By Will Sturgeon, 27 March 2006 13:10
NEWS
BT is cracking down on heavy internet users who are habitually breaking its monthly download limit, suggesting they either pay more or shop elsewhere for their internet access.
BT has agreements in place with users of its ADSL broadband service that limit them to up to 40GB of downloads per month. However, although the incumbent telco claims to be relaxed on occasional breaches of this limit - and has no automatic blocking in place once a limit is exceeded - it reports some users are taking liberties and regularly downloading up to 200GB each month.
A spokesman for BT told silicon.com: "I think it's fair to characterise these people as broadband hogs. You would have to be downloading pretty much all day everyday to manage that level of downloading."
Now BT has said enough is enough and has contacted 3,200 customers identified as excessive users. The letters offer customers the chance to pay for their excess bandwidth consumption or seek service from another provider.
Last October BT sent a similar letter to 1,800 users and while "a small percentage" of users agreed to a new payment plan to cover their monster downloads, the majority saw their contracts with BT terminated. The spokesman suggested "it would probably be fair to extrapolate out those results" in terms of a prediction regarding the likely outcome of the current crackdown.
Such high levels of downloading are certainly far from typical for the average user and are likely to indicate a heavy diet of large media files such as music or movies.
If these users were downloading music for example, at a rate of 200GB per month they could nearly be filling an iPod Nano twice over every single day - or 50 times over in just one month. That's approximately 50,000 songs.
Comments
There are 7 comments. Join the discussion
1. Harry Bartos
People need to remeber that about 30% of their traffic is overhead. Authentication and encription adds alot of throughput to the lines. The people accused of downloading 200+ gigs probubly are only downloading something like 140 Gigs. Thats just a few dvd's a month and heavy web browsing. Who the Heck is BT is it euro, most ISP's that i have seen offer an unlimited bandwith plan.
2. Victor Stroud
BT HAS ONLY ITSELF TO BLAME FOR MOST EXCESS DOWNLOADS.
THEY USED TO HAVE A "USEOMETER!" BUT IT IS NOWHERE TO BE FOUND NOW.
3. Trevor
With more TV programmes being offered for viewing via the BBC website, it must just be a matter of time before most people break BT's download limit. My advice is to change to an ISP who offers unlimited downloading, then BT will wake up and smell the coffee!
4. Patrick Bossert
I can understand BT's reasons for taking this approach with its customers, but it is at odds with encouraging the adoption of internet media appliances which is precisely what BT retail wants to do in the longer term.
For example, we use BT's broadband wireless hub as an access point to listen to internet radio stations using (the truly excellent) Roku media streaming devices around our home. If we listen to one radio for 5 hours a day at 192Kb/s quality that's 346MB/day or 7GB of download per month. In reality we often have more than one radio running, plus the children use interactive media from the BBC website, plus the usual (massive) windows update downloads, plus iTunes music and video downloads. We're talking upwards of 15GB/month.
Does this make me a bandwidth hog? I would like to think not. This is normal bandwidth usage for an average family in today's terms. BT is acting too soon to profit from early adopters - the uncertainty of being 'clobbered' for extra bandwidth charges is an effective deterrent to people buying internet media appliances. Rethink your policy please, BT.
5. Charles Wood
It is alittle difficult to understand BT's viewpoint! For example if you changed to a different supplier using the same telephone line 8meg x 20 hours of dowload would be two days worth, and up to the BT limit.
I presume that BT can only send out this sort of letter to people who have no choice but to use them, as my reaction would be broadband is broadband, so get off my back. Is this an example of BT using it's monopoly position to impose unacceptable criteria on people.
Can silicon.com get that information to see if a large percentage of these people have a choice?
6. Simon
Smacks of BT simply wanting to take what they can and kick off anyone who doesn't fit their desired profile. Other ISPs have the same issues, but they have measures in place to manage the system so that these 'hogs' cannot cause a degradation in quality for other users - simply lowering their traffic priority would do since it would allow the hogs to carry on, but only using what capacity isn't used by the the rest of the customers who aren't being managed.
The key thing is that to employ such management takes thought, development, and effort. Quite frankly I don't think BT Broadband are interested in these things, just what they can screw their punters for. It's not for nothing that I recommend against them !
7. Ian Savell
The only people who get upset about this are the hogs themselves. Domestic broadband is on 50:1 contention for a quite narrow "pipe" at the exchange. While the hogs are downloading their (probably illegal) movies the rest of us suffer impaired service.
What is more, many of these people are using BitTorrent or similar services where as they are downloading, others are uploading movies from their PC. That really chews up the upstream (256kb) channel and leads to all sorts of problems.
Hardly any legal users get anywhere near 40Gb - as evidenced by the all-day radio user at 15Gb (and I bet he doesn't actually achieve anything like that). I work from home over VPN and use the Internet as my main source of news, entertainment and information. My children chat all night, listen to streaming music, watch streaming video, 4 PCs update themselves, and my total usage is well under 1Gb per day.