XBox Live Warning

YORKSHIRELASS

Hi all, just a warning to everyone else with an XBox. DS got a new Xbox for his birthday, which he cant connect to XBox live because he doesnt get a very good signal in his bedroom.

Couple of weeks ago OH brought the XBox downstairs and him and DS connected to XBox Live and played on Call of Duty on and off all day (snowy Sunday, not much else do do!).

Today we got an e-mail from BT saying we have exceeded our internet allowance by 18mb for the month and they are going to charge us £20!!! After further investigation it turns out this was because of the day spent on XBox live, games like Call of Duty are very heavy on the internet usage, and the new Xbox makes it worse apparently.

Thank goodness they werent on it for days on end, £20 is bad enough. We have now upgraded our internet allowance, but will be monitoring this closely in future.

Thought this might be useful info for others out there, especially with Christmas coming up - or maybe everyone else is a bit more savvy than us with this one!!!

Phantom_Flan_Flinger

You haven't actually said what your monthly allowance is/was, just that you went over it.

YORKSHIRELASS

Yes sorry. To be fair our allowance was only 10mb a month and thats probably where the problem lies. We have been on the same package for about 3 years and never gone over before. When we took out the BT plan 10mb was fairly standard but we were recommended to upgrade to 40mb which we have now done.

I am guessing there must be other people out there like us who dont need high broadband usage under normal circumstances and might get caught out by this.

Or, like I said in my original post, maybe we are just a bit dim.:)

Phantom_Flan_Flinger

...and hopefully you mean 10GB and 40GB.

With on-line gaming and streaming, 10GB isn't a whole lot nowadays. A single days gaming shouldn't amount to 10GB, though if you were getting near the end of your allowance month and/or already getting near the GB allowance, it could certainly push you over. One thing to mind as well is that a typical demo download is ~1GB these days.

closed

Fines like this are a great incentive to check out the competition - much better value available elsewhere.

Crisp_£_note

Sorry to hear you got caught out YORKSHIRELASS but thank you for using your negative experience for a positive warning to others as the warning its definately worth remembering whether it affects us or not !

Rossy.

Definately

With online gaming it's always best to have a "unlimited" download package. Gaming online uses a lot of bandwidth especially if they are using the headset chatting away.

I'm unlimited with BT and spend a few hours in the evening gaming online. Well usually up to 5 hours hours lol (ssshh) and my average useage according to my homehub is around 25-35gb per month. I dont surf the net very often at home as my laptop is on it's last legs so it's only used for the gaming

You'll be ok if you get the 40gb allowance as you won't go over (hopefully)

YORKSHIRELASS

Thanks for the replies. And Dave you will guess that I am not terribly clued up about these things so yes it should have been Gb not Mb!!!

Rossy, thats really helpful. It gives me a bit of reassurance that we will be OK now. We have also learned that we can go online and monitor our usage through the month which we will do.

I believe that BT have changed their charging structure so its more expensive now if you go over the limits. Tbh I know there are probably cheaper options than using BT but we dont have access to all of them as we live rurally and BT works well for us. Think we will see how it goes over the next few months.

AA99

Hi there! Yes, thanks for that useful advice to everyone out their with XBox Live. I have just been 'stung' very badly by BT and have been referred here from my own thread.

Not able to post the link yet, but would be grateful if you would have a look at it......;)