Rural broadband

[Ferdinand]

Shouldn't you be able to find your usage from the online stats of your account?

 

For mobiles, mine has a traffic measurement and trigger warning facility built-in to Android.

Edited February 14, 2017 by Ferdinand
Typose. I hate :;()£& iPads.

[ProDave]

8 minutes ago, Ferdinand said:

Shouldn't yuo be able t find your usage from the online stats of your account?

 

For mobiles, mine has a traffic measurement and trigger warning facility built-in to Android.

Nope. BT unlimited broadband "helpfully" tells you that you have no limit so there's no point in showing you how much you have used. (i'll bet they know, just don't want to tell you)
 

[Jeremy Harris]

That's annoying.  I'm pretty sure our old ISP had this and the one we're now with here (with a slow VDSL2 connection), PlusNet, have the same, it shows how much you've used when you log in to your account.

 

Any reason for sticking with BT, rather than using a reseller?  It seemed to me, when I was looking around a few months ago, that generally BT weren't the best value.  Mind you, trying to make a fair comparison was not easy, it was a bit like trying to compare energy suppliers.  I've come to two conclusions:

 

a) The price comparison web sites are pretty useless, and I get the strong feeling that they steer you towards whoever is paying them the most.

 

b) The pricing strategy of all these companies is deliberately designed to be as confusing as possible to customers so that the best deals are really hard to find.

 

 

[ProDave]

We went back to BT after the nightmare with Talk Talk. Basically I just could not get them to fix a broadband fault. They were afraid to actually pass on the fault to Open Reach for fear they would get charged for fixing the fault, so chose to do nothing but keep sending me yet another new router because that must be the problem.  I ended up escalating it to their management and I parted mid contract with a refund for all the BB charges I had paid.

 

Switched to BT, immediately reported the same fault and they fixed it.

 

The overwhelming lesson from that is it's not worth saving a few £ if the customer service is so utterly disfunctional.  That has put me off trying other re sellers.
 

[Steptoe]

9 hours ago, SteamyTea said:

GiffGaff.  Called Always On.

Though just checked and it is £20/month, not sure if my memory has failed or the price has gone up.

The one limitation is that after 6GB is downloaded in any month, you get throttled to 3G during thee day.  So just do large downloading between Midnight and 8AM. 3G only has about 3 years left to run then the licences need renewing, 5G is out now anyway.

I saw that Vodaphone had a 24GB package, but that is £32.

 

If anyone wants to take up the GiffGaff offer, can I recommend you, then I get some freebies

 

Have you tried a gigabag,?

 

8 hours ago, Alphonsox said:

 

Details here

https://community.giffgaff.com/t5/Using-giffgaff/Guide-to-the-20-quot-Always-On-quot-goodybag/ta-p/17070641

 

Too many restrictions for me - Particularly the restriction on tethering.

 

They only guess at you tethering due to your data usage, they can't actually tell,

 

4 hours ago, ProDave said:

But that would mean installng a usage app on my pc, SWMBO's pc, SWMBO's phone, and daughter's tablet, then add them all together.

 

Shame the router doesn't just log it, or BT were not so unhelpful.
 

 

Get a Draytek, or some other decent router, 

Mine is only a basic one and it logs usage , total usage, and individual from each IP or Mac connected.

3 hours ago, JSHarris said:

 

 

I've not seen a router with a usage logger, but it should be possible to do, if you have a router that will run something like OpenWrt, I think.  If I log on to my account with my new ISP I can see the usage data now, which is useful.  I'm far and away the biggest user in our household, so just monitoring my use gave me a rough idea of how much we needed per month when I was shopping around a year or so ago.  I found that, allowing for usage by other devices in the house, we were not going to need more than about 20Gb/month, but as it happens we've ended up with an unlimited service anyway.

 

As above,

Any decent router can log usage

 

10 minutes ago, ProDave said:

We went back to BT after the nightmare with Talk Talk. Basically I just could not get them to fix a broadband fault. They were afraid to actually pass on the fault to Open Reach for fear they would get charged for fixing the fault, so chose to do nothing but keep sending me yet another new router because that must be the problem.  I ended up escalating it to their management and I parted mid contract with a refund for all the BB charges I had paid.

 

Switched to BT, immediately reported the same fault and they fixed it.

 

The overwhelming lesson from that is it's not worth saving a few £ if the customer service is so utterly disfunctional.  That has put me off trying other re sellers.
 

go TT business, had my fault fixed within 3 days and previous months bill credited for inconvenience

[vivienz]

8 hours ago, ProDave said:

But that would mean installng a usage app on my pc, SWMBO's pc, SWMBO's phone, and daughter's tablet, then add them all together.

 

Shame the router doesn't just log it, or BT were not so unhelpful.
 

I changed my BT broadband package a few months ago and moved off unlimited.  When I was talking about which one to move to, the sales bloke at the other end was able to tell me exactly how much bandwidth I had been using so it might be worth giving them a call.

[Guest Alphonsox]

9 hours ago, vivienz said:

I changed my BT broadband package a few months ago and moved off unlimited.  When I was talking about which one to move to, the sales bloke at the other end was able to tell me exactly how much bandwidth I had been using so it might be worth giving them a call.

 

That's interesting to know - thanks

[SteamyTea]

When I went looking at new providers last year, I found there is little difference between limited and unlimited download limits, when it came to price.

Most networks are just repackaged BT/Openreach aren't they?

[Jeremy Harris]

17 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

When I went looking at new providers last year, I found there is little difference between limited and unlimited download limits, when it came to price.

Most networks are just repackaged BT/Openreach aren't they?

 

Unless you live in one of the odd areas where Openreach don't own the local network (Hull and parts of East Yorkshire springs to mind as the only one I can think of right now) , then all non-cable broadband is just a re-packaged BT Openreach service for the local loop.  It's broken down a bit finer that that, as the backhaul maybe a fibre backbone that's been sold on twice, for example a fair few re-sellers buy backhaul services from TalkTalk who have in turn paid for the hardware access from Openreach, or, perhaps, a cable provider.

 

All is rarely as it seems with broadband, as I found out last year when hunting around.  We'd been with the Phonecoop here (old house) for years, with fast ADSL2+ from our unbundled exchange about 100m away.  For that connection the Phonecoop were just re-selling a BT service.  At the new house we originally went with the Phonecoop again, based on their good customer service they given.  However, the ADSL at the new house was grim, and when I looked into it I found that the Phonecoop seemed to be buying the copper service from BT and the backhaul from TalkTalk, not that they make this public, AFAICS.

Edited February 15, 2017 by JSHarris

[Jimcub]

I use my iPhone XR to tether to my iPad works for me, not any issues and only use when away from home.