Of course uSwitch price can be bettered. You will NEVER see the best deals on a comparison site, because they only list suppliers that offer them huge referral fees, which of course puts the price up.

Purely out of interest I checked your present package - according to your sig -
Phone £11.22 per month plus broadband £19.99 per month - cheapest package - total £31.12 per month
Seems a bit expensive to me

If I'm following correctly.

If ISP A has 100 million GB for 1 hour and nothing else for 23 hours compared to ISP B having 1000 million GB/day, then A, depending upon arrangements, would pay more.

If that is the case then surely it would be in the interest of BTW to get fibre installed, in a more timely fashion, to more exchanges and cabinets.

All depends on the spread of the usage on ISP B

95th percentile billing can means that a sustained peak from a sports event can cost an ISP more money if lots of users watch it online

Actually I have the Home Talk Plus package that costs a little more Old Jim, (read sig again!). BUT, it includes 5,000 free minutes which I USED this last month! Works out at 0.01p per minute - Unbeatable! - ALSO, the only company I have come across NOT to smack you with a charge for calls over 60 minutes long. Nice to be on the phone for four or five hours at a stretch without a charge. BT/PN anytime eat your heart out. SO, not expensive at all for what I get. Superb service and no tie in. It's called choice, just like any other purchase.
Possibly you may like to total up unlimited phone and BB with PN and BT on a Market one exchange, both of which I have suffered.

Edited by professor973 (Fri 31-Jan-14 12:51:57)

Only, that's a hypothetical and impossible scenario. And as explained, the rental is of maximum expected Gigabits per second, not GigaBytes actually passed through in any specific period. I haven't worked out what capacity would be needed for your two examples.

I don't see how you get from the examples to the last paragraph either. Unless you are just saying that if you have a product that sells well from a limited number of shops, and you haven't already saturated the market, it makes sense to open more shops.

The Openreach rollout has been based on commercial criteria. I.e. going first to where they think they will improve their profits most easily. Probably in consultation with one or more of their prime customers: BTW, Sky and TalkTalk.

Openreach fill-in, the BDUK programme, and other initiatives are going for most of the remainder. Openreach cannot blanket the country at current costings, and BT Wholesale can't go where Openreach haven't.

Both equate to GB/s. A is XXXX/s and B is XX/s but B over a longer period equates to more in total.

So why don't ISP's limit the speed of connections but make the usage unlimited?


100 users on ADSL can use a certain amount per second.

100 users on Fibre can use 5x more than the ADSL users, thereby saturating the connection and the ISP getting charged extra by whoever at BT group.

All hypothetical, but just getting my head around the way that ISP's are charged.

I've told you the way they are charged.

The capacity of an MSIL is 10Gbps. The early ones were 1Gbps and may still be available/in use. An ISP can have multiple MSILs at multiple locations. There are 20 such locations for WBC (ADSL2+ and FTTC) and 10 for IPStream (ADSL Max replacement).

Nobody ever talks about MSIL capacity in terms of how many GB it can handle in an hour, although as you say - the arithmetic is easy. Since when was your connection speed measured in time per GB? I accept files of known size are often download and that download is timed, but that's a different question.

Although a given MSIL is only used by one ISP, they don't have to rent the full capacity of it. That is why there is headroom if their customer demand goes over the rented amount at any given time.

A small ISP might rent 0.5Gbps at each of two locations. A large one a huge amount more. For instance we get frequent notifications from Plusnet like this:-

Subject: Increase in 20CN and 21CN Broadband Capacity - Monday 2nd December

We will shortly be increasing the capacity of our IPSC (20CN) broadband host links by a further 1340Mbps. It's these host links that we use to deliver bandwidth to customers provisioned on an 'Up to 8Mbps' 20CN product.

In addition to this we will also be increasing the capacity of our WBC (21CN) broadband host links by a further 4.3Gbps. It's these host links that we use to deliver bandwidth to the majority of customers on our 21CN and Fibre services.

We're activating this extra capacity in line with the current budget, customers' usage habits and our projected growth in customer numbers.

As for

So why don't ISP's limit the speed of connections but make the usage unlimited?

maybe you should write to a few and ask . Or look at how many people on here on ADSLx want to tweak their connection to the last 100kbps, even when over 15Mbps and using under 30GB per month.

95th percentile is the industry standard but unless things have changed aren't BTw doing 100th percentile? 100th percentile is even more evil than 95th, 95th at least allows 5% of traffic to spike without penalty, 100th allows none.

I'm pretty sure they can go 5% above rented capacity at the same rate. Above that IIRC it is tiered. I seem to remember there's also some provision that at some point they effectively get automatically contracted for higher capacity for 3 months, that being the additional rental "minimum term".

The details used to be publicly available. It looks like they are now behind a registration wall. So I can't confirm any figures.