Experience

I'm on O2 Access at present, and our house is quite a heavy user of the internet. O2 are trying to purge all high users so I am looking for an alternative.

I work from home almost all the time, my girlfirend does too 2 days a week on average, then there are the usual kids homework/games/etc in the evenings (although not that much actually compaired to the day useage for my work).

I'd say 90% of my internet usage is 7am-6pm Mon-Fri, and this is a combination of VPN connections, live data streaming, email and downloading (HTTP & P2P), evening / weekend usage is quite low in comparison.

I'm on a non LLU / 21CN exchange, no dates for either and probably wont be done any time soon (small exchange, http://www.samknows.com/broadband/exchange/LVWTW). Evening throttling doesnt really bother me so I'm wondering what experiences people have had on something like Option 3.

If your downloading more than 100GB per month then you may want to rethink about moving to BT.
As they have an unlimited limit!!!
How much do you download ?

In reply to a post by Pgre:

If your downloading more than 100GB per month then you may want to rethink about moving to BT.
As they have an unlimited limit!!!
How much do you download ?

That's my problem, I'm not 100% sure. O2 phoned to say I'd used over 100Gb last month, but rather than any throttling it's just going to be disconnection by the sounds of it. I can't accurately monitor usage due to locked down work laptops, games consoles (with iPlayer), etc, although I do know that I can easily download 2-3Gb a day for work if I have to get new build disk images.

If BT will throttle from 5pm onwards then I wont actually see this as an issue as I dont use it much after then. I know I hammer the connection, but as I'm on a small exchange that probably never will have LLU on it, it would appear that I'm going to be stuffed a bit because I'm either going to have to pay a LOT more to cover possible high usage or find an ISP that actually has visibility of limits, usage, etc.

I'm starting to get frustrated as an IT worker in the 21st century with games consoles, iPlayer, home working, etc and now I'm potentially going to be broadband-less. Bah!

Look at the BT business options - and don't forget they are a business expense.

BT business has an FUP but it is based around peak time usage which they class as evening and if most of your traffic is day time it should not affect you.

Going for a business Option 2 will give you 250 minutes of Openzone/month which can be useful too.

Support is UK based - occasionally the Scottish accent is a little heavy but you can get by and is 24hour too.

What router do you have... ?
Usually they give an idea of the traffic even if you have to reset it every now and again.

It's a standard O2 Access one. It's been powered on for 14 days and looks like total (up + down) at present is about 48Gb. I can't break it down as to what this is though (i.e. work, console, iplayer, browsing), but I'm obviously using it a lot!

I must admit, reading around BT seems the best option as even with 100Gb+ a month the connection would be throttled from 5pm onwards which is when I rarely use it.

Looking at both BT Business and Home broadband, I would prefer the home option just to get the hub I think, however I'm still not 100% convinced yet.

My connection has good stats (although waivers a bit, but I'm living on a building site at the moment) and SHOULD get 8128 sync (currently down to about 6000 but it will go back up again as before). As long as things run at a reasonable speed I dont mine (e.g. downloads/p2p/streaming around 200Kb/s) so I'm not going to hog the speed, but I'll still be using a lot most working hours.

Is the 100Gb unlimited limit based on 24/7 usage, or just peak hour usage, or 8am-midnight usage, etc?

Why do you need the standard hub?

With Business you will get a 2wire 2700 HGV

Standard hub is free and I'm tight

I work from home, but I dont work for myself, so I can't claim back the cost of BB/VAT either so the cheaper it is the better too!

Option 3 is £27.99

Business Option 2 which is "unlimited" is £20 + VAT so £23.50 and the 2700HGV is free too.

If you work from home for your employer and they do not give you an allowance to cover light, heat, water &c then you can legitimately claim a tax allowance for it. Depending on your house size it can be £600-£800 per year and in some cases even more.

but I dont work for myself

in which case you were in breach of the O2 t&cs unless it was a business account

You must not use the Services for:

commercial purposes, unless:
you are working from home as a sole trader in business on your own account; or,
you are a Business Customer and you use the Services only in the ordinary course of your business;

In reply to a post by yarwell:

but I dont work for myself

in which case you were in breach of the O2 t&cs unless it was a business account

You must not use the Services for:

commercial purposes, unless:
you are working from home as a sole trader in business on your own account; or,
you are a Business Customer and you use the Services only in the ordinary course of your business;

I suppose technically you are right, however I'm sure that pretty much everyone would technically be in breach of T&C's for BB (or almost anything else) if they read the small print.

I would say it's a grey area, it's not for commercial purposes, I'm not running a business from it. Yes, being able to work from home allows me to get paid, but it's not like I have a business bank account, etc.

Hmmm, strictly speaking, using ebay to sell something would breach T&C's worse than me working from home I suppose.

Bt's traffic management system starts to kick in around 3pm any p2p downloads you are doing at that point will die to around 20-30kbs the usage is monitored 24/7

the good thing and i know this as just had one is they do email you to warn you that you are reaching the 100 gig area i got mine saying i had used 80 this month so have had to step off the peddle for the remainder of the month. remeber tho that if you do take residential broadband you have absolutley no SLA whatsoever and as you work from home this could be very very important also you are not entilted to claim any compensation for loss of service/work/business etc as a residential custoemr purley entitled to a rental rebate i.e no service for a wekk so heres a weeks bb rentla charges back. Not read the business T&C recently but generally as a business user you do qualify for some kind of SLA

Top quality - IDNet Business. If you also looks at the Home/SOHO stuff make sure you are on the ADSL Max page, not the ADSL2+. No throttling or traffic management.

vivaciti Family and Office - resold Entanet - Office 90 looks suitable? Traffic management and geographic risk - some areas good, others busy.

The above with 832kbps upload if you pick the right package. All monthly contracts so no real danger.

Edited by RobertoS (Mon 03-May-10 18:24:51)