How much is too much..?

[opsmonkey]

Hi..

Last night i downloaded 16GB of data, tonight i'm probably going to do the same.. I've set my PC up to start at 1am and i'm on Virgin 10MB BB...

Will 32GB of data downloads get me into trouble with virgin regarding fair useage policy..??

Cheers

[cunny]

Hi..

Last night i downloaded 16GB of data, tonight i'm probably going to do the same.. I've set my PC up to start at 1am and i'm on Virgin 10MB BB...

Will 32GB of data downloads get me into trouble with virgin regarding fair useage policy..??

Cheers

Fair usage? M8 i have downloaded over a terabyte of data in a month.
As long as you do it over night then you will be fine. Set them off at about half 9 and leave running over night until about 9am.

All they will do is cap you to slow you down. I am on 20mb and they cap me to 4.5mb.

[opsmonkey]

cheers dude..

[chroma]

I was on Be* Broadband and downloaded everything constantly at 20meg.

No caps no letters nothing but a fast connection constantly.

The problem with virgin is that they run their broadband like an airport and overbook seats.

Your connection goes to the exchange where it gets connected to the backhaul to the internet proper.

The problem with virgin is they have too many connections going into a small pipe so they sell everyone 20mb and make the customers fight for position in the backhaul.

CONTENTION with be i had a 1:1 contention meaning that for every 1 customer there was 1 full connection to the backhaul. at 24meg max that means for 100 customers they had to supply 2.35gig backhaul.

BT are at roughly 100:1 contention meaning that for every 100 customers subscribing theres enough room for 1 full 20meg connection on the backhaul, so if you max your connection then 100 other peoples grind to a crawl.

Im sure that Virgin average about 50:1 and as low as 15:1 for a business package. so in effect if theres 100 customers subscribed they only need a 40meg backhaul for everyone to share between.

As you can imagine backhauls are expensive, so the less you spend on space there the more your shareholders will make from the product.
Hence the reason you really need to dig for the contention ratio from your ISP, they wont advertise the number freely as its the single most accurate guage to how much theyre gouging the customer base.
Every nmber they advertise is "up to" meaning theres scope for it to be variable and wiggle room to deal with complaints, contention is fixed and therefore theres room for complaints to carry weight.