I was playing WoW on 3G last week and it was clocking I think about 20MB an hour at most.

However, 7th December was the Cataclysm release which downloaded anywhere up to 10GB of updates - if that was part of it then that would have wiped out the months usage in one foul swoop.

Wow when playing may not be high usage, but updates to the software can be hefty in size.

Also wow tends to be played for hours on end, so even 48kbps mounts up over time.

I agree with the WOW comments which is one of the games my son plays on laptop. He has had to instal a separate hard drive to put the whole game on to ease up on the laptop's resources.

However, I am perturbed that BT cannot offer any breakdown of individuals' useage.
You've gone over your useage, whack, here's another £50 on your bill

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Wow when playing may not be high usage, but updates to the software can be hefty in size.

Also wow tends to be played for hours on end, so even 48kbps mounts up over time.

Think I said all that hours before with solid examples... I sometimes get the feeling that all my posts are ignored so I'm off to get some counselling

In reply to a post by ArmstrongAbbott:

I agree with the WOW comments which is one of the games my son plays on laptop. He has had to instal a separate hard drive to put the whole game on to ease up on the laptop's resources.

However, I am perturbed that BT cannot offer any breakdown of individuals' useage.
You've gone over your useage, whack, here's another £50 on your bill

Move to the "unlimited" option. It appears you need to.

Move to the "unlimited" option. It appears you need to.

Am trying to, have learned the hard way, have a huge bill to pay, getting nowhere fast..........

Well, found the source of my problems and it's all at my end. No problem with BT, no hackers or anything else exciting. Basically my flatmate was using bittorrent and - god bless her - didn't realise that after a download finishes the file continues to upload so long as you leave it listed in the client (like a good bittorrenter should...).

Had a little chat and convinced her that if she REALLY must download things using bittorrent then she should shut the client down when it's finished. Been keeping a beady eye on the BT usage monitor and sure enough, usage for the last week has been pretty minimal. We'll probably still exceed 40GB this month but we'll be well within the initial £5/5GB excess. Annoying we have to pay any excess but I think this'll be the end of it.

That said, I'm still installing TBB bandwidth monitor on all our PCs before next month and keeping an eye on usage from individual PCs. If hers use all the bandwidth again she can pay the excess alone.

So thanks for all posts and sorry to have wasted your time! OP signing off.

I have a problem with the usage monitor and have posted a thread here -
http://community.bt.com/t5/BB-in-Home/BT-usage-monit...

Also world of warcraft uses p2p to distribute patches in the background and the cataclysm one was huge.

You could have been uploading it several times over while playing and not notice.