BT Broadband Usage Meter Wildly Inaccurate

cestlavie

well i'm so glad i found this thread. checked through my father's bills and found he'd regulalry been charged £5 for going over his allowance though he only uses the internet for light surfing and occasional itune podcasts. he never recieved warning notifications by email as they apparently sent them to the wrong address. last month i monitored it for him down to the last day when he was still clearly showing her had a good 1mb+ spare.... and what' d'ya know... he's been charged an extra fiver for that bill as well. what a bloody con!

WTFH

For those who are going way over your limit, are you using cloud storage?
(icloud, skydrive, dropbox, etc)

If so, and those are syncronising between devices, then that's most likely where all your allowance is going.

e.g. if you have three devices on the same cloud account, then every time yuo upload a 10MB file, that uses up 30MB of allowance because it uploads from one, then downloads to the other 2 when they syncronise. If you then delete that file out of the cloud, it has to re-sync the 3 devices again.

Nothappy101

Tarzan - its worth trying the livechat through myBT (saves calling India) because I don't know what button the salesguy hit when I was complaining (he was trying to sign me up to Infinity originally) but unbelievably I've just taken a reading on the usage meter which shows that 1st-30th September I've used slightly under 20GB. Given that I'm on a 40GB package and for three months they said I was using 90GB it seems that whatever he poked around in on my account may well have kicked their useless meter back into line with real life again.

And WTFH - Nope I'm not using Cloud, to be honest I'm such a technophobe I wouldn't know how to use it or what to use it for.

However trying to get BT to accept responsibility for things having stuffed up and actually doing the responsible thing and refunding people is proving painful. I have reported it to Ofcom, they won't deal with individual cases but I think the more people complain to them about this practice the better because sure as hell no one at BT wants to know.
Oh and I'm also awaiting a reply from the ombudsmen regarding this matter since I was told by BT tough luck, the readings were correct and will remain.

Blackbeard_of_Perranporth

The diference in price between the capped and unlimited is £8. We currently average about 120 gb a month online, have no problems and get all our tv from online services.

WTFH

Nothappy101 wrote: »

Tarzan - its worth trying the livechat through myBT (saves calling India)

And livechat uses... data allowance.

Nothappy101 wrote: »

And WTFH - Nope I'm not using Cloud, to be honest I'm such a technophobe I wouldn't know how to use it or what to use it for.

If you have a smartphone, you may well be using it.

Nothappy101

WTFH wrote: »

And livechat uses... data allowance.

Small price to pay if they reset the meter simply by looking at your account and saves the "language" problems so many seem to have when calling India and end up with no phone at all.

WTFH wrote: »

If you have a smartphone, you may well be using it.

No smart phones here, both my son and I have Nokia's with buttons, the old fashioned way.

cestlavie

in reply wtfh -
no cloud usage in my case, no smartphones, secure network, no film downloads - in short nothing to explain the data usage being over.
i'll follow advise above and complain to ofcom. hadn't thought to do it before.

Blackbeard_of_Perranporth

Think Children and YouTube. One hour a night on YouTube soon eats up more gig than you have Hot Dinners!

cestlavie

i've just checked the current bt usage monitor today just now and it is showing usage allowance as up to 30 sept. saying it was last updated on 30/09 at 23.59... the monitor though today is clearly running at least a day behind so what's the point if you cannot monitor it in real time??!

UKstu

My parents have been having the same issue since April this year getting extra charges all of a sudden, they are in their late 70's have one Laptop which is new fully checked and they do not use any other services such as TV or Streaming media, BT advised that they are using 10GB each month since then, and will not speak to them further stating they have the problem for using the internet too much. All systems have been checked and nothing is streaming so in a last ditched attempt last week I asked them to switch off router for a few days so the BT usage stated from the 1st Oct 2013 to the 3rd they had a usage of 0.11 GB on checking today after the router has been switched off for 4 days usage has risen to 0.28GB even when its switched off, they have a line of only 1.5MB live over a mile from anyone else and being told by BT someone must be using their WIFI Strange as WIFI is switched off the unit also, This is a joke that BT can Steal money from Old Aged people as they know they do not have the ability to fight them.