QOTD: How Much Would You Pay for Uncapped Net?

$50 Why should I pay extra for uncapping my bandwidth. I think that if the ISP can't support the traffic then STOP offering speeds that they CANNOT sustain. I prefer a slower transfer with unlimited usage.

ISPs should charge customers based on speed and NOT quantity as is the precident. What is happening now is ISPs, such as TWC, are trying to stimulate new 'growth' by changing the market pricing structure in a time where clients can ill afford them to.
There is talk that this is aimed at controlling intellecual property but, there are already ways and means of doing that without crippling the global communications network.
If ISPs wish to stimulate new growth in the market then they should introduce new technologies or features that command a higher price from the customers. They should not go back on existing services and reduce functionality to get more profit from the customer. If they want to use capped services then they should do so as has been done up until now and, offer discounted services with the caps whilst maintaining the existing un-capped services at existing pricing structures (obviously adding any inflationary costs and removing any cost-cuts they are able to pass on to the customer).

Bandwidth is already capped when they rent you the line - a 10mb connection can only download so much in a day, after all. So why should I want to pay extra to get what I'm already paying for?

I much prefer the way Virgin in the UK do it. Once you hit a certain limit at peak times, you get throttled for a period of time - off-peak, fill your boots.

Don't forget, that bottom line all they want is some way to squeeze extra cash, and as long as they think they can get away with it, the longet this farce continues.

Can someone explain something please? Is there an ISP in the UK that does offer unlimited, not capped, not throttled and reliable connection? I've been with BT, Homechoice, Pipex, Sky, Bulldog (before Pipex bought them out) and now am with Virgin. They all pretty much suck... The best so far was Bulldog but they are now owned by a company that sent me a letter saying that if I won't stop DLing over xxx amount of GB they will throttle me to a standstill (that was on unlimited, 8Mbps connection). So...
1. BT - expensive, rather slow, quite reliable
2. Homechoice (does not exist anymore?) - total crap. When you watch TV-on-demand, the Internet drops to about 36kbps (both ways)
3. Pipex - quite good but now throttled and capped and what not...
4. Sky - seemed to be good but somehow slow
5. Bulldog - best so far, reliable, decent speeds, no throttling or capping (changed it when I moved house)
6. Virgin - Horrible connection, throttled, annoying customer service and since they have started to introduce 50mbps service in my area we get disconnected at least once a day... If not for the speed (which you do get sometimes) and reassuring from their Engineer (who was the best engineering I've seen) as soon as the switch-over to 50mbps equipment finishes (might take a couple of months) it will be finally good. So... to answer the QOTD: I would personally pay up to £40 a month for whatever it takes to get me an ethernet socket (BT/Line+ADSL or cable or whatever) but only if the service is not throttled, uncapped (I never buy capped ones) and reliable. I am with virgin only for the speed and that it is not my broadband - I share it from my flatmate.

Be and O2 do unlimited lines, and I don't think they throttle any of it. Only down side is they only do copper wire, no fibre.

Bhamid is correct. 'Be' I believe have a limit of 10TB or something crazy like that. So no way you'll ever reach their limit. The connection's pretty reliable, and the only problems we've had were not Be's fault but BT's fault - we kept getting disconnected(fixed now).
What I have realised, however, is that even though I'm about 500meters from a BT exchange my speed loss is pretty high. I dont get anymore than 1.85MB/s, about 15mbps(router connected at 16-17mbps), when I should be getting 24mbps.
But I really cant complain considering the deal Americans are getting; 'Be' only charge £17.5/month(about $30/month) so its a really good deal.

www.bethere.co.uk

Im with be, in my old house i got 22mbp/s i was 200yds from the exchange, I guess you have to live in the exchange to get 24meg.....

The service from be has been excellent (apart from the ridiculous process to move house and keep your email address, which is being sorted i believe) and the price is £22/month including fixed ip, webspace, emails... Whats more, if the email servers go done in the month you get all your email package money back and get paid for service downtime... in january i even got a month half-price because it was my birthday!

The ISPs are quite happy to offer speeds of "up to" whatever. If you multiply users by speed then you will almost certainly find that the ISP cannot saatisfy everyones' offered speed. This is because the whole "up to" scenario is a scam. So, you cannot get your paid for speed all the time.

Now, the ISPs (in the USA at least) want to increase their revenue by introducing caps with charges for exceedence. But, wait a minute, has their operating cost changed in any way? Probably not - so the increase is down to pure, unadulterated greed.

Having said that, I have had a solid "up to" 8mbps connection for over two years now with no issues whatsoever.

I am with Be as well Have been using for around 2 years now. Best I have found so far. It is not 100% reliable but good enough for me. Also now You can select profile for standard, reliability or speed as well as gaming option on or off. You can change this up to 6 times a month on Your profile on their website. I just found out about this yesterday. I changed from standard to speed and gaming option on. Speed went up from 12/1.3 Mbps to 14/1.4 Mbps down/up and ping times sligly improved tested by speedtest.net and that is 900 yards away from central. If You need reliability You can select reliability option for cost of some speed. Download speeds always good does not throtle even if You heavy downloading at peak periods. I sometimes download 50+ GB per day.
If somebody is interested send me PM with Your e-mail and I will refer You too Be, they will send You an e-mail and If You sign up both of us will get month for free.
You also can get static IP free of cost if You want to host Your own web, ftp or mail server.

There's a difference between what I think I should be paying for uncapped internet, and what i think the ISPs should be charging.

Here in Australia, I would like to pay around $50-$60 a month for uncapped, but i expect to pay $90-$100. That's AU$ by the way, not $US. And for that money, i expect 24Mbps speeds (minus distance degradation) with a completely limitless cap.

The chance of seeing this in Australia? Nil.

I get "unlimited" broadband with O2. For £10/month I get actual download speeds of 15 Mbps and the service has so far been 100% reliable, I would recommend them to anybody. There is a fair use policy but when I rang them to query this they said not to worry and as long as I didnt download more than 30GB EVERY day I would be fine. I initially wanted to go on the max package for £12.50/month for 20 Mbps but they tested the line and said the max speed I would get would only be around 16.5 Mbps so I should save my money, I wonder if other companies would have said this!

i`m from romania and i have unlimited ~ 15 mbps
and i pay 9 dollars and we have free local and mobile phone with 1000 minutes in the network included , the connections is very reliable so i guess i should feel lucky

virgins 50mb is limited only by your hd space as i downloaded 200gb on the first day and they only plan to release the capping when more users come upto the 50mb service, so please for the love of god dont ruin my broadband by joining it

I've been with Ultility Warehouse for quite a while and I've been paying £22 a month for unlimited up-to-8Mb. I regularly pull down 70GB a month between the WoW accounts, PS3, Wii, MSN, Facebook and actually doing my job working on 3 computers at once and I've never had a single complaint.

Unfortunately I'm looking moving now because my consistent 7Mb has dropped to 5Mb because their LLU kit on the exchange needs replacing (and they're not going to in my area for a while), the 16Mb service has never arrived (again LLU kit) and they or somebody who provides their service is now throttling P2P traffic so my torrents now go no faster than 15Kb/s

When Virgin finish their 50Mb infrastructure upgrade I'll probably switch back - the gf's been with them for a while now and they're so much better than NTL used to be.

RichardScott - That was the original Virgin's plan - not limit the 50m service until they finish the switchover... After having a longer chat with their engineer I recon they came up with this due to massive issues when they switched from 10-to-20M service. So to avoid potential Clients going nuts about the new service "not delivering" they've opted for "free upgrades", "uncapped", "testing" and so on and on... Bottom line is Virgin said themselves that they will cap 50M service as soon as they switch x% of Customers (read: they finish the internal upgrade)... so... sorry mate - enjoy the RapidShare while you can... coz it will end eventually

I think when they say cap they mean throttle in peak times. From what I hear, Virgin throttle heavily during evenings, even now, but its fine late at night and mornings. Or am I completely off?

Kashman - you are correct. Downloads seem to go high after around midnight... During the day it is usually ok-ish... but the afternoon is just horrible... Then again - that's torrent-wise coz if you download updates or something massive we still manage to get around 0.8-2MB/s regardless of the time - which is good but mysterious to say the least... especially knowing that Virgin throttles the connection... I suppose without me running a set of proper tests during various times I cannot say anything for sure though.

I've taken the approach of buying a reliable service which is capped, but one which doesn't penalise me heavily for going over that cap - just a reduction in speed. I download less than 20GB a month so I've gone for that tarrif, but if I know that I am downloading loads of stuff a particular month the I up the cap for that month to 40GB or 100GB. If you are downloading more than that then you probably need to go out more anyway ;o)

There are enough reliable services out there, just read the reviews, and pick on that works for you.

I'm with Virgin which I find to be fine. I have a speed scheduler on my torrents which run midnight to 6 am. Then the rest of the time I'm a fairly light user.

But unlimited broadband is still important to me and I'd pay £40 per month for it to answer the actual question. I'm a heavy user (on the whole) and don't mind paying more than light users. Caps are unacceptable to me and I'm prepared to pay to avoid them, though not excessively. I think £40 is reasonable.

Anyone know why the cap on mobile broadband is so low? For the cheapest o2 package in Ireland its only like 5 gb.

i have 54mbit/s or 6mb/s rapidshare is useless with the 80gb limit, as for placeing throttleing on the 50mb they engineer i spoke too when mine was installed he said it will only happen when they have enough people on the service, otherwise its no point, because few people cant download much compared to thousands downloading a little.

I'm on a fairly slow connection (Virgin's minimum cable speed), on what was a Telewest deal (so not capped or packet-shaped). Download speed is ok, but latency is great, with sub 30ms ping from the gaming services I play on. I'm paying £40 a month, covering TV, phone and mobile in addition to that service. Have had a couple of hours downtime in 8 years. Low latency is more important to what I do than download rate, but even that minimum rate is enough to have two things playing on iplayer whilst playing an MMO (3 PCs on our home network).

Lucky you guys in the UK. I'm in Brazil and I pay around $100 for uncapped 4Mbps.

Im a Be* Unlimited ADSL2+ subscriber here in the UK. For £21.50 a month I have 22.5Mbit downstream and a 2.5Mbit upstream. Totally uncapped, unthrottled or restricted in any way. It's allways fast 24/7 with no slowdown issues at peak times of the day. Im a heavy online gamer, use bittorrent and all the streaming video on demand television sites / apps and will frequently chew through 350-500gb a month in usuage. Be* is totally ok with people using this ammount of internet traffic, most UK isp's are just greedy and want customers to pay over the odds for a service they cannot provide legitimately.

Stop whining people... in zambia we are paying $700 a month for a 1Mbps shared connection (10:1 contention) capped at 160MB per day!

yes but in the uk we have the infrastructre for faster and cheaper broadband yet the companies apart for virgin are actually makeing the faster speeds available

Zen was good, in the pre-dsl2 days. 512kb, 1mb, 2mb all wholly uncapped, truly unlimited service. Now they are capped at 100GB/month. I hit that regularly, which is a PITA given on a 2mb service one could transfer 700GB/month. But the support is 100% 1st class. They do offer an upto 8mb uncapped service, Office8000 Pro, but at £80/month...

Be is probably the last, good, uncapped provider. Some distance to go before reaching Zen level of support, but... at between £17 and £22/month it cant be knocked.

That said, so no task this question on Thinkbroadband.com forums... there are people on there who beleive that *no one* needs uncapped connections, the only people who do are transfering porn or so-called "illegal" donwloads. There again, they also belive that no one needs faster than current network speeds... and they do not understand that higher bandwidth = "doing many things then was even thought possible a decade ago"