Can some explain Broadband useage

sunshinelollipop

I live in a large family group - 6 of us. We all have laptops. We were with Sky and then 02 but recently my husband changed to BT and suddenly we are being told that we're using way over our monthly allowance of 40gb.

We use two computers a lot during the day for work although mostly this is offline work, emails and facebook, the rest are mostly used during the evening, two stream movies/music/iplayer stuff most days, the rest are just used for skype, facebook etc.

Can anyone tell me how we estimate how many gigabytes we're using for these various activities to avoid any nasty shocks as we've never had any problem before we moved to BT.

macman

Email and Facebook is not 'offline work' (though it won't use much).
Don't estimate, install NetMeter or another free monitoring facility on each connected device and then you'll know what you're using.
With 6 of you streaming iPlayer, 40GB will not go very far at all. You'll probably have to upgrade to the Unlimited tariff if you can't cut your usage.
Why on earth did you switch from a O2 (presumably one of the unlimited legacy tariffs) to BT?

JJ_Egan

two stream movies/music/iplayer stuff

There are your main high data uses Movies in particular will consume a lot of bandwidth .

Its probable that you had a higher cap before your move to BT .
40GB would be fine for average use but not for your high usage .

jje

lucylucky

http://www.simplebroadband.co.uk/usage-guide

http://www.zen.co.uk/business/broadband/business-broadband/broadband-download-usage-guide.aspx

A couple of links that might help you.

Remember every single bit of data uses some of your allowance.

spannerzone

Sky broadband was most probably an unlimited option so that's why they never complained.

They're one of the few that do truly unlimited option as most 'unlimited' in reality has a fair usage limit which may be quite the opposite of what most people would consider 'unlimited'


If you already subscribe to Sky then this option is good value for heavy users.


Iplayer usage varies but it seems that 1hour of medium quality Iplayer streaming might usa around 400-600mb of data (half a gigabyte roughly), HD streaming would take that figure to approx 1 - 1.2Gb per hour. So two computers downloading a few hours of Iplayer a day would very quickly eat up that 40Gb allowance especially if in HD. Add in some youtube, streaming radio, downloading films (legit I hope!) and there you go.