Carphone Warehouse to offer 'free' broadband

It's not actually FREE though - you have to pay £9.99 a month (which gets you free national calls + free calls to 28 countries) to get the broadband.

Shitty thing is I can't switch to this even though I work for the fucking company because the broadband package I'm on at the moment is too shit to give me a MAC code.

I will be able to answer all questions about this in about an hour! That's if I can't skip out of it.

We are already foreseeing problems. They won't be able to deal with the sign-ups quick enough, if you do go for this, expect to wait a while before it gets sorted out.

It's 8Mbps IF they've unbundled your exchange, otherwise it's 2Mb (max you can get via BT) until they unbundle.

The 40GB limit might not actually be enforced (they don't know yet)

Nothing about P2P mentioned.

"What will happen if my use is very high?
If you only occasionally have very high usage, we're unlikely to be concerned unless it becomes a regular occurrence. If this does happen then we'll get in touch to help you find ways to reduce your usage.
Ultimately, if your usage still remains excessive despite our attempts to help you reduce it, we may restrict your general Internet service throughout the entire day. A last resort will be to suspend your service and possibly close your account.
We definitely don't want to do that, TalkTalk is all about giving our customers the best possible phone and broadband service and with your support we'll work with you and hopefully avoid this from happening.

Does TalkTalk Broadband allow peer-to-peer (P2P) downloading?
We don't stop our customers using file-sharing software (often known as peer-to-peer or P2P), but we keep an eye out for anyone abusing the rules. We will work to restrict P2P users who slow down the network for everyone else (see below). And we certainly don't condone using P2P software to illegally share copyrighted music, or to breach any other local law or regulation.

How is peer-to-peer (P2P) downloading restricted?
We restrict P2P activity in peak hours to make sure that other general Internet use takes priority (including surfing, email, shopping, gaming and commercial downloads). Between midnight and 8am we allow a greater proportion of P2P traffic."

Hmmmmm.

Explain? My connection has been cutting out a lot recently and I'm wondering if this could be why.

How do they cap P2P traffic? I'm no expert - do they restrict certain ports or something?

Do they help you cut down your usage if you ring a random person in all 28 countrues every night, to ask them if they've got any football stickers for swapsies, for example?

Apparently it costs them more to route a call to Newcastle than to New York. I ought to know that since I work in rating/billing but maybe that doesn't apply to our switches.

What's the distance limit for 8Mbps, though?

(We get 2Mbps for £pounds;15, so I don't think we're likely to switch somehow)

2Mb (max you can get via BT)

BT are starting 4Mbps and 8Mbps very soon.

>> BT are starting 4Mbps and 8Mbps very soon

Well then I guess they'll give 4-8Mbps when that happens. Basically you get BT broadband if they haven't unbundled the exchange, but CPW pay for it. They're losing a shitload on this (for the 1st year at least)