'previous 30 days' limit.

vibe666 wrote: »

UPC measure from the start to the end of the month.

Which of these is it? If its a rolling limit, when does the 30 days start? Your billing date?

CrazyRabbit

EnterNow wrote: »

Which of these is it? If its a rolling limit, when does the 30 days start? Your billing date?

100% guarantee its a over a 30 day period. That came from UPC L2 guy I spoke with.

The measurement at any given time is today+the previous 30 days usage. There is no start date, just 30 day historical total.

vibe666

CrazyRabbit wrote: »

100% guarantee its a over a 30 day period. That came from UPC L2 guy I spoke with.

The measurement at any given time is today+the previous 30 days usage. There is no start date, just 30 day historical total.

well if it is then its something new because in the past they have always sent out their FUP warning letters with a message along the lines of "you have exceeded the fair usage amount in jan, feb, march" or whatever, never "your usage over the last 30 days".

i'm not saying categorically that you're wrong, just that its never been like that up to now, so if they've changed it, it's news to me ad probably to most of the broadband forum as well as i've never seen it mentioned before.

maybe your UPC L2 guy used to work for eircom and just forgot where he was.

and i wouldn't be offering a 100% guarantee if i were you, someone might decide to hold you to it if you're wrong.

moonboy52

The way i guage my monthly allowance is by bill date.

On my bill it says my BB is from the 21st of the month to the 20th of the month.

So, i measure my downloads on that basis.

I never go over 250GB per month on the days i mentioned.

I have never got a letter and i am with them 12 months now.


Does anyone else guage their downloads that way or some other way?

vibe666

CrazyRabbit wrote: »

100% guarantee its a over a 30 day period. That came from UPC L2 guy I spoke with.

The measurement at any given time is today+the previous 30 days usage. There is no start date, just 30 day historical total.

I've had it confirmed by someone in UPC that you are indeed correct about the rolling 30 day limit, although apparently the billing department *may* take into account the calendar month when calculating amounts downloaded which would seem to tie in with my usage, as i'm regularly around the 200-250gb mark from the start to the end of the month, but would have bursts of usage in that time as well as lows at other times which would push me over a rolling 30 days limit at least some of the time.

in any case, it's more than a little unfair for a company that provides no usage stats for its customers to track your usage themselves in a way that it is pretty much impossible for YOU to track at all.

at least with a calendar month you can track your usage via a decent router with a built in bandwidth monitor.

the only time i ever got a letter was in Feb 2009 (for January), the first month they introduced the FUP. up to that point there were several people on here who'd said they were downloading over 600gb per month and not getting anything from UPC (NTL at the time).

CrazyRabbit

FYI to anyone that needs to measure usage. You can install a tiny program called DU Meter which can record daily/monthly usage. It can't handle 'usage in the last 30 days' yet, but it's the best I've found so far.

Burgo

CrazyRabbit wrote: »

FYI to anyone that needs to measure usage. You can install a tiny program called DU Meter which can record daily/monthly usage. It can't handle 'usage in the last 30 days' yet, but it's the best I've found so far.

Yeah i've been using it for the past while and it's quite good.

Karmafaerie

This is why I keep telling people that UPC don't have a set limit.

They only send you out letters if you're in a high contention area.
There are loads of people, as demonstrated by above poster, who do pretty much have unlimited connections, it's only if contention gets high in the area that UPC start with the heaviest users and aske them to stop.
I know a guy whopushes a TB per month regularly and never got so much as a "tsk tsk" from UPC.

It's all about where you live.
So If UPC had a blanked 250 cap, some users would be loosing out.
And as is the law with internet forums 99 times out of 100, it's the people who lose out who complain, while those who benefit don't say anything.

We've no idea how many people download/upload more than 250 GB in a month on UPC.



As for the OP's question, they won't charge you anything extra.
They may send out a letter asking you to be more careful in future.
If it kept happening, they'd bump you up to the next package which would be €10 more per month.

vibe666

CrazyRabbit wrote: »

FYI to anyone that needs to measure usage. You can install a tiny program called DU Meter which can record daily/monthly usage. It can't handle 'usage in the last 30 days' yet, but it's the best I've found so far.

DU Meter is a great little app, but not free after 30 days trial and only any good if you only have a single windows PC on your connection unfortunately.

also, my previous post was me apologising cos you were right about the rolling 30 days usage.

the problem with managing usage is that the only way to do it accurately if you have more than one thing using your connection is to get a router that logs WAN usage.

my house currently has 3 games consoles, 3 desktop PC's, 3 laptops, a NAS and 2 mobiles all using the connection on a regular basis, so it's impossible to keep track of the usage any other way.

CorkMan

how the hell do you need more than 250GB a month? If you have a 1.5 TB hard drive, you would need more than 4 new hard drives every 2 years, without getting rid of the old ones.

I'm back in my own place, i'm on Eircom 3MB for the last month before I get UPC 15 MB (Eircom bastards wanted me to pay out the last month) and am downloading Futurama series, which is 12.5GB and i'm sweating like a mutha f*"*er over the data usage.

dunworth1

CorkMan wrote: »

how the hell do you need more than 250GB a month? If you have a 1.5 TB hard drive, you would need more than 4 new hard drives every 2 years, without getting rid of the old ones.

I'm back in my own place, i'm on Eircom 3MB for the last month before I get UPC 15 MB (Eircom bastards wanted me to pay out the last month) and am downloading Futurama series, which is 12.5GB and i'm sweating like a mutha f*"*er over the data usage.

it would be mostly music, movies and tv programs downloaded/streamed

that would easily go over 250gb a month

a hd movie can be 6-7gb alone
and a tv program can be 1-2gb
an album can be 100mb-600mb+ depending on bit rate.

vibe666

CorkMan wrote: »

how the hell do you need more than 250GB a month? If you have a 1.5 TB hard drive, you would need more than 4 new hard drives every 2 years, without getting rid of the old ones.

I'm back in my own place, i'm on Eircom 3MB for the last month before I get UPC 15 MB (Eircom bastards wanted me to pay out the last month) and am downloading Futurama series, which is 12.5GB and i'm sweating like a mutha f*"*er over the data usage.

Linux ISO's.

nobody here downloads anything illegal, boards.ie doesn't condone that kind of thing.

seriously though, it's not hard at all when you have a 30mbps connection, particularly if you're torrenting as UPC count the data you upload as well as what you download which makes a significant difference.

i actually usually only download about 150gb per month (averaging 5gb downloads per day), the rest is uploaded data and as I use the net a LOT it's not hard at all, trust me.

for example: right now, my home connection manages a 4tb NAS, an VMWare ESX server, 2 desktops, 2 laptops, a netbook, a ps3, wii & xbox and 2 wifi mobile phones (not all online 24/7 but all of those would be online repeatedly over the course of a week).

both myself and my wife use skype video calling regularly and I have at least one remote desktop session going 24/7 (either from home to work or from work to home).

one of those desktop PC's is plugged into my LCD TV as a media centre and is used to stream HD video from the net pretty much daily and another one is being used as an ESX server running 7 VM's with Windows, Linux & OSX on them, all of which need regular updates.

add to that, regular torrenting and its easy to use it all up without trying at all.

people here have a habit of assuming that because THEY don't use the net enough to max out a 250gb FUP that nobody else can/should/would, but that's simply not the case at all.

now is also usually the time when someone will come along an shout 'bandwidth hog' and accuse people like me of using up all of UPC's bandwidth and destroying the internet for everyone else and stamping on puppies and other such fallacies. my response to that would be, if i'm using up all their bandwidth and choking their network, how can that be the case when they're upgrading to 100mbps this month?

Karmafaerie

I live on my own and go through roughly 120-150 usage a month CorkMan.
I'm not a particularly heavy user, but transfer a lot of files from work etc.

Can you imagine if I had a couple of people living with me on the same level of internet usage?

dub45

vibe666 wrote: »

Linux ISO's.

now is also usually the time when someone will come along an shout 'bandwidth hog' and accuse people like me of using up all of UPC's bandwidth and destroying the internet for everyone else and stamping on puppies and other such fallacies. my response to that would be, if i'm using up all their bandwidth and choking their network, how can that be the case when they're upgrading to 100mbps this month?

Well if you get yourself on to the "mysterious" unadvertised punishment product you can apparently do all the choking you want! and to hell with your neighbours that when on the previous "unlimited" product UPC were all concerned about you choking!

Besides its all contention free now anways:rolleyes::rolleyes:

vibe666

dub45 wrote: »

Besides its all contention free now anways:rolleyes::rolleyes:

you're a sucker for advertising dub.

i think once someone from eircom waved their magic contention removing wand we were all sorted anyway, no matter how we connect to the net, yay for eircom, saving us all from the dreaded contention!

come to think of it, i think there's actually less traffic on the roads now too, it must REALLY be working. or is that congestion?

CrazyRabbit

CorkMan wrote: »

how the hell do you need more than 250GB a month? If you have a 1.5 TB hard drive, you would need more than 4 new hard drives every 2 years, without getting rid of the old ones.

I'm back in my own place, i'm on Eircom 3MB for the last month before I get UPC 15 MB (Eircom bastards wanted me to pay out the last month) and am downloading Futurama series, which is 12.5GB and i'm sweating like a mutha f*"*er over the data usage.

I buy a new portable 1TB drive about 10-12 weeks. It's amazing how easy it is to fill them up.

CorkMan

CrazyRabbit wrote: »

I buy a new portable 1TB drive about 10-12 weeks. It's amazing how easy it is to fill them up.

Its at least 80 euros for 1TB hard drive, if you are on 3MB eircom that is paying double for the connection!

Seriously though, I love to download. I never use mp3, only flac and I like to watch Obamas speeches in 720P, which are sometimes over an hour

Only 1 person (me) uses the connection, solely on the this laptop. I look forward to getting chorus, I though 1GB a day was plenty! On 250GB a month I will be downloading DVD after DVD Set (legally of course, I am a millionaire after all )

vibe666

my NAS only has a couple of hundred gb of space left on it now and that won't do me for too much longer, but i need to sort out a viable backup solution for it before i can add more storage. unfortunately it's not an easy task to backup almost 4tb of data.

mfxer

got a letter today about my usage limit(im on 40GB limit), by July 10 I had used 113.333 GB!!!!! How can I check all my data usage for last month and this month, cos I think something isn't right??

In the letter they write that customers in my area is having problems with connections..... bla bla bla

then they request that I reduce my my usage or they bump me on different plan.

I got that, do I need to pay additional charge?? I haven't see last invoice yet so I'm stressed up a bit.(its a first notice )

CrazyRabbit

mfxer wrote: »

got a letter today about my usage limit(im on 40GB limit), by July 10 I had used 113.333 GB!!!!! How can I check all my data usage for last month and this month, cos I think something isn't right??

In the letter they write that customers in my area is having problems with connections..... bla bla bla

then they request that I reduce my my usage or they bump me on different plan.

I got that, do I need to pay additional charge?? I haven't see last invoice yet so I'm stressed up a bit.(its a first notice )

As them to provide an itemised report showing usage. Other than that, all you can do in future is more carefully monitor your usage by installing software such as DUMeter which is mentioned above.