Best Capping Method?

I'm looking for a broadband supplier and am considering a capped service from

Eclipse HomeOption 2 = 10GB
NamesCo HomeMax = 10GB
NewNet Home M = 12GB
Zen 8000 Active = 20GB

The only problem is that they cap in different ways
Eclipse. Downgrade your line to 256kbps unless you buy extra bandwidth
Zen. Redirect you to a page to buy more bandwidth. No access until you do.
NamesCo, NewNet. Just let you keep on trucking and send you a bill at the end of the month for your excess. Tough.

I had a trojan on my PC last year which managed to chew up 4GB of bandwidth over dial up. I hate to think what would have happened had I been on broadband with NamesCo or NewNet...

Am I missing something or is my understanding correct? Advice / Comments please.

You're definitely missing something if 4G can disappear over a 56K connection - Security!
What maximum bandwidth do you think you'll actually use in any given period?

I had up to date Firewall and Virus Scanners Have recently changed to Steganos; I realise that no scanner is 100% effective, but I believe that the problem was a DUN Monitor that I tried. Have done a fresh install and so problem has been resolved (for now).

Typical bandwidth was running up to 500M-1G. I expect this to increase with Broadband. However, my point was that if I go with NamesCo or NewNet then I am basically giving them a blank check (cheque) if I fell foul of some future malware as there appears to be no way to limit their service.

I don't know about Namesco but Newnet provides a tool for monitoring your usage, which appears to be more than adequate for myself and other customers.

There are many packages available from a whole raft of providors. What is your budget??



Shaune

Assuming the data mostly out going (i.e. the trojan was sending mail or such, not downloading ads) and wasn't easily compressed, you can assume about 2.5Kbyte/sec from a dial-up connection (above 33k6 modems run the upstream at half the rate of the downstream, and I actually saw a full 56k6 connection happen). At that rate 4Gb would take over 19 days if running 24 hours a day.

If the data was text based (which given spam is progressively moving over to being image based is less likely than it used to be) and so compressible at about 2:1 by modems, then you are still looking at 8 or 9 days for 24 hours/day or nearly 4 weeks if it was dialling in for 6 hours overnight every night.

Not wishing to be patronising, but... How did you not notice? Did you not question the phone line being in use at odd times?

I think that should have been addressed to the OP.

The Steganos IS package is based around the Kaspersky product so it should be pretty good.
However, no ammount of security will be of any use to you if that ammount of data can slip by unnoticed over dialup (Don't BT still contact the customer when it becomes obvious that there is a problem?).
I take it that you are the admin, so lock down and regularly monitor that system!

We seem to be straying off topic here. In thirteen years of internet usage, I have only suffered this one incident (which I did notice and being a bit geeky investigated before resolving). My concern is that neither NewNet nor NamesCo provide any means for managing my account to limit the bandwidth usage. For this reason, I feel that I am much more likely to go with Eclipse or Zen, although I might possibly give NewNet a try.