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True Unlimited Broadband in the UK? 144

Posted by Cliff from the isp-fine-print dept.
Tango42 asks: "Next (academic) year, I'm going to be living in a student house with 4 (inc. me) heavy internet users. I can see us potentially using 50-100GB/month. Do you know any UK ISP that will accept that kind of usage without claiming it's abuse under some 'acceptable use policy'? We're willing to pay a bit more that we would on more restrictive ISPs, as it's divided 4 ways, we just don't want to end up getting cut off or throttled for going over the limit on an 'unlimited' account."
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True Unlimited Broadband in the UK? More

True Unlimited Broadband in the UK?

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  • Maybe (Score:5, Informative)

    by x2A ( 858210 ) on Monday July 24, 2006 @09:01PM (#15773353)
    I use blueyonder through telewest (cable modem), and we've had our bandwidth maxed out for long periods of time without any complaint ever. I'm not sure how many gigs this translates to per month, but it's about the most you can get with that speed connection. This is achieved through running p2p apps constantly, with a linux gateway/router to give priority to certain packet types (eg, so shareaza doesn't slow down ssh etc)

    • BY are great (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I'm on blueyonder as well & share my connection with 2 others. Maxed out all the time with no complaints.

      Best ISP I've ever had. Never had any OS issues before I started sharing either ( never had a windows PC )

    • Could you point me to a place to learn how to set up iptables to achieve those rules?

      • not iptables so much as iproute2/tc.

        http://www.lartc.org/ [lartc.org]

        Wondershaper can be a wonder, tho I have found that it can be improved somewhat by rewriting the concept in perl (Python should work too), rather than bash. Makes it more flexible. Use your language of choice of course, so that you understand it.

        IPtables cannot do shaping, although you can use it alongside iproute2/tc with MARK.

    • https://www.bethere.co.uk/ [bethere.co.uk] - If you're lucky enough to live in one of their areas, i'd go for Be. Their pay-per-gb package goes up to 90gb, so their unlimited is for those who will use more? £24 connection fee £24 a month 24mb down 1.3mb up

    • Re:Maybe (Score:3, Funny)

      by thelost ( 808451 )
      I can second this. Telewest have provided consistent service for me, the whole time I've lived in Bristol. If it's possible to get them then do, they don't cap the service and I've never had any complaints about bandwidth usage, even when I was living in a heavy usage household which must have been sucking over about 60-100gig a month while we still enamoured of downloading. Eventually, we downloaded the whole internet though. It was quite peculiar, a series of interconnected copper pipes.
      • Blimey, another Bristolian!
        But, I'll add my vote to BlueYonder/Telewest.. Had Broadband in since it started, and not really had any issues with it..
        The only ones I did were hardware related (they had a fault due to corroded copper in a service pit just outside the house.. Took about 5 engineer calls until one of them fixed it correctly)..
        Last time I checked, the phone in support desk doesn't support Linux, but you just tell them you're using Windows, and answer the questions they have using Linux tools.
        Th
        • ditto. Telewest is great, except when some **** cut the cable before the England game last month. I was able to watch it on the bbc website though, which wasn't to bad once I reduced my desktop resolution towards the native stream size.
    • I'll put in another vote for Blueyonder. While I was at uni we had 6 of us on a 2Mbit connection averaging around 175Gb/month for the best part of a year and we never had any problems. Very good tech support too, should you ever need it - it's always nice to come across people on 1st line who are smart enough *not* to force you to disconnect your router to diagnose every single problem.
    • I used to be on Blueyonder and used 150+Gb/month, same sort of pattern. I moved and had to change to ADSL which is a nightmare in comparison. For heavy users in the UK, cable is the way to go. Totally unfiltered, fast and unlimited capacity.
    • I just wanted to thank you for running p2p constantly, and also for providing an advert for bulk DVD writers/copiers/duplicators. It's obvious that you're pulling the latest and greatest builds of every distro nightly and are distributing them for free or small amounts of money on physical media

      So from everyone, thanks for that!

      After all, there's nothing else you'd be doing running P2P and disc duplicators, is there? ;-)

      (PS - this is an attempt at humour and should not be taken seriously or internally)
      • "oops" :-)

        The link's a client's tho who I'm trying to draw traffic (or at least, google rating, although it doesn't seem to be working)... perhaps I should include a "my opinions do not necessarily reflect those of..." disclaimer in my sig too? :-)

    • I just moved out of a place in Edinburgh where I had 2mbit down/256k up from blueyonder broadband. We transferred over a TB in torrents, and god knows how much in websites last year and they didn't even blink. Not only that but if you have a phone line from them, customer service is free to call iirc, and they're really good. The 3 for £30 package is ace too. Cable TV, broadband and a phone line with free weekend calls. I just wish we weren't about 200m too far from their area in this new place...

      Now

      • I'm living in Leith and have the 30 quid package, mostly because the previous owner/tenants had all the cabling already installed. I can max out the incoming connection too.

        I can't say I've ever had to call their customer support, so I dont know how good they are. But I guess saying that I've had no problems in two years is something.

        They have occaisional outages. I think I've seen maybe two mornings where I had no internet in the past 18 months. Frustrating since my neighbours open wireless link also

      • My parents (who have kids as young as 2) moved house last year. Telewest/blueyonder availability was checked before deciding on the new house. Okay, like me, they run internet businesses, so connectivity is very important (just as most people wouldn't want to live too far away from where they work), but still... I wouldn't move to an area where I'd only have ADSL to "choose" from either. If you stop and think about it - that's pretty extreme!

    • There is no maximum to Telewest/Blueyonder, its totaly unlimited.

    • Blueyonder have always been quite a nice ISP, in my experience. Back in my dial-up days I had unlimited dial-up from them on a second line and I left it connected pretty-much 24/7 and they didn't seem to care. I figured this was because I got my telephone line from them as well, so it wasn't really harming them. At about that time all of the BT-based "unlimited" ISPs were using automatic cutoffs every hour or two, whereas I'd keep connections up for weeks at a time. It doesn't really suprise me that they'd

    • The only things that are "unlimited" in this world are governmental incompetence and Jesus's love. Everything else that bills itself as "unlimited" is full of unlimited bullshit.

      -Eric

    • I'm a happy customer. Their tech ppl actually know what they are talking about too. If you can get BY where you will be then that's the way to go IMO.

  • No (Score:2, Interesting)

    by nagora ( 177841 ) *
    That's the simple answer. Apart from the cable companies, who will all kick you for that level of usage, all the other lines are ultimately owned by BT and they don't sell wholesale unlimited lines to the other ISPs (nor do they reserve them for their own customers). There is no totally unlimited bradband in the UK because of this.

    Sorry

    • Re:No (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Psychotext ( 262644 ) on Monday July 24, 2006 @09:21PM (#15773403)
      As much as I hate to disagree, I've been pulling easily 100gb a month (NTL) for the last year, as have many of my friends (Telewest mostly). http://www.home.ntl.com/page/broadband3 [ntl.com] shows the 10mb NTL package which clearly states that you have unlimited downloads (http://www.home.ntl.com/page/broadbandusage). Oddly they refer to their user agreement which says nothing about fair usage.

      But anyway, don't take the piss with peer to peer maxing your bandwidth all month and I doubt you'll have a problem.

      (p.s. Just noticed "unlimited" also applies to the lower connection bands as well.)

      • Re:No (Score:3, Informative)

        by Don_dumb ( 927108 )
        I think the gp was talking about lines through their telephone network (which is basically the UK telephone network, there may be some obscure others). The gp may well be correct, in his/her understanding of BT only selling limited lines.
        So you rightly have pointed out that perhaps the only truely unlimited service is offered by NTL and Telewest but you are not actually disagreeing. NTL and Telewest are connections not actually made through BT's infrastructure but their own cable (originally TV) network, wh
        • I was disagreeing with the statement that 100gb usage will get you kicked off the network by the cable providers (NTL / Telewest). I can't really comment on BT as having worked for them I now avoid them like the plague. :)

      • Re:No (Score:1)

        by M1FCJ ( 586251 )
        NTL works fine, I use their middle-speed entry which is 4MBit/s at the moment and I've been on my long-loved quest of archiving Internet to DVDs for years now. No complaints from NTL - yet. :) Simply put, the latest SUSE releases (SLES10 and SLED10) took 4 DVDs and 16 CDs to cover DVD and CD versions of both architectures and even that would blow a lot of companies' download limits and it's a legitimate use.

      • Re:No (Score:2, Informative)

        by Badfysh ( 761833 )
        I was on NTL a few years ago, and I seem to remember that they did sneakily introduce some kind of fair use policy. Unfortunately I can't provide links as my source at the time was NTHell, which was bought by NTL and taken down. The impression I got at the time though, was that it was just a way of dealing with the handful of seriously hardcore downloaders, the type of people who sell moody DVD's in pubs. Only about 3 or 4 people on the NTHell forums ever got warning letters, so I suspect that if your usage

        • Re:No (Score:3, Informative)

          by Psychotext ( 262644 )
          That's right, was not long after those usage policies that NTL bought nthellworld.com and closed it down. There is still nthellworld.co.uk but it seems to lack the same bite. :) The usage policies were widely criticised at the time as most of NTLs advertising was focussed on "wearing out your modem" and stating very clearly that you can, and should download as much as you could. Even their portal site ntlworld.com gives information on the best ways to make the most of your connection and gives you a ton

    • Re:No (Score:3, Informative)

      by Ned_Network ( 952200 )

      ...all the other lines are ultimately owned by BT and they don't sell wholesale unlimited lines to the other ISPs (nor do they reserve them for their own customers)..

      That's utter rubbish.

      Whilst all the lines are owned by BT, when they were privatised by Maggie Thatcher in the 1980s they were put under the supervision of OFTEL (now OFCOM, I think) which was given the job of ensuring that BT doesn't behave in a monopolistic manner. For this reason BT have to provide lines to ISPs on reasonable terms - in f

      • Re:No (Score:1)

        by RupW ( 515653 ) *
        I pay £29.99 for Eclipse's most premium home service.
        My only niggle with Eclipse is that every once in a while they make their accounts better and cheaper and don't tell you about it until you stumble across it and ask to pay less :-)

        Sounds like you're already on their latest accounts though.

        • Re:No (Score:1)

          by Kuad ( 529006 )
          I can certainly agree for that. I regraded for free last month and quadrupled my down bandwidth for less money a month. They sure don't go out of their way to tell you that you *can* do this.

          I stay with Eclipse because no other ISP has ever given me less hassle than they do. Their only black mark is botching my transfer when I moved houses.
    • "Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" as "Library" is to "A lot of people standing at a bus stop who collectively have read all of the books in the library."
    • This is simply wrong. Cable on BY is unlimited and there are ISPs who let you do whatever you want such as Zen, albeit at a price.
    • As an ISP, BT sell you the line to the exchange, and then the central pipe back to your network.
      Ofcourse, since BT are a pain to deal with a lot of ISPs use third parties as the go between with BT, companies such as easynet, griffin and entanet... Who offer a range of plans, both traffic limited (fixed cost for a line regardless of speed, and you pay for traffic usage) and unlimited (where faster lines cost more)...

      Currently i have 2mb unlimited, and i run it flat out pretty much 24/7.
    • I have unlimited broadband, but that's probably because I don't download continuously all day long. I'm with PlusNet (who are great), and a while back they introduced a 'fair use' policy that caused quite a fuss.

      The whole industry is based around buying X mb of bandwidth from BT, and then reselling it on to customers, expecting the customer to use a fair amount of it - not to use all the 2mb that they are given. This overselling is common as you'd be paying £100 a month for a 512Kb connection if they

    • Price (Score:2)

      by ebcdic ( 39948 )
      There is unlimited broadband, it's just expensive. From what I can deduce from comments by various ISPs, BT charges around 1 pound per month per GB of bandwidth. So Zen, for example, who charge 35 pounds for an
      ADSL Max service with a 50 GB/month limit are probably not making a huge profit - they're relying on
      many customers using less than the limit. They have a much more expensive unlimited "business" version.

      ISPs can avoid BT's bandwidth charging by "unbundling" exchange lines: they put their own equipm

  • Seems like it shouldn't be a problem... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 24, 2006 @09:09PM (#15773375)
    My roommates and I are constantly downloading movies/music/games from bittorrent and I assume that our usage approaches your estimate and we haven't had a single problem from our ISP. I mean I was just tel

    Connection Reset by Host - Over Bandwidth Limit

  • nildram 50GB limit (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Jamesie ( 615784 )
    I have the 2MB for £22.12 pcm service and there is a peak limit of 50GB and you can carry any unused over to the next month, all that happens is that they throttle you down to 64 KBs after you use all your peak download bytes. Additional 2GBs for £1.98 at 2MB.

    • English equivalents of US units (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I have the 2MB for £22.12 pcm service and there is a peak limit of 50GB and you can carry any unused over to the next month, all that happens is that they throttle you down to 64 KBs after you use all your peak download bytes. Additional 2GBs for £1.98 at 2MB.

      Sir Dude, what's the English measurement for Mega-byte? I mean, that's the US measurement and all, but isn't a mega-byte in the English system like, "X stones per pound per nut of wire diameter" or something?

  • Business plans (Score:3, Funny)

    by The MAZZTer ( 911996 ) <.moc.liamg. .ta. .tzzagem.> on Monday July 24, 2006 @09:23PM (#15773409) Homepage

    I hear plans for businesses tend to actually give you the limit you pay for, and without throttling... I think the reasoning is that businesses are paying for bandwidth that they NEED for their mission-critical ... things (sorry I only took business 101, and I ran out of buzzwords). Anyways, MY thoughts on this are, if you were an ISP, would YOU want to cut off a business when they might train their lawyers on you? I thought not.

    At any rate, you should look into it.

  • Prodigy Networks (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Prodigy Networks [prodigynet.co.uk] are the firm you are looking for. They have several good unmetered ADSL packages. Excellent reliability (I've been a client for 3 years and had 8 hours downtime) and English based customer service. Just call and ask for Nick, or sign up online.

    It's wires only, so you will need your own filters and modem, but the prices and service are great.

    HTH

    ADSL Guide UK [adslguide.org.uk] has some good recommendations.

  • High Usage (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Try purchasing a commercial connection. I know in the states cable companies have commercial lines that they lease at a premium.

  • Bandwidth is not everything (Score:4, Informative)

    by Col. Bloodnok ( 825749 ) on Monday July 24, 2006 @09:34PM (#15773444)
    I pay 25 quid a month for a half meg connection. I get an extremely reliable service, no contention issues, reliable email hosting, no complaints when I max-out the line for days at a time, and access to *all* the newsgroups. Not only that, if I have any problems with the service, I immediatedly get put though to a northern (England rather than India) bloke who knows what traceroute is. What more could you ask?

  • 100GB/mo == 256kbps (Score:3, Insightful)

    by billstewart ( 78916 ) on Monday July 24, 2006 @10:36PM (#15773621) Journal
    Unless I've dropped some zeros or 8s, 100GBytes/month is only about 256 kilobits per second fulltime (ok, 277 for a 30-day month, but 256kbps is a nice round size that telcos sell.) A business that bought a 2 Mbps E1 line and got spanked for using it more than 1/8 of the time would quickly find another ISP. I don't know the prices for an E1 in the UK; a 1.5 Mbps T1 in the US is typically under $500 including access. Fractional-speed service is more expensive per bit, of course, but you may still be able to find a good price for the box you hang your P2P service on, and then use cable or DSL for web browsing.
    • 256/8 = 32 kilobytes/second (MAX)

      Assuming 1 megabyte = 1024 kilobytes we get 0.03125 MB/s

      0.03125*60*60*24*30 = 81000MB per 30 days. Roughly 81GB.

      Of course that is running 24/7 at the maximum theoretical speed of the connection, which is never going to happen.

  • we do because we have to, but they put us on a crap connection (sent us an email saying so) because there are lots of us sharing it and we actually use the bandwidth we bought.
  • I highly recommend that someone setup a QOS router and firewall for the house with five or more NIC's. Everyone will otherwise be complaining about how much other people are pips. Also I think it would be imparitive that you actually get 5 or more real IP addresses otherwire it's will be a bear setting up certain programs.
    • You don't need multiple NICs, I use iptables to classify packets from different IP addresses so they get picked up by different tc rules.

      I also set up port forwarding on address ranges to different IPs, for example,
      20000-20999 -> 192.168.1.20
      21000-21999 -> 192.168.1.21

      Then, anything that someone wants to run on their machine, they just set the port within that range (most listening programs will let you specify a port to listen on). New services can be added no problem without having to configure the

  • Get BE 24mb adsl (Score:2, Informative)

    by tom1974 ( 413939 )
    I have a http://bethere.co.uk/ [bethere.co.uk] BE adsl which gets you upto 24mb/1024 down/up, depending on distance from the exchange and line quality. I'm around a mile away from the exchange and get ~15mb.

    Between the 3 of us in the house, we use around 150~200Gb a month for the past 5-6 months without any complaints from BE.

    They've been good to us, give them a try.

  • How much are you prepared to pay? (Score:5, Informative)

    by alanw ( 1822 ) * <alan@wylie.me.uk> on Tuesday July 25, 2006 @02:27AM (#15774255) Homepage
    For £79/month you can have Zen's Office 8000 Max.

    One month minimum contract (useful if you are only staying in the house for 10 months)
    No bandwidth limit
    Excellent technical support
    Max ADSL - up to 8Mb/s, depending on your distance from the exchange and quality of the circuit.

  • Plusnet (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Criffer ( 842645 )
    Plusnet [plus.net] rock. Up to 8 meg downstream with no limits for £14.99 a month. And you get wide open ports and a static IP address. Great for bittorrent, hosting your own web server, gaming... And apparently they now throw in VOIP, just for the hell of it.

    And the referrals program means you may end up not even having to pay for any of it. Tell them negativezero sent you.
    • Plusnet aren't unlimited. They have a hazy and poorly-defined acceptable usage policy, and a CEO who rants and raves about the top 2% of bandwidth users like he'd round them up, put them in camps, and gas them. If you mod me troll, it's clear you've never used plusnet.
      • I use plusnet, and they are great. I do get unlimited broadband - but as with everything in life, 'unlimited' just means a large limit I don't notice. There again, I don't download music and vids 24/7.

        Plusnet do allow true unlimited downloads from midnight to 4pm though - they throttle it during peak time when mum and dad are downloading emails and surfing for their new vacuum cleaner, so its understandable the CEO wants to give them a good surfing experience (they pay lots for little usage after all) witho
        • Plusnet aren't draconian, that's the problem. They won't say "we enforce bandwidth" because then people will not switch to them - they've not quite grasped how "false" and "advertising" juxtapose. Then they do it anyway. It used to be the opinion that plusnet was a geek ISP - now it's mom-and-pop and desperately trying to keep the geek vote, by just lying. And deleting all the customer's emails last week.
      • They blocked bittorrent on my account without even telling me they were doing it. I was a customer of theirs for four years. I now have a different ISP.

    • Ditto, I was going to mention plusnet. Although by the looks of things you got a better deal than I did!?

      I was paying £30/mo for 2 meg -- but it was two years ago that I signed up (and a year ago I quit) so I guess their pricing has been forced down by competition.

      Anyway, I paid as much as £30 because it said unlimited and it meant it. I used over 100GB/mo (just me!) and they never batted an eyelid.

    • Up to 8 meg downstream with no limits for £14.99 a month.

      Plusnet do have usage limits they just hide them in a 'Sustainable Usage Policy'

      On their PLUS package you pay £14.99 a month and are capped at 10gb
      On thier Premier package you pay £21.99, £29.99 or £39.99 for 15gb, 22.5gb or 30gb caps.

      These caps are on peak time usage, initially this was afternoon/early evening for a 4 hours or so. It is now 4pm until midnight and can be changed on their whim. At one point it was 4pm

      • I was going to post myself on Plusnet, but MrAngryForNoReason did it for me. Plusnet do a very shoddy job of making their AUP understandable or even accessible to their customers. I hesitate to say "users" as it's become clear that their preferred userbase is the occasional surfer who reads a couple of emails occasionally.

        I joined them about 3 yrs ago because at that time I considered them one of the most technically aware ISPs - but with the gradual throttling of any protocol that's not HTTP or POP3, a
    • For anyone with Plusnet, or thinking of joining them, this posting on ADSLGuide [adslguide.org.uk] might prove interesting

      Recently, we received notification that during the process of emailing customers about the announcements posted yesterday, whilst uploading the information to the email tool that we use, an error occurred and we sent the contact information of 20,000 people to approximately 3,500 customers.

    • Plusnet are singually awful. They start shaping well before the download limit, and my home connection is currently shaped down to 5KB download on ~4GB worth of usage. Their customer service is very poor[1] and the quality of network access is also not great. For downloaders, you should note that non-encrypted bittorrent is far slower then encrypted, as they mess with the whole protocol. They are specifically mentioned in the Bad ISP page on the Azureus wiki [2 [azureuswiki.com]]. They may have at one point been OK, but

  • Demon (Score:1)

    by Xest ( 935314 )
    Demon's HomeOffice solution isn't a bad bet, I've been with them years, they're saying they're implementing limitations on their users now they're giving them 8mbps free but when I spoke to them last night to see what limitations would be imposed I was told that 100gb a month would be okay, they said it's people who are maxing their connection constantly for a full month that they'll impose limitations on and even then they wont cut them off, they'll just slow down their connection from 9 - 5.

    One thing to n

    • Not so (Score:1)

      by DB'C ( 150223 )
      I emailed them about this and they said no such thing to me. I requested that I get a discussion that formally applied in the same way as the upgrade T'S&C's so that if I agree to their new contract I know where I stand. Their answer to me was that they are going to measure the progress of the upgrades and then set the limits. Furthermore, the official webpages state that the slow down of connection is 9am-10pm not 9-5 as you post. I am going to give them the benefit of the doubt because customer serv
  • I can highly recommend freedom 2 surf (www.f2s.com) as a decent ISP. They're customer service is excellent. When I first signed up, our broadband didn't work because we were too far away from the box thing that it goes through. They sent a guy round and he switched over some wires so it worked properly, and set up all the splitter's and stuff for us.

    It's reasonably cheap too, I pay £17.99 a month for 512k-2M and although they technically have a 10gig per month limit, I use about 50 gigs per month and

    • I've been a long-term F2S customer for years and always found them good, but in recent months their support has been appalling. Once you get through to someone it's fine, but I was on hold for 2 and a half hours last week....

      Maybe try in a few months when they've had a chance to boost their support staff...?
  • Someone else has already said don't use tiscali, and I'd agree except for this rather important fact:

    You may be able to get out free after 9 months instead of 12!

    If you're only in the student house for one year, you only really need the connection for about 9 months, i.e. not over the summer afterwards. Most ISPs contracts are 12 months, with terms that you pay the remaining months to get out early, so as useful as just paying and no one receiving the service.

    However: Me and 3 others signed up for Tiscali's

  • Easy (Score:2)

    by Kosi ( 589267 )
    Just subscribe to some thing called "flatrate". Yes, the real thing. If they complain, threaten to sue them, because even in .uk it can't be legal to offer a flatrate, get paid for a flatrate but then refuse to deliver one.

    I had even > 300 GB in some months, and never got any complaint, but I'm in Germany. :-)

    Kosi

  • Simple idea: Get a life! (Score:3, Funny)

    by mgblst ( 80109 ) on Tuesday July 25, 2006 @07:10AM (#15774998) Homepage
    Or at least, that is what I tried to do - no internet at home. Of course, now I just waste time on the net at work, so maybe no a solution for you.

    But this is some serious downloading, shouldn't you be spending your money on cidar, and banging fat chicks at students parties? Throwing up your guts after the quid nights, passing out in someones garden? ....ah, fond memories!
  • I would have voted for Bulldog, I have been with them for a while, unfortunately, they aren't taking new customers.

    Be broadband would have to be my other choice though. A guy who works with me does some stupid stuff with his line and doesn't have any problems.

    Berny
  • UkOnline does up to 22Mb (if you are close enough to an exchange) with a cap at 500GB per month for £29.99 a month. A couple of my mates are on it and haven't got anywhere near that limit ever.

  • Well There is a way (Score:2, Informative)

    by mistralol ( 987952 )

    Hi,

    There certainly is a way todo this. Theres going to be 4 of you ?
    So if you each pay £20/month towards a net connection it should not be a problem to enter into
    an unlimited bisness grade account which dont have caps / limts etc.. but they do cost around £80/month or more.

    All BT ADSL Lines in the UK charge the ISP's for data form the exchange to the ISP at a rate of around £300/mbit per month. This is why the limits exist.

    I have been looking at moving away from my current ISP because they
  • as much as it disgusts me to suggest this but apparently AOL are giving away wireless routers and not levying any fair use policies or transfer limits.

    this is just what me freind told me you might want to make sure first, as AOL are a bunch of cowboys.

  • Black Cat Networks do services up to 200GB/month:

    http://www.blackcatnetworks.co.uk/services/adsl [blackcatnetworks.co.uk]

    And native IPv6, incase you're really geeky :)
  • I have Be's ADSL2+ service, and think that, if you can get it, it's probably what you need. If there are four of you sharing the line and downloading a lot, then 8Mb really won't be enough. Be will get you 12-24Mb depending on your location, and don't seem to impose limits on the amount from what I've found -- and given that you're talking about 2-3GB a day, I can't see it being a problem.
  • Ever since 8 meg lines starting becoming the norm in the UK, broadband companies over here have somehow managed to sidestep the Trade Descriptions Act quite nicely with their advertisement of "unlimited" broadband. Frankly, I'm wondering where the hell the Trading Standards Authority stands in all of this. How can you market a product as "unlimited" when it quite obviously isn't?
  • At £79+VAT per month it's not cheap but with 4 of you sharing the cost is this then that expensive and you can have routed /29 to share giving each of you a private public IP Address if you set it up correctly - For more info see http://www.zenbroadband.com/ML_Business.aspx?page= 527 [zenbroadband.com]
  • I have no experience with fair use plans in the UK, but given the choice between "unlimited" and a provider that actually quotes data limits and surcharges, I'd always pick the latter if there was anything critical or even remotely serious happening over the connection. "Unlimited" is usually a nice way to say "we'll kick you out whenever we like". All contracts offer a termination clause. Companies who offer a price for traffic beyond a certain limit benefit will find a way to keep you happy. Those who cla

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