What's the logic here?confused3

If I pay a monthly fee for a package with a certain bandwidth, why should I be charged MORE when I download Gb what my ISP deems is excessive??

Are there ISPs out there who don't place restrictions on how much I can download?


It seems to me like I'm buying petrol for my car and then being charged extra for driving it too far. What gives?

The broadband market is similar to the mobile phone market, you have a choice of pay as you go (limited Gb) or any network time (unlimited usage)

In this day and age of video and flash content in some websites will eat up usage allowance in no time at all. Some ISPs offer 2Gb monthly limits as enough, this is no way near enough unless a person just casually browses and emails only.

Does your ISP have a unlimited usage upgrade option at a reasonable price? if so then go with that it´s easier than changing ISPs, if not then rummage around for decent prices and providers, talk to the new ISP customer services beforehand about how to switch over to them, getting your mac address etc, you´ll have to do this if you want to switch ISP with minimal downtime, remembering your new line/ISP will have to be a parrallel speed to the old one. 1mb--->1mb then you can upgrade to a faster speed if needed.

Sorry if it is not too clear.

But if you don´t mind having downtime, you can cease the line with the old provider and start afresh at whatever ISP and speed you want...8...22...24? although you maybe without internet for upto 1 month.

I´ve put some links below where you can see differant ratings for ISPs but most importantly you can find a forum where you can see real peoples opinions and scathing views of ISP etc.

Personally I have an 8mb line unlimited usage with ukonline.net, I´m a little too far from the exchange to get 22mb for only a fiver a month extra. but they are ok for me, sometimes I´ll grab 8gb a day, or sometimes over 100gb a month and sometimes i just browse, they never even bothered me with an sort of unfair usage even though they have that policy.

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/isps.html

http://www.broadband.co.uk/

The watcher - it's all about what is known as contention ratios and aggregation traffic. Internet bandwidth is shared and very expensive. There will never be enough to accomodate all internet traffic so the thresholds are basically there as quota where you pay for your 'equal' share of usage.

Somebody who downloads 100GB of movies a month uses up more bandwidth than someone just checking emails and visiting the village. The second user in principle shouldn't have to pay the same price as the first.

Essentially it's a limitation of the ISP - they simply couldn't afford the bandwidth required to give everyone unlimited access...and even if they could, the customer at the end of the day would have to foot that bill. A provider with a 155MB pipe to the internet with 10,000 subscribers all wanting 8MB each to download GB's of files will soon have a contention ratio giving everyone the equivalent of a 56k dialup.

Service providers simply divide up their bandwidth into chunks and sell you a chunk that meets your criteria. If you cross over into the chunk of a different criteria then you have to pay for it.