OT - BT dialup - you'll like this...

"BT took us off because they said we used our monthly quota - however
for the four or so years they've been our ISP they always told us to
ignore those messages and never cut us off once"

Colin Wilson wrote:

> "BT took us off because they said we used our monthly quota - however
> for the four or so years they've been our ISP they always told us to
> ignore those messages and never cut us off once"

Would you care to provide any context for this exciting piece of information ?

Graham

> > "BT took us off because they said we used our monthly quota - however
> > for the four or so years they've been our ISP they always told us to
> > ignore those messages and never cut us off once"
> Would you care to provide any context for this exciting piece of information ?

Yeah, sorry, my machine was in the death-throes of a nasty crash, and
I forgot to annotate it after a reboot...

One of my colleagues in work *was* with BT on dialup, and they've had
their account pulled for exceeding a "monthly quota" ?!?

That's gotta be hard on dialup ffs, and I know for a fact it's only a
couple of early teen kids who use it* - mainly for updating their own
website with some of their home made artwork.

* the parents are technology-averse to put it mildly, and they also
heavily limit how much time the kids spend on it

I can almost guarantee there was no p2p activity saturating it either,
as they're not into downloading crap for the sake of it.

Colin Wilson wrote:
> One of my colleagues in work *was* with BT on dialup, and they've had
> their account pulled for exceeding a "monthly quota" ?!?
>
> That's gotta be hard on dialup ffs

I think you misunderstand what BT are referring to here... The 'quota'
they're referring to isn't a data transfer quota (as with always-on
connections like ADSL) but a time-based quota. The old 'Anytime'
package (which was billed as 'unlimited', much like modern ADSL
packages) came with a 200 hour limit per month. This kept dropping, and
when I eventually left BT it was somewhere in the region of 120 hours.
It's fairly difficult to break even that reduced limit (as it would be a
solid four hour per day every day), but it only takes a few nights where
you forget to disconnect and leave it running to bump up the figures.
That said, I remember them adding in a 120 minute cutoff (which played
merry havoc with downloading of large files like Windows service packs)
to stop people 'accidentally' leaving the connection open.

--
Gareth Halfacree http://gareth.halfacree.co.uk
"If Ace Books ever came out with an edition of The Bible, both books
would be edited down to 40,000 words, and they'd be renamed "Master of
Chaos" and "The Thing With Three Souls." - Terry Carr

On Thu, 17 May 2007 10:42:21 +0100, Gareth R Halfacree
<(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

>I think you misunderstand what BT are referring to here... The 'quota'
>they're referring to isn't a data transfer quota (as with always-on
>connections like ADSL) but a time-based quota. The old 'Anytime'
>package (which was billed as 'unlimited', much like modern ADSL
>packages) came with a 200 hour limit per month. This kept dropping, and
>when I eventually left BT it was somewhere in the region of 120 hours.

That's right. It isn't "anytime" at all really. The orange (formerly
freeserve) equivalent didn't have that restriction and could be left
on 24/7. It still cut off after a couple of hours, though, which was
rather annoying.


Jim.