In reply to a post by APTMAN:

You can say that for any supply, water, gas and electricity.

Water maybe, since a lot of people still pay via the old system and don't have a meter, but people pay for the electric and gas they use. I pay for the water I use.
I suppose we could go back to that for broadband, I used to use an ISP called Metronet many years ago. I paid an amount and got so much data, then used to pay extra to get more data. Not sure if it would work so well in this day and age, saying that A&A still have a fixed data usage.

I am trying to get my brother to use his broadband more than he does, trying to get him to watch more streaming.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

saying that A&A still have a fixed data usage.

Not any more- https://forums.thinkbroadband.com/aaisp/t/4761829-no...

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

Not sure if it would work so well in this day and age,

Thanks to streaming TV, and online gaming, there was a report a while back (in some newspaper) that the average home (2 parents, 2.4 kids, dog, cat etc) now uses around 10 Terabytes of data a month.

My friends in the US on the (hated) Comcast Cable ISP have had usage caps from 800 Gb and now 1.2 Tb a month. No wonder in areas they have options, people switch. (e.g. to Verizon Fios FTTP in the north east).

Puts it into perspective the UK setup where the Openreach and Cityfibre networks are wholesale, and in 2025 it is reported that the Virgin Media network will open to wholesale.

The US is similar to having an Alt Net and no other option in majority of areas. You want to change ISP, you either try DSL (1.5 Mbit is common) or mobile data, or you move house/city/state.

10TB as an average (median?) I find unbelievably high. We use maybe 2TB a month and that’s with a lot of olympics, and football streaming, iPlayer / Channel 4, full-time WFH and downloading content off newsgroup services.

I can’t see how to 5x our usage and that being the average.

To put it in perspective there are office locations I have access to the reporting on with 60 staff members and they do less than 5TB in a month, this one in particular is quite relaxed about people streaming Olympics, Tour De France etc. at their desks.

In reply to a post by jpm:

To put it in perspective there are office locations I have access to the reporting on with 60 staff members and they do less than 5TB in a month, this one in particular is quite relaxed about people streaming Olympics, Tour De France etc. at their desks.

I assume the only way you get close to 10 is having multiple 4K/UHD televisions, but agreed it does seem high. I would assume offices that allow staff to stream TV are most likely to be using smaller screens?

I thought Offices (not streaming TV) use significantly less than most home connections?

Adrian,

I agree. Another thing that a lot people don't utilise fully is domains. How many businesses purchase a domain and only use it to host their website and then advertise an AOL / Hotmail / etc email address??? I've always associated that with purchasing a UHD TV and only watching B & W films....Why aren't they using all the features that they paid for???? Someone answer me that question and I will gladly bequeath (upon my death in 10,000 years time) them everything I own (which might be nothing at the rate I'm going)!

Yours,

In reply to a post by mking90031:

Why aren't they using all the features that they paid for????

Perhaps they don't need them?

I'm well beyond retirement age with no business interests, I bought a domain to get email that was independent of any ISP I might go with¹, what do I want with my own website?

I certainly don't have the sort of ego that assumes anyone might be remotely interested in my doings, comings and goings (even ignoring whether it's any of their business). There are enough of those around without me adding to the total


¹ And of Google, Microsoft, Apple, Hotmail etc- I don't trust the free offerings

I'm just the same, with my own domain. However, I also have a GMX address for shopping, etc. This has worked perfectly for years until now, when they have introduced their own spam detection that dumps anything it doesn't like into a folder that you can only access via their website. There is no way to disable this infuriating feature. Since I have managed spam perfectly well using Mailwasher, I resent being forced to obey their rules, and am currently researching an alternative free account that respects my choices, without stealing my information.

In reply to a post by cjn:

I'm just the same, with my own domain. However, I also have a GMX address for shopping, etc. This has worked perfectly for years until now, when they have introduced their own spam detection that dumps anything it doesn't like into a folder that you can only access via their website. There is no way to disable this infuriating feature. Since I have managed spam perfectly well using Mailwasher, I resent being forced to obey their rules, and am currently researching an alternative free account that respects my choices, without stealing my information.

Both my paid-for domain and my ISP's email systems come by default with spam filters which do the same, but at least I can turn the damn things off (and have done). Like you I prefer to handle it locally, especially as I find the server-based filters are often a bit too trigger-happy for my liking. Even the fairly primitive MacOS Mail app catches most of it with only an occasional mistake in the wrong direction, and even then there's a "Not Spam" button to put it back in the inbox

For not much more than the price of a cup of coffee per month, the lack of aggravation of having to log in to webmail every few days to see what it's screwed up on now is well worth it in my opinion!