20gb of internet use between midnight and 9am- what's the point?

mindovermatter

Hi,
I am thinking about changing my ISP.
I am looking at one with 4gb per month in peaktime and 20gb between midnight and 9am.
What's the point of this - I am not going to use the internet to watch TV in the middle of the night!
Or am I missing the point?
Can I download TV in the night to watch when convenient to me or is this offpeak allowance such a selling ploy!
Bes wishes and enjoy the sun
Miindovermatter

[Deleted User]

Hi,

I'm with PlusNet, with a 10gb monthly allowance, and unlimited between midnight and 8am, I'm usually up before 6, so if I want to download from BBCi I do it before 8 and can watch at anytime, don't know of any other tv channel that allows downloads for later viewing though.

barrymoney

Its possible to schedule some types of large download to run overnight, but yeah, in normal use 4GB is a very tight peak-time limit which you could hit with a few iplayer programs. I didnt think any ISP still offered such a low limit…
(is weekend considered peak?).

Be broadband Value is 7.50 a month with 40GB limit (if avail in your area). Other Be packages are unlimited but more expensive.

JasX

O2 are usually quite good, and cheap and don't have download useage caps at all

cit_k

I doubt any ISP has no usage caps, they all have fair use buried away in the terms, o2 says

4 What about excessive network usage?
There is no limit on the monthly network usage. However if we feel that your activities are so excessive that other customers are detrimentally affected, we may give you a written warning (by email or otherwise). In extreme circumstances, if the levels of activity do not immediately decrease after the warning, we may terminate or suspend your Services.

BT Unlimited (no download limit) will cap your speed and cripple you peak times if yo exceed 100GB.

Eric_Pisch

cit_k wrote: »

I doubt any ISP has no usage caps, they all have fair use buried away in the terms, o2 says



BT Unlimited (no download limit) will cap your speed and cripple you peak times if yo exceed 100GB.

my best so far with BE (part of O2) is 940gb in one month, no traffic shaping, restricted times or bandwidth throttling ( I stream backups from my servers over the web before you ask )

no complaints from them, not even an email

JasX

cit_k wrote: »

I doubt any ISP has no usage caps, they all have fair use buried away in the terms, o2 says



BT Unlimited (no download limit) will cap your speed and cripple you peak times if yo exceed 100GB.

yes thats true but it's all relative, for someone who was considering a 4-10GB capped service they'll struggle to bust any caps sold as 'unlimited' unless they suddenly get into filesharing in a big way.

generally if you start bustiing 100GB to 300GB any ISP might start to get a little irritated

Eric_Pisch

JasX wrote: »

yes thats true but it's all relative, for someone who was considering a 4-10GB capped service they'll struggle to bust any caps sold as 'unlimited' unless they suddenly get into filesharing in a big way.

generally if you start bustiing 100GB to 300GB any ISP might start to get a little irritated

BE dont, in 3 odd years i have never been less than 350gb in a month

they are truely superb, and there support are real techs in this country as well

JasX

Eric_Pisch wrote: »

BE dont, in 3 odd years i have never been less than 350gb in a month

they are truely superb, and there support are real techs in this country as well

I think I'm with a sub vendor of Be, (Independant LLU outfit but whenever I do speed tests it identifies me as having a Be net connection).

Either way seems a rock solid reliable connection

Leopard

A peak-time usage cap of 4 GB a month brings back memories. We used to get that from PlusNet but, crucially, the specified peak time was from 4 pm to midnight.

Never caused me any inconvenience and the price was nice. It all depends on your preferred usage pattern. I could download as much as I liked, all day, completely free, until 4 pm: then start again after midnight. That suited my hours. Children start using the Internet at 4 pm and this used to slow it down anyway. So, between 4 pm and dinner-time I mainly used it just for email and light browsing. After dinner, in a civilised manner, and then some television watching, if at home, it would be 11 pm and only an hour until it became completely free again.

This was fine for several years, until my companion, unbeknown to me, decided to update the maps on her Garmin while we were having dinner, two days into the month. That was a download of 3.8 GB...

Faced with being throttled for the next 29 days, we upgraded to another tariff.

Nothing's unbundled, hereabouts, so we're still with PlusNet: we now get 80 GB a month from 8 am to midnight, with midnight to 8 am unmetered. Costs £12 a month and speed is usually somewhere between 5.8 and 6.2 when it isn't busy.

Evening speed can be much slower but I never want to use it at that hour unless I need to bid on something specific that's ending then on eBay. (Why do the Germans, incidentally, always schedule everything to end at the totally uncivilised time of 8 to 9 pm on a Sunday :mad: ? I hate having to park my netbook on the dinner table, ready for some last-minute bidding between courses.)

To revert to the OP's question, many people do download films at off-peak hours, for subsequent viewing, and other downloads (for example, 850 MB "Combo" updaters for Mac OS 10.6) knock a big hole in a meagre peak-time allowance.

timberflake

When I had this restriction I used to schedule all my newsgroup downloads to start at midnight, worked like a charm, everytime I woke up in the morning there was a fresh batch of stuff for me!