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You’d think that with streaming taking off in a big way, everyone would already be on unlimited deals, but it seems not. Apparently over two-million of us Brits are forking out up to £40 in overage charges on their broadband every month; that’s up to £480 a year whacked onto your bill. Ouch.
The problem is that the rise of streaming services has put a pinch on limited broadband packages. People who signed up for those paltry 10, 20 or 40GB packages because they were cheaper, are flying over their usage caps and getting hit with some pretty hefty charges. OK, we’re not talking mobile broadband £1-per-megabyte charges here, but still, the average is around £1 per gigabyte.
TalkTalk reckons that the average UK household downloads about 17GB a month, which seems a little bit on the light side to me, but we are talking averages across the whole nation. When I think about what I do in the evenings, mainly streaming Netflix and LoveFilm at the highest resolution and quality possible down my 80Mbit pipe, that’s got to chew through some serious data.
With iPlayer and other catch-up streamers, plus things like Netflix, LoveFilm, and even YouView taking centre stage in the living room, it’s only going to get worse. Plonk for unlimited packages folks — data usage is only ever going to increase. Is anyone in the Giz UK faithful on a limited package, and if so, have you ever been hit by extortionate overage charges? [Daily Mail]
Image credit: Bill from Shutterstock
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We have a 60GB cap which we use about 50GB of in a house of five, though I admit to using most of it on StarCraft, Steam, and TV shows.
We just get our speeds reduced if we download too much during certain times. Only lasts for a few hours though then back to normal..
We used to be on a 40gb cap with BT, which I only went over once and didn’t get charged for… But now I’m on unlimited, I do use more than that. Mostly downloading the free game of the month on PSN+, that can be 15+gb by itself.
That said, I have a friend on a 40gb package and he frequently gets charged double his base bill because of over usage charges.
An average of 17gb a month?
I assume they are taking every member of the population into account to come to that figure. I think that between 4x phones, 2x pc’s, 3x PS3′s, internet tv, and god knows what else, our house does double that a day.
To be honest if you have 3 PS3s you probably aren’t that average!
I signed up with O2 Broadband when they were just starting out and were selling some excellent deals. They called me about a year ago asking if I wanted to update my contract; I asked them what would change and their response was (paraphrasing) “well, it’s a little bit more than you’re paying now, with a slightly slower broadband speed and a 20GB data cap”. I literally LOL’d and informed them that I could get through 20GB inside a week!
ISPs are totally taking the mick and catching out those who are not so web savvy, either with ‘up to’ speeds or unlimited data with fair use policies, much the same as mobile operators.
Throttling is another annoyance but at least there is a (somewhat spurious) reason for that.
its a con by what measurement can they really charge what they do for data, usage policies need to adapt the Bulk growth of the internet. Media is so much bigger now and they have the cheek to charge on their out of date consumption policies. just make it all unlimited, Data consumption is not really an issue, data does not run out, its not like a fuel. the issue is bandwidth at key times.. if i consume 5TB a year that does not mean the rest of the country cant consume 5TB in a year it just means at peek times they will rain back my connection speed so everyone can access the line and even this is becoming pointless as bandwidth grows to allow higher access over the networks. its all simply a con..
Do you have only ‘unlimited alcohol’ parties where you live?
I think there is a trade off between bandwidth and data usage while restricting users from overloading the network. If restricting bandwidth was the only strategy, it could mean that everyone uses Kbps speeds. While this does mean that the companies are incompetent and would rather stifle people’s pleasure and information consumption, it also suggests that real cost of unlimited connections are in fact expensive
the Alcohol tends to out last our ability to consume it
I agree, the strategy is to limit the bandwidth at peek times, but if i do all my downloading at 2am but consume more data than nextdoor who does all their traffic at peek times who should really pay more. i am on the only one on the “highway” i am not flooding and not restricting access for anyone else but next door is part of the traffic jam problem. At these points i agree maintaining the network is expensive but considering they get Gov. subsidisation ontop of thousands/millions of customers payments. i dont think they should be able to charge £1 a gig for over consumption if your average traffic times tend to be off peek since you are not part of the bottle neck?
Maybe they could consider basing there packages on access times like a train fair.
10mb off peek 2mb on peek = £20 a month
100mb at all times £50 a month..
see the idea? its not consumption as there is no loss, data is infinite it needs to be based on assess speeds.
i also acknowledge that i clearly cant type given all the typos above…
Haha. Your little tariff there is so full of hope. But reality is more like
10mb off peek 2mb on peek = £50 a month
100mb at all times = £50 a month
No usage = £50 a month
I have a 40gb cap, and I never reach it thanks to my whopping 1Mbit connection (on a good day, if it’s not too cold or sunny, the wind is in the right direction and I’m wearing my lucky socks). Its very hard to reach 40GB when the quickest you can stream anything is at 75kb/s
I only get 1Mbit too – that’s crappy enough, but both BT and TalkTalk have been promising fibre broadband “within 3 months” since January, and every time that deadline passes they simply put it back by three months. Shitty behaviour……
They didn’t specify which 3 months it was within. If you read the really really small print you’ll see “the 3 months are Mar-May 2017″.
I’ve got the same problem. We can’t go with Virgin either as they haven’t laid any cable down
I work for an ISP that doesn’t have overusage charges on its broadband packages, though only 2 of its packages have usage limits. One package is based on the BT network, and has a 40 Gb per month limit. It also has fair usage policies which can only be described as strict. They’re basically designed so that no-one can go over their limit by slowing the speeds down so low that you practically can’t download anything. On its other package, which is based on their own network, they offer 2Gb usage per month free with upto 20Mbps speeds. On this package you don’t get charged extra for going over per se, but if you do it twice in 6 months you get upgraded to the unlimited package they have, which comes at a charge. I regularly deal with older people who go over their limits each month and get upgraded, but swear they only use the internet sparingly.
The fact is that even without streaming and download services the Internet is becoming more data-intense. Simple websites are being updated and use more data. Older generations are learning to use computers with services such as Skype and Facebook. If you view all your grandkids photos on facebook, you’re gonna use a lot of data.
Streaming services don’t help. My company, which also does tv services, are pushing their on-demand service atm, and for customers who are on their free broadband package they’ll go over their limits really quickly. Using only the on-demand content they’ll get a maximum of about 5 20min shows a month, as long as they don’t do anything else online.
All internet providers need to realise that having packages dependant on data is not the way to go. Fully customisable packages are. Offer a package where you can choose the speed of your line, and how much you use every month. Give them the ability to add on extra data, but if they don’t do it before they go over then you can charge them more for the extra data. Give control to the customer and they’ll soon be paying for extra so they don’t get over charged.
I live in a semi rural area, 30 miles from central London and roughly 5-6 miles road distance from my telephone exchange.
My home broadband is on an unlimited package, with a blazing fast 0.6mbps connection – my internet usage comes solely from a MiFi with 15Gb cap, at 3mbps. After the 15Gb is gone, I pay 10p/mb.
No Fibre – No Virgin – No HSPA+ – No 4G (HAHA)
How the other half live…
I live in the centre of a small city. We get between 1 & 2mbps in a house that is less than half a mile from the exchange and is only 10 years old(!) Yet Virgin, BT & anyone else who offers superfast broadband won’t sort it out for anyone on our street. It’s an absolute joke.
What is the cost for ISPs for a usage of 1 GB over their entire infrastructure’s capacity? And how does this cost scale for every GB thereafter? Do usage patterns and behavior change according to the amount of data at disposal? Is it ethical to restrict the amount of content consumption based on financial status? Are data caps a blatant acceptance by the ISPs that their infrastructure is not big enough to accommodate the actual data consumption demand? And do they admit that they don’t intend to meet this demand and would rather stifle demand and the economy than improve and expand their infrastructure? Does that make them lazy scumbags?
I’d never really considered how much I used before, just checked on my desktop and I’m at 4.5GiB over 5 days and 18 hours. I wouldn’t be surprised if I end up using around 30GB in a month, then there’s whatever my phone and PS3, family computer, and brother’s Xbox which he uses to stream a ton of films. I think I’m going to ask my dad if we’re capped (I’ve always thought we were unlimited), hopefully I’m not costing us a load of money.
We were charged a hundred (or maybe 80) quid I think for 1 month when I believe we were told we were on a 100GB limit package but turned out to be 20GB, we were with pipex and they were just taken over by talktalk I believe. before the take over the broadband was fine, but we ‘upgraded’ to 8Mb and I think it was actually worse than what we had before. We changed over to o2 unlimited which we got trouble with drop outs to start off with occasionally but it was good when it was sorted.
Pipex was bought by tiscali*. I thought it was but a google said talktalk owned them, but they bought out tiscali afterwards. We almost went with talktalk afterwards too (not my choice) glad we dodged that bullet.
I expect these limits to change radically within the next 5 years as hi res streaming becomes far more popular-and please, NO more ‘unlimited’ allowance advertising, when the reality is 30 to 40GB! Its just on the verge of lying to your audience and potential customers. You might as well advertise your services with free money,porn,food,anything at all-because as long as ‘only joking’ is there in the small print (as is the real download limit), everything remains legal, doesnt it?
I use between 20-30 GB per month, I stream radio, lastfm, and the occassional youtube and pandora for tv and music. Pandora tv is included with kmplayer, it has mainly eastern content but Im sure thats set to change. ps if you install the player, watch out for yontoo llc which may be installed without permission. yontoo is unneeded and completely unnecessary.