Usage incorrectly (huge amounts!) recorded agains

Is anyone else having this problem?

I

Unfortunately its a 17 hour average, so means a lot of tickets are a lot slower to answer. If it was a 90% are answered in 17 hours thing then its a very different stat.

In theory PlusNet should be able to see when you are actually logged in, and then marry this up with the usage figures, but if it is clocking up 200MB or more a day even when turned off then something is wrong at their end.

Whether Ofcom will listen hard to say, then may ignore you since the service still works even if going over the limits - or is it such that once 7.5GB is hit the connection is more or less turned off.

My connection is hosting a webserver, I listen to radio online and am around the forums all the time, but still I only manage a daily average of about 250MB

If you get nowhere at all with Plusnet then email me [email protected] and will see if someone at Plusnet will take a look.

Andrew

Isn't it the case that Plus.net charge people for incoming data so if the OP had an IP address which had previously been used by someone who had been using P2P there might be a lot of incoming traffic coming that IP addresses way.

I remember reading somewhere that Plus.net did admit that they had a problem with billing when the dynamic IP addresses would get changed halfway or similar and the person using the IP address after the first person is charged for the usage of the first user...

Not directly related to this, but I turned my router off when I went away on holiday and had 0 useage for each day that the router was off for the whole day, so it does work how I would have expected it to, at least for my connection over those 6 days.

I raised a ticket about usage some time ago and have still had no satisfactory answer.

I was not in the habit of turning my router off at night although my pc was off, and I got the following peak/off-peak usage pattern
15 Jul - 15 Aug 737.97MB 968.65MB
15 Jun - 15 Jul 584.39MB 1.21GB
15 May - 15 Jun 731.8MB 1.13GB
How can off peak be there at all let alone far higher than my daytime usage?

Surprising since I turn off the pc at or about midnight and do not download files or use p2p.
PN keep suggesting different things, encryption not fail safe, router updating itself at night.
Admittedly since I have turned the router off at night the problem has gone away but I am still waiting for an explanation of the above. It suggests to me PN have a major probem with their monitoring system, and leads to the question, do I trust the peak usage figures?

I've found the link for the incorrect VMBU..

http://portal.plus.net/central/forums/viewtopic.php?t=45593

<Quote>

9:48pm, Friday 14th July 2006

Dear My Name,
We were aware of an issue where customers had data transfer wrongly allocated to their account. We now believe that this issue has been resolved and apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused.
If you have any further issues regarding this please advise us by response to this query.

Regards,
Agents Name

</Quote>

It wouldn't surprise me if the VMBU is still suffering from teething problems..

By charge - do you mean count it towards their usage allowance?

Andrew

Yes, usage allowance.. apparently any incoming traffic needs to be charged or allocated against a user even if it's just noise and traffic that you didn't ask for it like ping traffic.

I think that it's because of the way that Plus.net get charged by BTw I think, i.e. that every single piece of bandwidth use needs to accounted for and charged accordingly.

Please feel free to jump in and correct me anytime if I'm wrong..

Edited by caesar_salad (Tue 12-Sep-06 22:41:01)

It is allocated to a specific user so that the Plusnet owned traffic management systems can work out their sums.

BT Wholesale when you buy a CBC BT Central do not care whether it is running at 10Mbps at peak, or 500Mbps (assuming a 622Mbps central).

PlusNet are charged at a flat rate by BT Wholesale for the BT Centrals.

Andrew

Plusnet currently have two systems.

1. BT provided RADIUS logs which have an accurate count of the ATM data which flows through the circuit to the end user. This is pretty much as accurate as it gets, assuming BTs systems are right. Plusnet use this data to charge customers.

2. Plusnet's inhouse 'view my broadband usage' tool. Very spotty and has loads of longstanding bugs. They intended/intend to use just this as one, unified, system, but because it's so plagued with errors like this, they just use it for traffic management, not billing.