Smart or what?

Vunderground

From Smart's FAQ:

Do Smart Broadband have download or upload limits?
There is no limits on the amount of data that can be downloaded or uploaded however users whose usage is deemed excessive on a regular basis will be contacted and restrictions will be used if the activity persists.

So, there are no limits unless they deem your usage to be excessive and there is no indication of what excessive means. If you phone you get a different answer depending on the tele person you get. Anybody else think this is odd?

Nice grammatical error to compound the thing: there ARE no limits. God!

chorus techy

Did that REALLY require a new thread?!

God! :rolleyes:

Vunderground

Well it seems to me that they may have an uncapped service on offer, but when there are a lot of subscribers and In order to bill you for "excessive" downloads they need some flavour of systems management technology in place - this technology would essentially monitor download amounts and be able to 'map' it to a particular user account. The technology would involve some hardware, software and people to manage it - ultimately this is a cost to their operation.
Most providers would retrofit this kind of technology as the user base increases, as it can be quite costly to implement up front with no guarantee that they will get any discernible benefit in the early days.
Therefore when the amount of signed up users is relatively low you have little pressure on the infrastructure and people can download at will, when more users sign up the demands on the infrastructure increase and the provider may decide that it's time to start 'metering' usage in order to regulate usage and of course charge you for the privelege!!

This I cut and pasted from another site and I think the subject may indeed be worthy of a new thread as it smacks of false advertising. Wonder if many people here work for them?

Gone West

whats excessive? I downloaded 300 gigs one month in the usa, but they didnt deem that excessive.

Vunderground

One Smart guy said that over 8gigs in a month would be too much while another told me that downloading eight or nine movies per month would be grand.
This is why I posted. I'd use the 24gigs per month I get from BT no problem and would love more for less, but they don't seem to be on top of this at all.

TimTim

http://boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=2412589&postcount=78

Amazing how the search funcition works isn't it?

Vunderground

Thanks for the link.

Amazing how few of the people who work for Smart know that.

beller b

Its amazing how little most people in Smart know!!

TimTim

It is really necessary for you to be bumping every thread about smart for some comment of yours?

CuLT

One Smart guy said that over 8gigs in a month would be too much while another told me that downloading eight or nine movies per month would be grand.

...and just where might one download these entirely legal movies?

Because surely a Smart employee wouldn't be giving you an estimate of how much copyrighted material you could illegally download with their service?

gsand

when that guy from smart was here he said somewhere between 50-100gigs would be the max they would allow without stepping in.

beller b

TimTim wrote:

It is really necessary for you to be bumping every thread about smart for some comment of yours?

Is it really necessary for you to be so critical of everyone elses posts??????

causal

Vunderground wrote:

Thanks for the link.

Amazing how few of the people who work for Smart know that.

Therein lies the great irony in his .sig:

Ignorance is a weapon of mass destruction

causal

Vunderground

gsand wrote:

when that guy from smart was here he said somewhere between 50-100gigs would be the max they would allow without stepping in.

That would be great if they gave you that on paper.

causal

In fairness he was quite clear in his post:

GarfieldConnoll wrote:

<snip interesting insight into how providers are charged for their bandwidth>

So what about 'excessive usage'.

Well if you are single handedly increasing our bandwidth requirements we have to do something about it. We're not a charity. So what will we do?

Well we won't cap your downloads, restrict your IP adddress or put you in a 'bad boy pipe' with all the other 'heavy' downloaders.

We'll contact you regarding your downloads, possibly suggest an alternate package (to be decided), possibly suggest how you can stop affecting our aggregate concurrent download requirement (downloading between midnight and 8AM has been used successfully in Scandanavia), or suggest that you find an alternate provider.

If you're not happy with any of the above suggestions then you can break contract and move on to another provider.

Just to reiterate, we won't cap you, but if you don't make any of the changes suggested above, then we should go our seperate ways.

I don't think you can ask for fairer than that, imho it's perfectly reasonable.
After all if you (ab)used their 2Mbps service at full tilt - then on a 30 day month you'd download 648GB (i.e. 2*10^6 *60*60*24*30 / 8)
In any event T&C + AUP are always 'subject to change'.

causal

Vunderground

That's fair enough as far as it goes, but it was posted on an internet message board by somebody who represented themselves as being from Smart and still remains vague and far from legally binding.

To pick up on one point: how many people who download torrents are going to be happy if they are told that they can't download during the day? You could easily leave a torrent and return to find it seedless.

Anyway, I just would have liked to have seen them put a cap of say 50gbs up and downstream in their faq and have done with it. Some of the people I've spoken to on the phone have suggested that 24gbs would be pushing it while others have indicated that much bigger amounts would be OK. I live in the Dolphin's Barn exchage area so they ring about once a week to try and sell the product and when questioned on this cap thing contradict each other with alarming alacrity.

At any rate, people are getting connected now. I only wish I was one of them as it looks like a good deal on paper apart from this odd waffle around download caps which makes it impossible for me, and quite a few people I know, to buy into it. Good luck all who have signed up.

Blaster99

And your options are what exactly?

Nietzschean

Emm this 'woffle' about uncapped download services is not a new thing(esat no-limits anyone?)... it just gives them the ability to be reasonable... Effectively what it probally means is they will contact you if they have a problem, which seems fair enough to me..

mneylon

Unless they define what is "reasonable" and what is deemed "unreasonable" it could lead to issues.
Wouldn't it make more sense to actually define what they are allowing?
Never mind if they have the equipment in place now to monitor the bandwidth usage accurately or not.

The entire Esat no limits issue was due to them not specifying that there was a limit. If they had simply told us that we could download X per month from the outset would we have been as upset when we were cut off ?

Nietzschean

blacknight wrote:

The entire Esat no limits issue was due to them not specifying that there was a limit. If they had simply told us that we could download X per month from the outset would we have been as upset when we were cut off ?

i just said it wasn't anything new, i never said it was great. And smart seem to be saying that if they deem your useage to be excessive they will contact you to discuss it, not send you a letter informing you of termination of contract...

Solair

From what I can see none of the operators, including eircom and BT, are actually profiteering from the caps. Does anyone actually know of anyone who's been charged for excess usage? I mean, BT seems to prefer to suspend your service or call you up and give you a lecture.

The main reason for these caps is to keep their networks stable. No network's built to allow every user to be at 100% capacity all the time. I'm sure that there are clusters of users who will tend to hog resources really badly.

I think a peak and off peak cap would be fairer though. i.e. if you want to download overnight, e.g. major software updates, etc.. the cap should be lifted.

The caps applied by BT in the UK however, are a totally different story.

Broadband Basic (1mbit) - £17.99 (32.60 euro)/month Cap: 1GB / month !!
BT Broadband (2mbit) - £24.99 (45.28 euro)/mth Cap: 15GB/month
BT Yahoo (2mbit) - 26.99 (48.91 euro)/mth Cap: 15GB
BT Yahoo (2mbit) - £29.99 (54.34 euro)/mth ... Cap: 30GB

I fail to see the point of the basic package. It's pricy and pretty crap.

"1GB inclusive monthly usage allowance, ideal if you want fast internet and email access but don't want to download or send large files such as video clips. If you go over 1GB then charges apply as follows: £4 (5.92eur) for more than 1GB, £8 (11.85eur) for more than 3 GB, £12 (17.78)for more than 6GB."

To be fair to the Irish ISPs none of them are quite that nasty!

dahamsta

Solair wrote:

Does anyone actually know of anyone who's been charged for excess usage?

UTV disable access by default, but if you set it up to allow overages, they do charge for them. Of course the user has control, but I would say that when the user chooses to go over their cap, UTV is profiteering with major overpricing. Bandwidth is expensive in Ireland, but it's nowhere near that expensive.

adam

iano

Darth Bobo wrote:

And smart seem to be saying that if they deem your useage to be excessive they will contact you to discuss it, not send you a letter informing you of termination of contract...

Yes, but you are far more tied into Smart. If IOL cancelled your contract, you could always dial up someone else.
If Smart cancel, you could be left with no broadband, no phone service and no easy way of getting one (Where is the seamless procedure for reverting to Eircom/BT/UTV from Smart LLU?)

steve-hosting36

Bandwidth is not really that expensive in Ireland, typically less than 10 euro per Mbps more than equivalent transit in London or Amsterdam, hardly a huge premium...

dahamsta

Have to admit it's been a while since I tried to bandwidth in Ireland!

Out of curiosity, do they peer in INEX? Someone told me recently that one of the larger Irish ISP's peer in LINX but not INEX, but I can't remember who it is (or was).

adam

steve-hosting36

Yes, Smart peer at INEX, you're probably thinking of NTL, who are installing upgraded links to be able to peer at INEX.

iano

dahamsta wrote:

Someone told me recently that one of the larger Irish ISP's peer in LINX but not INEX, but I can't remember who it is (or was).

Don't know if you would consider them a "larger Irish ISP" but UTV have only one route (out through Energis in the UK). No INEX.

steve-hosting36

Hadn't even thought of them, but yes, they are not INEX members and only peer in the uk. That said, they dont run a network here either, but use Energis.

Blaster99

Cablesurf, hardly large either, don't seem to connect to INEX either. But we still like them...

steve-hosting36

Anyone got a tracert from cablesurf to say, boards.ie?

Blaster99

This is from IrishWAN SE that uses Cablesurf:

10 39 ms 83 ms 17 ms fe1-jun-telecity.cablesurf.com [83.220.200.126]

11 * 15 ms 15 ms fe-cablesurf.servecentric.com [212.147.128.33]
12 50 ms 18 ms 16 ms fe-0-3-1-gc-jun147.servecentric.com [212.147.128
.2]
13 22 ms 18 ms 16 ms so-4-1-2.ar1.dub1.gblx.net [64.211.206.97]
14 38 ms 26 ms 84 ms so6-0-0-2488M.ar2.LON3.gblx.net [67.17.66.2]
15 40 ms 29 ms 29 ms Level-3public-peering.ge-5-0-0.ar2.LON3.gblx.net
[208.51.239.162]
16 31 ms 28 ms 42 ms ge-10-0.ipcolo1.London1.Level3.net [212.187.131.
7]
17 39 ms 45 ms 40 ms 80.253.124.21
18 44 ms 45 ms 41 ms 82.195.128.7
19 51 ms 44 ms 44 ms boards.ie [82.195.136.36]