NTL Broadband Limited to 1 GB per day!

"ntl: home's broadband and dial-up services are intended for normal recreational or educational use by individuals and families and our pricing and network architecture have been designed accordingly. Customers who use the services more heavily than a normal home user will reduce the performance of the network for other customers.

"Normal use" of the service is defined as up to 1 gigabyte downstream of data transfer daily (which equates to approximately 200 music tracks, 650 short videos, 10,000 pictures or around 100 large software programmes downloaded per day). ."
http://www.ntlworld.com/legals/user-policy.htm (Sneaked in on Friday Afternoon)

1GB (or approx 128kbps) A DAY DOWNLOAD! FOR £35 a Month for a 1Mbps service!!!
That's more than £1/GB
Or +70p for a CD-R's worth of information!!!
+£4 for a DVD-R's worth of information!!!
A 90% decrease in service!!!

SOD OFF!!!
DON'T PAY YOUR NEXT BILL, I WON'T!!!
(if we all didn't pay our bills (Phone/TV/Internet) debt ridden NTL would finally go bust and somebody with the money to invest as well as take on new customers would buy their creaky infrastructure for a song!)

If you are on a 12 month contract
They can't hold you to contract, they have moved the goal posts!
They advertised it as "unlimited" and this is clearly a limit and an unreasonable one at that.

LET EVERYONE KNOW THE SITUATION ON EVERY NEWSGROUP/FORUM YOU MIGHT POST TO OR READ
Tell any friends or work mates that are thinking about broadband what NTL are doing with their phoney broadband (Really "narrowband")
This effects everyone, the whole economy, education, the whole country!!!
Imagine the uproar there would be if the BBC or SKY said "Sure you can have more channels, but you can only watch the ones you want for 3 hours a day"

If NTL didn't have such a crippled Usenet newsgroup service and hadn't just removed popular binary groups it would not have seen such an increase in it's external bandwidth!
It's the whole reason NTL run Proxy servers for port 80 (Web browsing)
Who ever decided to chop back the newsservers is to blame here. We should have their head on a stick and if anyone with a brain, a grip on reality and a knowledge of the internet would understand that

It is much, much cheaper for NTL to run it's own newsgroup servers and keep user bandwidth within the NTL network.
They just shot themselves in the foot and now expect us to just "Stop using the service" and still pay £35 a month
NO WAY!!!

You don't buy a Ferrari just to nip down to the shops in it.
If you have paid "extra" for 1Mbps it's because 600kbps is not good enough and you certainly don't want 128kbps!

A 1Mbps connection (that NTL charges £35 a month for) is capable of downloading approx 8GB a day, By restricting it to 1GB they are effectively making it so that customers can only use their connection for less than 3 hours a day or at less than 128kbps (This is lower than a lot of TV streams that run at 300kbps or 500 kbps)
It matches a lot of internet radio stations that run at 128kbps or 1GB a day.
So NTL are expecting customers to pay broadband prices for a "midband" service

There are plenty of legit reasons for using amore than 1GB a day like video streaming and software updates.
Soon there could be pay services that use high bandwidth connections to watch movies (500-700kbps) and sports events, but under these new NTL terms customers will have to go and do something else other than use their internet connection.

And if it's aimed at a "family" well a lot of "families" have more than one PC, so even more bandwidth is needed, hence why the hell they are on broadband!

And who is to know where this will end?

500MB cap??
Then I might as well be on dial up!

In Japan you can get 12Mbps broadband for £27pm!
By NTL's rational you would only be able to use it for a few minutes a day before they cut you off!!!

Telewest, the UK's other main cable operator has no such user limits and is even thinking about starting a 2Mbps service, so 1GB in about 1 1/2 hours

What next from NTL "Sell your granny"??

I might as well get ISDN!! or go back to 56kbps

NTL have been advertising
that people can try and "break their cable modem" by constant downloading, now they say that because people have been doing just that they have to restrict their service to 1GB or face ejection from NTL

If you feel the same way or like me can't get ADSL yet and wish to help publicly humiliate NTL please email me justdont@dont-pay-ntl.co.uk

Please place this logo on your site to link to us

BBC News online, The Register & Inquirer are already following this>
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2740621.stm
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/22/29246.html
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=7676
http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/article/ds10333.html
http://www.tech-pc.co.uk/index.php?id=765

COMPLAIN HERE

http://www.dont-pay-ntl.co.uk/complain.htm

Nildram seem to be able to handle it. And the amount people want to download is only going to get bigger and bigger.

FFS why? No, really? Someone please explain to me what they're downloading and what they're doing with what they download.

But for alot of users 1GB a day is too little for regular use, there is enough stuff out there legitimate use of that bandwidth, movie trailer, software demos/patches/opensource, streaming audio such as http://www.somafm.com, multiplayer games can use alot of bandwidth as well, heck NTL even offer streaming video content. There's enough there to use 1GB easily for legal use.

NTL advertise 24/7 at 1Mbs for a price then for the same price they reduce the service significantly this is not on.

At the moment streaming content, even 'Broadband Quality' isn't anywhere near using the full bandwith of my connection, with a lack of quality to match, to get anywhere near a good TV quality reception would eat into all my bandwidth.

Not having a video recorder I also use my connection to download episodes of TV shows I miss. An hour long show can easily take up 1/2 gig. I would never have even seen a single epsiode of The Sopranos, 24 or 6 Feet Under without this as I work when they are shown.

Then there is MP3 downloading, I will often pick MP3s encoded at 320kbps for best quality, resulting in more bandwidth used.

Web browsing of a graphically intense website will also eat into bandwidth too.

From The Register:

In a Q&A the company said: "Our objective is only to limit very frequent or persistent heavy network use that can impact other customers. Therefore we will ONLY contact customers who exceed the daily data limit for three or more days in any consecutive 14-day period.

"If you occasionally exceed your data limit, it will not be a problem. Remember our goal is to give freedom and easy usage to our customers. This rule ensures that you have peace of mind and that we are able to reduce the unfair prolonged usage by a small number."

I agree that in the future this kind of cap will either have to be removed or boosted to a much higher level; the technology companies seem to be dead set on delivering multimedia content on-demand over the Internet, like movies and "television" programming, which will obviously require a much greater amount of data to be moved over your connection. Of course, it will require an upgrade of all of the equipment at the ISP, and an upgrade of THEIR connection, probably, which means don't expect it to come cheap.