plusnet usage - warning for bittorrent users!

dallnsn

Just got caught out by plusnet's charges for going over my broadband limit.

In summary: beware of bittorrent use - even legal!

I bought the latest humble bundle and as they're a charity I thought I'd use bittorrent to save their bandwidth ( yes that's legal )

It was the last day of the month and I'd just got an email from them to say I was nearing my limit - but I had about 10 Gb left and I was only downloading 4Gb so I set the torrent off and left it to it.

Checked it some time later and found it had only got to about 45% and wasn't progressing any further, but it seemed to be doing something as the internet was slow.

Alarm bells should have rung then, but I left it running.

Some hours later, it hadn't progressed any further and I had 2 emails in my inbox saying I'd gone over my usage allowance twice and had been charged £5 for each. As I read them a 3rd came in.

Needless to say I killed the bittorrent application and tried to work out what was going on. At this point I'd only succeeded in downloading 2Gb so I couldn't believe that was the culprit.

So I fired off a complaint to plusnet.

Some time later I had the thought of looking closer at the stats of the torrent I was downloading and found it had downloaded and discarded as corrupt nearly 25Gb of data :eek:

So, hands in the air, I emailed plusnet again to explain and ask them to never charge me again for going over; I'd rather have my service restricted, which they agreed to.

I would guess this problem could happen if you were using something like a download manager as well.

Hope this helps somebody else avoid being ripped off.

spannerzone

You can restrict over payments, which you've learnt is important! I don't think it's fair to say it's being ripped off

Go into the control panel and set the spend limit to £0 to ensure you service stops (goes to a crawl) when you hit your 10GB limit.

Home > Member Centre > Connection Settings > Control Your Broadband > Manage my usage

https://portal.plus.net/data_transfer_watch/
"Maximum extra monthly spend: £0"

Also any uploads/downloads out of their peak hours don't count against your usage allowance

dallnsn

you're right, I'm not being completely fair, sorry plusnet you've been great overall :kisses: - but I felt ripped off!

Thanks for the advice, hopefully it'll help others from falling into this trap in the future, which was the point of this post :idea:

spannerzone

I can see how it would be annoying that's for sure. Anyway hopefully your post may well help others from falling into the trap.

I can't remember whether Plusnet advise on this feature when signing up though?

ktothema

We've just signed to plusnet and had no clue of this feature. Very handy piece of info.

Owain_Moneysaver

I think the problem is bittorrent (or other similar products) rather than Plusnet.

At least Plusnet do email you to warn you about going over and allow you to set your own limit for extra charges.