Primus Saver: experience + data usage monitoring

Jabba_flabba

I recently joined Primus Saver (phone + broadband 20GB data usage allowance), and have so far been very happy with the setup process. They activated the line on the day they said they would and everything's been smooth since then.

The only thing that could have been made clearer is that you don't actually need to configure the supplied TG582n router with your broadband and username and password - it just works after you plug in and turn on! In fact, doing so could catch people out as it did me! The day before activation I had gone through the setup wizard in the router web interface and configured the router with my username and password. Unbeknownst to me, this process inadvertently disabled network address translation and thus prevented my devices from accessing the internet even though the router was connected to the internet! The quick fix was to telnet to the router and enter:

nat ifconfig intf=Internet translation=enabled
saveall

I later discovered that a factory reset i.e. back to how it was when it dropped through the letterbox, equally made it work.

I have emailed Primus concerning whether there is a facility in place to check how much data has been consumed within the billing month. I rather suspect that there isn't anything, other than a phone call to them. I haven't heard back yet, though I only emailed yesterday. The obvious way forward would be to provide the data usage statistics within the customer's online account, but if this is not easily achievable for technical reasons then perhaps an email system could be set up, whereby the customer sends an email in a prescribed format to a dedicated Primus email address; then at Primus's end an automatic reply would send the data usage to the customer.

I wouldn't be so cynical to suggest that Primus would deliberately make no proper provision for data usage checking Furthermore, if all customers were so diligent as to phone up every week to check their usage then I would think there would be Primus helpdesk chaos! Not to mention the cost to the company in staff time answering those phones. So it must be in their interests to progress this. IMO, if an ISP imposes data caps, and charges for going beyond the agreed allowance, then customers should be provided with a convenient way of checking their usage. And it shouldn't matter whether they're a budget ISP or not. The whole reason for customers joining a budget ISP is that they want to save money. Not being able to monitor your usage detracts from that. Having to phone up simply doesn't cut it in this day and age.

Personally, though the £2 per GB doesn't seem excessive, I would rather Primus simply shaped my traffic if I go over their limit! Down to dial up speeds would be better than the anxiety resulting from the possibility of additional data charges incurred.

The current workaround for customers is to monitor their own usage. For one device households, this is easily achievable as there's a plethora of programs out there, particularly on Windows, that allow the collection of data usage. However, I imagine most households will have multiple devices and installing programs on each and then toting up the amounts is not practicable. So the obvious solution is to monitor the data usage on the router. Well, the Primus-supplied router does in fact have a real time data usage counter (data transmitted & received), and an uptime indicator. So in theory you could monitor this way. The counter/uptime resets when the router is powered off/on, so you could simply power cycle on your first billing day to reset the counter. However, in practise there are two problems with this:

1) If for some reason the router gets powered off e.g. mid way through the billing month you have a power cut, the counter stats are gone!
2) The counter stats may not be reliable, and may be out-of-sync with the data recorded by Primus at their end. So your router may mislead you!

Another solution is buy a router that supports an alternative firmware such as Gargoyle or DD-WRT. These firmwares have features that allow you to monitor usage, and I believe Gargoyle lets you see usage per device. However, it's unreasonable to expect the average user to go to the lengths required to get such a router working.

Well, you've reached the end of my brain dump so give yourself a pat on the back.:T Have others reached similar conclusions to me?