BT Ifinity Usage Policy

steverido

Hi,

I have been throttled now for the 2nd month running with BT Infinity option 2 Broadband. Bear in mind I have been careful to watch my download this second month but oh no, BT inform me that I have exceeded my 300 GB fair usage to the tune of $&0 GB. I do not believe this and I have asked them for proof but they refer me to the online meter they have inside ones profile.

Their customer service is appalling. Whilst investigating my 2nd month throttle I went through all of the right buttons to get to Broadband customer services to be passed through to 4 people in the end after having to explain the situation to all.

Can someone read my correspondence to BT and advise please? This broadband is not good to me. I accept that I didn't listen carefully on the phone when making the order when they read out the fair usage policy. I am sure it is part of the ploy as they know people fall asleep when someone reds from a script.

Why is BT allowed to sell Infinity products as unlimited when they are not? This catches people off guard and is unfair. Unlimited to me means no restrictions.

If I want to cancel my contract I will have to pay over £300.

Thanks for reading.



Recently you requested personal assistance from our on-line support centre. Below is a summary of your request and our response.

If this issue is not resolved to your satisfaction, you may reopen it within the next 7 days.

Thank you for allowing us to be of service to you.



Dear Mr Morris,

Thank you for your email dated 24th January. I am sorry to hear of the inconvenience you are experiencing in regards to your broadband usage.

In reference to your enquiry, unfortunately we do not have the facilities to forward reports to customers to show their usage however you can check your own usage via your account at (if you have not already registered you will need to setup an account to view your usage and account details).

For reference, in the month of January you have used approximately 470GB thus far; you were sent an email on the 3rd January advising that you had reached 80% of our Fair Use limit, then another email was sent on the 5th January advising that you had exceeded this limit. Even if you have carefully monitored your usage for the month, your speed would have been throttled during peak hours from the 5th January anyway.

I can also see that you have been in contact with a complaints manager towards the end of December who advised you that they had listened to your sales call when you first ordered service and you were fully advised about the Fair Use Policy; if you did not listen to this in full when it was explained then we cannot accept responsibility for you exceeding the Fair Use limit (not to mention the emails you were sent).

If you wish to cancel your broadband you will be held to term on your current contract. Feel free to contact our cancellations department on 01234 450760 if you wish to discuss this further.

If you require any further assistance, please do not hesitate to contact us


Yours sincerely,
Dean McFarland
Digital Care THD Team

kwikbreaks

So what do your own measurements show the download to be?

steverido

I have not measured but I know I have not downloaded 470 Gb. I wished that I had been doing this. I just want them to prove I have but they keep telling me to go to my account and use the built in meter which I don't believe is accurate.

kwikbreaks

What sort of things do you use your connection for?

Apart from straightforward downloading streaming video (iPlayer etc.) and some gaming can use lots of bandwidth. How many people have internet connected kit? I presume that you have secured your WiFi.

If you only have computers connected (no video/audio streamers, games consoles etc.) then you can run software to track usage. Some routers provide that data too.

Phantom_Flan_Flinger

For 470GB, you're looking at a lot of P2P stuff. Browsing and gaming won't get you there and a typical iPlayer HD download for an hour is around 1.2GB.

macman

steverido wrote: »

I have not measured but I know I have not downloaded 470 Gb. I wished that I had been doing this. I just want them to prove I have but they keep telling me to go to my account and use the built in meter which I don't believe is accurate.

The limit is not a download limit, it's a data usage limit, i.e. download, upload, streaming, everything.
But you still have to stream an awful lot of iPlayer to get to that level!
I suggest that you install your own metering software and cross check using that.

kwikbreaks

Phantom_Flan_Flinger wrote: »

For 470GB, you're looking at a lot of P2P stuff.

It sure as hell would be...

just about a full quality blueray disk every other day
or
3 compressed 720p movies a day
or
just about as many hours of divx quality video as there are in the month

I'll be interested to see what uses the OP has for the connection - I may be missing out on something.

steverido

I am connecting to my works network but the files would not cause this. I do stream from iplayer and I use newsgroups for TV and film stuff but that is it. The first month I definitely went over it and hold my hands up but the second month I was downloading TV catchup stuff.

I am surprised that they can keep taking my money and not justify to me what I have used.

macman

Only BT would be crazy enough to launch a high speed service like this and then put a 40GB cap on the lower priced option.
On second thoughts. it's just a cynical marketing ploy...
OP, why do you think that downloading TV catchup stuff wouldn't take you over the limit? No difference to streaming from iPlayer.

kwikbreaks

macman did you see that BT have notified the OP that January usage was 470GB a few days ago? Option 2 has a 300GB FUP.

If upstream is counted in the limit then the high upstream speed available in conjunction with naive use of a torrent client could account for it but 470GB of video at the sort of quality catchup TV and iPlayer streaming offers would be more hours worth than there are in a month.

As I said earlier the obvious answer is to install something like networkx on all PCs and compare with the BT metering which I'm pretty sure will prove to be accurate.

macman

Yes I did. Which prompted me to recheck the cap applying to Option 1.
The intention is obviously to be able to offer a lower headline price on Option 1, knowing that almost everyone wanting this speed will need to upgrade to Option 2 in a couple of months.