Be Excellent To Each Other

(Cross posted from YY as there may be Demon users on here)

Just got a fair usage letter, 47 gigs in last thirty days - first time I've ever been near it (Battlestar Galactica, a one-off).

So apparently the limit of my unlimited broadband is 50gb per rolling thirty days. Fine, I'll just stay under that and there's not a problem, I'm never likely to need to do this much downloading again anyway.

So I go on their website, and I look, nowhere to be seen is a means of finding out my usage over the last thirty days. So I call the number they provided and speak to a gentleman in India (not sure why, as I 'bought British' quite deliberately). They tell me they can't help, I need to call an 087 number, which I do, which takes me to a nice lady in India, with a script and a VERY STRONG ACCENT.

"Can I have your house name, sir?"

"Erm... ok - ****field House"

"No, sir, your house name"

"****field house, which is number ** **** road, Cardiff - why do you need this?"

"No, sir, the name of your domain, your house name"

"Host name?"

"Yes"

"<sigh>"

Apparently, I've used 47gb. Yes, love, I know. (Wouldn't it be easier just to publish these callcentre scripts online and we follow them, they could lay off whole cities of staff and pass the saving onto the customer). So I explain that that 47gb is rolling, and it could have been all used in the last ten days, in which case I need to be very careful, or in the first five of today's thirty day period, in which case a couple of days without iplayer and I'm safely in the black (which I'm in anyway, and am trying to responsibly stay in). So I ask how I'm supposed to know.

"With respect, sir," she begins "there is software you can download from Google to do this for you".

Joy! Google host software that will tell me what my Demon internet account usage has been each day ovr the last thirty!

Or not.

Apparently, their solution to my 'when did I use this bandwidth you feel is important enough to write to me about' query is for me to download an unspecified app 'from Google' and use that in future. I respond enthusiastically "Great, so this Google application will cover my three main machines which run Xandros, XP and Vista respectively?"

"Different softwares are available"

"Great, so when I consider the three laptops, two desktops, two EEEPCs, two DSes, an XBox, a 360, a PSP and an N95 and a Wii all of which use the connection at times, this software will sort the lot out, will it?"

"No, it is for individual machines only"

"So I've no way of knowing how much I've used then?"

"You have used 47gb Mr Finlay"

"When though?"

"In the last thirty days, I apologise that I can't be more specific sir".

<Facepalm>

So I'm off to Be, however she told me my contract was renewed on 20/10/07 when the only thing I've ever agreed to was the service on 9/10/06. I could push this, but I'd sooner just cancel.

Alternatively, I could just stop paying them, and when they call to query, I'll advise them I did indeed pay, 'at some point in the last thirty days' and if they want to know more, download something from Google.

Fucking shitbags. I hope to god Be do manage to unbundle my exchange this month, as their website suggests. Anyone who where else I might check such things? Please, please don't suggest there's something i can download from Google

That's really blinkin' annoying, Goatboy.

I can't see how they can get away with not publishing the information that allows to you to monitor your usage and so stay within their own terms and conditions. Muppets.

The call center in India is also annoying when you get through to someone who doesn't understand you or who doesn't have sufficient English skills, it just serves to make you even more fed up with the service. The people that work those call centers in India always seem so nice and polite and helpful, but if you can't even communicate the information you are ringing to give, then it is pointless.

Ruddy hell! Are Demon still going?

I ditched them in 2002 when I switched to broadband and they were already going down the pisser then.

I'd like to recommend UK online, only ever had great service from them.

Be/O2 are slowly working their way through the Cardiff exchanges. They did whatever one serves our office in Cathays at the end of last month, although it had been pushed back twice from June and July.

This is exactly the reason I dumped them last year to swan off to Be. Funnily enough, the people who give you your migration code are in Britain and are very interested in why you left.

I've an aversion to putting money into an economy which operates the caste system, plus it makes no sense to struggle for ages to slip the yoke of British administration, only to be on the end of the phone every timer I pick it up and dial a British number.

The people on the end of the line have very polite and hepful sounding scripts, it is nothing to do with the individual. And no, you name is not Thomas. Lying to me in the first twenty seconds is not going to make this call go any better. Most communicaiton difficulties come from operatives speaking too fast in order to get things done and imporve their stats. It is counter-productive and if they don't feel capable of resolving my bother and hitting targets, fucking quit, that's what I did.

Any comeback regarding the economy over there and job opportunities is bullshit - if they want our money they can play by our rules. Indian customer service is becoming as bad as American equivalents. Creative labs, I'm looking at you.

I went with Demon on the understanding they were 'home grown', and called numerous times to make sure I didn't get bangalored.

According to YakYak, Zen have a firefox plugin which will give me exactly what I need. Demon, on the other hand, offer I.E. SIX for download from theirs, no idea why. All those IE 5 users unable to get an upgrade from MS?

That always both bothers and amuses me. Every person I have ever spoken to from an Indian call center is called 'Maria'. Maria must be very busy.

For what it's worth, UK Online have 100% UK based customer services, and a pretty decent team at the other end of the line too, and not very long waiting time. When there was a problem with connecting, and they were doing really basic stuff (like "is the router turned on") I said "btw, I am a geek, it's not going to be a simple problem", and they skipped all the bullshit. Turned out the problem was at their end, so they gave me 3 months free.

It's an 0800 number too.

Not that I've had any fair use problems with Be, but short of you keeping an eye on your router, they don't have this information either I believe.

Their CS, especially their member's only forum is rather excellent though.

Only in Management World can it be acceptable that the Customer Services Advisor has lied to you before you have even spoken a word.

Any ISP that enforces bandwidth caps but doesn't expose their counters to the customer should just go away. PlusNet, to their credit, had really nice graphs of how much you'd used and when it was going to reset, and they didn't count anything from midnight to 7am either.

I'm with Sky now and they claim to be genuinely unlimited.

Indeed, our house had averaged very roughly 150gb a month for 10 months from Be and I've not had a peep.

They are and they're very, very good. Unfortunately as I'm cancelling my TV with them now you can't have broadband on its own.

What are the speeds generally like with Be? My local exchanged is all Be-ed up, and while I wouldn't realistically expect a full 24mb (although I do live less than a kilometre from the exchange), if it's likely to be around the 8mb my ADSL24 connection whizzes along at I might be tempted to switch. I'm generally very happy with my ADSL24 connection, but the prospect of saving two quid a month and not having to wait until the off-peak tariff kicks in before downloading anything particularly meaty is a tantalising thought.

I connect at just over 20 and while it's quite tricky to really reliably speedtest connections like that without it just being the site you're going from, I get a smidge over 2MB/sec from newsgroups.

At work we're further from the exchange and connect somewhere in the 15-18 range and I get about 1.8MB/sec.

Note megabytes in both cases for the actual speeds, obv mbits for the connection.

I'm still with ADSL24 because they're nice people and the service seems pretty solid. It's not hugely fast but it's not bad. I can usually download at 300-400 KB/s. I'm with Bulldog at work and get about 650KB/s download and a crap phone line that beeps and the phone rings if you put it down and the other person hasn't hung up. It's not bad though. It's the cheapest I can get here because if I went to Be I'd be forced to have a business phone line from BT which is hugely more money even though I wouldn't get benefit from it.

I'm 500m from the exchange and got the max 20mbps from O2*, when I was on the top package - and 2.5mbps upload, versus the supposed 1.6mbps limit. Lovely as that was, I didn't really think it worth the extra £5/mo over 16/1.3mbps, so I downgraded - and it happened immediately. £10/mo (being an O2 mobile customer) for apparently properly unlimited, unshaped 16mbps is just about unbeatable.

A shame, then, that's someone's doing *something* that destroys my wlan; for the last week or so my netgear router's wlan would lock up once a day requiring a power-cycle; figuring the radio's dying, I switched to the O2 box (less configurable and insecure without telnetting in to hack away at the undocumented settings by command line)... and the wlan just failed completely for about an hour last night, until I forced it onto channel 13, uptimes of about 30 seconds. Nothing to do with O2 or their hardware, particularly. Just annoying.

* they restrict the top end for some reason, presumably they figure advertising that final 4mbps would be more hassle than it's worth from "but you promised I'd absolutely definitely get it!" whingers. Or that because they're pushing a damn sight harder than Be they'd best limit network load a touch. Or Be just wanted to keep a little extra by way of bragging rights for themselves. Or something.

Just in case anyone didn't know, O2 owns Be.

Ah, I think I just found out why I only got/could get 20MB; Be offer "Upload Plus", which sacrifices 1-3mbps of download speed to boost upload from 1.3mbps to 2.5.

For the merest hint of a second, I'd thought Dudley meant "O2 is much better than Be" in internet speak. Duuh.

Much like Nirejhenge, I would feel a bit sneaky leaving ADSL24 behind, as they've been nothing other than wonderful since I switched to them - it'd somehow feel like punching an affable neighbour in the face for absolutely no reason. However, Be do offer a superior product at a lower price, and as only three months of notice are required before leaving Be, I could switch back relatively easily. I have actually been recommending ADSL24 to other people I know (who live in areas not served by Be), so I could well claim I've offset my broadband allegiance a few times over. Hmm.

Now that I have a lingering sense of guilt about how I'm going to break it to my broadband provider that I'm considering dumping them, I am actually slightly concerned that I've now turned into Mark from Peep Show. If I started playing World Of Warcraft, I should really start to worry. Luckily, my career is firmly rooted in "Jeremy from Peep Show" territory, so I'm safe in that regard.

Always the way. My favourite was when my wife ditched Orange, after spending time talking to some lovely person in India, and then an hour in the shop trying to get a deal that wasn't utterly utterly shit. Basically, they offered her about half what she was currently getting, for the same price, all because the new "Dolphin/Racoon/Yeti" bollocks was WHAT OUR CUSTOMERS WANT". She explained that, in fact, it would end up with her spending more money, and she left and went online for her code (because the shop claimed it couldn't get it). Right on cue, someone from the UK called and tried desperately to stop her getting her code, but, amusingly still only offered the same stupid packages.


*goes to Zen website*. Oooh! Zen's customer portal site does this anyway (offering both daily and cumulative usage stats—see below), but here's a wee Mac OS X dashboard widget. Lovely! (It has to be said, Zen's service has been going steadily downhill over the past year, but it still seems to be one of the best of a bad bunch. And at least they actually answer emails to support now, which they didn't for a long time.)

You get plenty of reporting on the adsl24 website as to what you've used. Plus.net used to offer such things as well. I didn't think it was so uncommon!

Also, Mark X, if you leave ADSL24 you might miss out on all those lovely graphs. I know how you have an unhealthy obsession with them after all..

My router can also generate graphs like that, and it will of course be for all traffic. It can also save logs in text form, split daily, weekly, monthly or yearly, and even a realtime graph for in and out.

It's so much easier having an awesome router.

You're so modest Sheepeh

In topical news, Sky ADSL has dropped all usage limits on the top-tier Max package.

This is true. And I am very lazy, probably too lazy to bother getting a MAC code from ADSL24. Anyway, why haven't you checked out my Song War thread, Nirej-o? It should be right up your particular alley.

Has anyone tried Virgin's Fiberoptic service?

I've been on their 20mb tier since it existed. I always get the full 20. Service is pretty good as it stands, but it's not overly cheap and the limits are pretty harsh.

http://www.virginmedia.com/help/traffic-management.php

Here's one of my emails. They are titled WARNING EMAIL.




I got the first one of these on Sunday, when I started the thread. So we barely used the net all day, so they got their fucking decrease.My usage was 47 gig then though. On Monday, another warning, 47 gigs. Again Tuesday. How I'm only using just enough internet to check messages and forums and this figure not drop one iota is beyond me, I must be using exactly the same amount of data as is falling off. Then the next day, I get one saying 48 gig. So I've done a gig's worth of browsing in two days where I probably didn't spend more than an hour online, and I've now learned that they round their figures down, as the initial 47 gigs they warned me about must have been 47.9999999.

Belligerent and tight-fisted purveyors of half-truths and unease. They can fuck off as soon as my missus doesn't need to work from home for a fortnight.

Out of curiosity, can't you buy extra bandwidth? I know with Zen, you can grab however many GB you want, and anything you don't 'spend' of this extra chunk is bumped to the following month.

I didn't realise they were throttling uploads now as well -- that's a bit annoying to say the least (and will do my Cheggit UKNova ratio no good).

Anybody any experiance with the Virgin fibreoptic stuff? I'm thinking of changing over for cheapness.

Cheapness? Do you have TV already then because it's hideously priced compared to o2 or Be.

It's good but they throttle you like a bitch if you dare to actually use it during an ever expanding peak time period. If you're a lightish user this won't matter. But if you're a lightish user, why do you need 20mbit?

I was thinking of dropping the telly service, but I won't really be saving much. Going with another company means arsing around with the land line. Think I'll just leave things as they are.

Um... That's what the last few posts have been about...

What do you need to do to swtich suppliers?
Do you need to wait til the end of a 12 month contract?

What happens if you want to change in the middle of that?

Depends entirely on your provider what contract.

Then you call the new provider.

Be demand 3 months or £50 fwiw.

Im with Demon, will have to check

seems there may be better deals out there, though personally I dont have any issues with Demon.