Some providers here in the US do one of two (or both) things: 1) Indicate that you are on their "unlimitied residential" plan, which has certain bandwidth restrictions "for everyone's benefit" and that since you are exceeding these restrictions you would be better served by their "residential pro" plan for an additional $10/mo or similar. 2) Perform bucket throttling. They'll give you full speed until they find that over the last x minutes or hours you've downloaded y amount of data, and they throttle the connection back so that you can't go over their limits. Once you stop downloading the connection slowly goes back up in speed. Think of it as a bucket with a large inlet, and a small outlet. If you use the large inlet at full blast, eventually the bucket will fill, so you have to slow the incoming down so the bucket doesn't overflow. For the average web surfer this yields very quick page loads (a few kb every 30 seconds or so). File downloads that take less than an hour or so go at full speed. But if you want to get something very large, then it'll slow it down. But in any case this is usually spelled out in the terms of service. 1 pound per gigbyte is not terribly expensive as bandwidth goes. Still, that's worse than we have here - I'm certain I've downloaded dozens of GB in a single month with no problems. I'm about to move to the middle of nowhere though, and will probably be using Verizon's EVDO service then. I imagine I'll be running into the same issue eventually. -Adam On 9/3/06, Chris Gavin-Egan wrote: > Hi all > > I have just been emailed by BT (my broadband supplier) to tell me that I > have gone over my monthly bandwidth by 18gb (how i don't know but I have > a whole family using the connection on 4 pc's LOL ) > > anyhow they advised me that next month, if I go over my bandwidth, they > will charge me =A31 per Gb over the bandwidth allowance ! > > Interestingly - they don't give you any method of actually monitoring > your bandwidth usage on a hourly/daily/monthly basis other than this > email telling you. > > I emailed them back today telling them that an example of BT's > behaviour/policy is saying to people that they can go into a buffet and > eat only as much as a plate holds, however we are not going to give you > a plate to hold the food on and we would like you to stop eating when > you think you have eaten as much as you feel a plate would hold... by > the way we will be charging you =A31 for every sausage roll over and above > the plated amount... oh and lastly we'll be watching so we know how much > you have eaten ! > > I haven't heard back as yet, but I am interested in peoples opinion of > this situation, afterall, are they allowed to impose such charges when > they don't give you any way of metering your own use ? > > Cheers Chris > > > > -- > http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive > View/change your membership options at > http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist > -- = http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist