"on the bright side, as you're on a market 3 exchange you can now get 15GB a month for £10.99"

the Extra account will offer 60 GB for just another 50p (11.49) (but can see if someone has decided to use the Value account, they won't be happy at having this level of 'penalty' imposed. It's good the traffic watch thing will work better, and I do feel that should be "on" by default, unless the user chooses not to be speed-limited.

5 GB chunks are far too big - yes, there are ways to use it all up, but not everyone wants to spend that much extra... and because of the way it is charged, nobody will actually get 1 GB for 1 pound (they run the risk of an extra byte taking them into paying for a further 5 GB chunk.

So where is datawatch (DTW?) set? I can't find this option in the control panel for BBYW Option 1. I had set a fixed price limit on the account at 9.99. Given your statement I would have expected the account to limit to 128Kbps rather than to stop connection unless the datawatch setting is hidden somewhere that I can't find.?

Sorry about the delay there, I've kicked things off for you now.

In reply to a post by therioman:

You are joking Mand?

A quick scan on any forum here will show where an ISP has this model you often go over the limit and get stitched up. I suspect that Plusnet have realised the insanely low prices of £5.99 being offered for Broadband do not make for profit and sustainability (you'd think by now Plusnet would have learned this), and now need to "fix" the gap.

I don't know how many customers Plusnet have thesedays, but if you still had circa 200,000 and "only a small amount" (let's say just 2000 (1%) do, that's another £10K profit.

I don't know about other ISP's but our customers who do go over their usage allowance on the whole do so by more than a small amount.

We have many more than 200k customers these days, but that's by the by.

Presumably it would be fairly easy to provide the average amount that a user goes over the limit by (excluding all those that don't go over the limit at all)? This would give a true reflection of the per GB income and if as you say they go over by a lot then this would support your case for increasing the allowance.

PN - there's really even more reason to ask what a customer wants to do, since the speed limit facility will be working... Bumping up the quota (and the cost as a result) for the user is just shooting yourself in the foot. It will be criticised a lot in the media as unfair on users (ignoring the fact some other ISPs charge less than a quid per GB).

Switching user to slower speed, and sending an e-mail explaiing how they can pay for an increase in quota would be fair to the users and (more important) seen to be fair, too.

We'll be giving customers the option to choose fixed usage or flex usage (with or without DTW).

Changing DTW so that it restricts speed rather than blocking altogether is a much better customer experience.

In reply to a post by ian72:

So where is datawatch (DTW?) set? I can't find this option in the control panel for BBYW Option 1. I had set a fixed price limit on the account at 9.99. Given your statement I would have expected the account to limit to 128Kbps rather than to stop connection unless the datawatch setting is hidden somewhere that I can't find.?

I wrote a library article about this yesterday, which you can see here.

That explains my confusion. The fact that it isn't called data watch on the account would explain why I couldn't find it. And also nowhere did it say that data watch would block access and was completely pointless if you have already specified a fixed bandwidth limit.

Will change the accounts I manage now to take account of this.

EDIT: Just to be clear the option on the account is called "Set a Broadband Price Limit" within the "Control your broadband" option of the Connections menu. Only after you set it does it refer to it as a data watch (which it isn't, it's a price watch not a data watch - the data watch is incidental to the setting of the price).

Edited by ian72 (Thu 11-Mar-10 10:24:22)

The icon should be called Data Transfer Watch?

It isn't there. I looked at your screen shot and I have 7 icons on each of the accounts, not 8 - the one missing is the data watch one.