BSkyB-owned BE slams into traffic pile-up over 'unlimited' broadband lie

Re: Come on 150GB a month

I believe that traditionally it's file sharing, and mostly pirated films and TV shows, that accounts for the really large network use; not you downloading all those gigabytes, but other people downloading it from you, peer-to-peer, either free or for a modest and still illegal subscription. Torrents and so forth. But you also could be performing a legitimate activity that uses up bandwidth. Torrenting a movie that you made yourself, for instance. I wonder if they disallow commercial use...

Practically, as a user, you want generous bandwidth, but there are, evidently, valid business reasons for the ISP to want you to not use all of it all of the time, which is reflected in the price: full-time full throughput would be more expensive. Accordingly, what we really need is a word or phrase that describes how much you can use, without making it restrictive. Or maybe a word or phrase that means "nearly unlimited", but that sounds better.

Would it make sense to describe a quota or a fair use limit in hours of HD video per day? Which may be > 24 if people in the house are watching different things.

Re: Come on 150GB a month

The economics of providing an unlimited service stack up. They just don't for everyone, in all geographies.

The economics of an LLU network are now such that it really isn't a problem, whether you're supplying FTTC or conventional DSL products.

The problem is that it requires a scale that few companies have. Basically Sky and TalkTalk. BT have the scale but sadly are regulated out the ass, so can't.

We have nearly 6000 telephone exchanges in the UK. Of which 2000 cover 95% of the populace. This leaves 4000 exchanges that are more costly than the other 2000 because they are in more rural areas etc. to backhaul.

The economics of providing an unlimited service to the 2000 exchanges is totally achievable, but you need millions of users, probably ~2M with a half decent spread across those 2000 exchanges. The remaining 5% of the UK that are on "Market 1" telephone exchanges, get stiffed with BT Wholesale products, that while very fair, being as the costs of all their users are averaged across the whole of the UK Populace, is very expensive relatively.

I don't think that Be had any non LLU clients. I might be wrong though. The fact that they couldn't offer this service is down to either poor management of fixed cost infrastructure, or a lack of scale (number of users) to warrant such a network. Consolidation in the market will reduce costs in the long-term from an economic perspective but arguably Rupert Murdoch has a track record in sewing up market share, through acquisition and bottoming out the prices in his chosen market (eg newspapers) and then once all competition became irrelevant stiffing his user base.

Whether this is on the roadmap, given the fact that all broadband is for sky, is a client retention program, for broadcast subscribers, who knows?!

Re: Good company though

Yeah. I'm watching this one carefully to see what happens and looking for a new provider just in case. Who did you go with?

Re: Good company though

"Paying for the 2.5Mbps upload never worked, the modem would re-sync down, even though the trigger for the resync seemed to be a dropout on the upload (even though the upload speed without the high speed download never had any problems)"

That should read that changing the upload affected the unchanged download sync (which dropped out), even though it didn't drop out at that speed with the slower upload sync, something that seems to indicate a fault of some sort

Re: Good company though

I've used sky broadband for about 3 years now, they said i'd get about 8 mbit/sec speed, i actually get 12mbit/sec, so that's good. I've used anywhere between 30gb to 500gb a month, depending on the situation (curse you steam summer sales!) never had any issues with them, never had anything saying i'm using too much, never throttled me for using torrents or streaming etc. I think within that 3 years i've had less than 24 hours of downtime caused by their connection, too. The router they provided is a bit poo, granted, but then it was free and you can use another router instead and just use the one they sent as a modem. So, fast enough broadband which is totally unlimited and costs me something bonkers like a tenner a month, since i have TV with them.

Much better than any other ISP i've used, inlcuding BT whom i had numerous issues with. Guess like most things it's one thing for one person and another for another though, I know people whom have had loads of issues with BT and with Sky and with BE etc.

"Because, as you rightly say, Virgin is coax, whereas BT is twisted pair. Which makes one hell of a diiference on how much bandwidth it can support."

Though I'm on FTTC + OH span with BT and I don't get the issues of my neighbours on VM.

Faster than them and no problems in the evenings.