£260 bill for a month's internet usage - precautionary tale

headpodd

Just a precautionary tale...do not ever underestimate the amount you are spending on the internet when you have dongle (or other limitations).

I have a £25 a month, 5GB limit , Vodafone dongle which normally is perfectly adequate.

However in the last month, for one reason or another, I've had to put most of my possessions into storage and live out of a suitcase.

"I don't need a telly" I told myself, "It'll cost me c£100 to buy one, I'll just watch it all on-line". What a mistake. And I know I'm a muppet and only have myself to blame. I appreciate that most people are a bit more clued up than me, but if this story helps someone then it's not all bad. Nice lady at Vodafone said that the amount you use live streaming TV/you tube etc is horrendous, and clearly she is right.

esuhl

Blimey! There really ought to be a law that says that the ISP needs to notify you when you exceed your monthly limit. It'd be easy to implement too - just block network access and redirect all web traffic to a holding page that says "You've reached your limit and will be charged £X/GB. Enter your password to continue."

I just posted on another thread that while "general surfing" doesn't eat in to your allowance too much, an hour-long programme on iPlayer is 600MB, so with 5GB that's just over 8 hours' viewing.

brewerdave

I watched a live rugby match for 1.5 hours via Sky player the other morning and used up 1.8Gb, which is over 10% of my monthly allowance! Easy to do!!!

Hammyman

headpodd.....

I would like to thank you for being one of the first people on this board to have the balls to admit their £100's data bill is down to their own actions and not somebody elses fault.

Maybe a bit late but you can buy USB freeview dongles for under £50.

headpodd

Hammyman wrote: »

.
.
Maybe a bit late but you can buy USB freeview dongles for under £50.

Thanks, didn't know they existed, wow. I'll bear it in mind, but I'll think I'll go and buy a small 16" TV (quite cheap in Argos really). Could've bought 3 TVs for the price of my Vodafone bill.

steveE2

Hammyman wrote: »

headpodd.....

Maybe a bit late but you can buy USB freeview dongles for under £50.

I bought 2 of these for less than £10 each,connected to external aerial they're perfect set one up on ol dpc to use as pvr

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/USB-TV-TUNER-DONGLE-WATCH-FREEVIEW-LAPTOP-PC-VISTA-/120711579102?pt=UK_Computing_Computer_Components_Graphics_Video_TV_Cards_TW&hash=item1c1af885de

Mark_In_Hampshire

There's a handy broadband meter you can get for free at www.thinkbroadband.com which runs in the system tray and can be set to alert you at predefined usage limits (as well as monitoring performance) which might be worth installing.