If your usage is mostly out of office hours then you might consider Claranet's "Gamer" account. You don't state what level of usage you are at right now, but they offer a 10 GB "daytime" limit per month and then after hours, they seem not to count (though like many ISPs they have a Fair Usage Policy which covers them for someone trying to pull several hundred GB a month through the network) anything between 1800 and 0600.

You should be able to find the account via www.claranetsoho.co.uk (NB I am not [yet] a customer but the account is tempting to me). They used to have a similar "off peak" residential account costing similar which had to be paid for the whole year in advance. Their current accounts are paid monthly, and there's a one-off fee for a fixed IP if you want it to assist your connecting for Hulu. One possible time when the 10 GB limit might be worth remembering is that on a Bank Holiday Claranet treats it as a work day.

To limit daytime usage, it should be quite easy to link your Draytek to the Claranet router via a cheap 10/100 hub/switch and power that on a timer, so it will allow traffic off-peak when there's no cap, but keep daytime use to your first line. PlusNet with their 60 GB / month limit works well for me (though I download around double that overnight as I am a night own usually, and from 0000 to 0800 they don't count traffic so iPlayer downloads are scheduled for then (series link control within iPlayer desktop).

This is our usage for last few months. it is mainly between 6pm and 8am but there are some months when there is a lot more daytime usage. due to my sisters holidays in school and mine from university etc


Peak Time Other Times
Down Up Down Up
Mar 2012 19.5G 960M 58.1G 13.3G
Feb 2012 13.7G 1.20G 50.8G 13.6G
Jan 2012 3.49G 474M 32.4G 16.2G
Dec 2011 13.8G 3.17G 63.2G 24.9G


The high uploads are from the computers backing up online

How does BT's traffic management compare to Plusnets?

BT just say they will throttle P2P at busy times. Those times can vary, depending on "busy". The Olympics? Andy Murray?

Some users say they never have a problem, others say they have slowdowns every evening. I think it partly depends where you are, the load on your exchange for instance.

I've a feeling the BT Business one has something as well, but different. There's someone on here using it on a "residential" line and swears it is marvellous. With UK support not the normal Indian one.

Can you remind me of AAISP's "peak" and "off-peak" as the hours will be different on an ISP basis - for PlusNet they 'count' traffic as peak from 0800 to 0000 but do most traffic management (on FTP, peer-peer and download sites) from afternoon to 2300/0000.

Does AAISP count the uploads ? I thought they and Zen were only counting downloads.

Anyway, you have relatively low upload traffic in peak hours (I'm guessing 0700-1900) but is there really such a need for so much upload traffic anyway (I'm thinking you might only need to upload full music / video libraries once a fortnight and upload any changes on a daily basis, which would probably cut traffic significantly.

Most backup software I've seen allows for both 'full' and 'incremental' backups. Are you doing full backups every night ? If your "off peak" traffic could mostly be after midnight, then the PlusNet Extra account would cover you with 60 GB during 'working' hours (0800-0000) and if you could be sure 2/3 of your off-peak traffic was in the "uncounted" period of the day, you should still find a 60 GB limit wasn't difficult to fit.

Incidentally, while a customer has an option to buy additional traffic at 5 GB for 5 pounds, I think the policy is to reduce data throughput to 128 Kbps if a customer sets the monthly "extra quota spend limit" to zero pounds (mine is set to that, but I keep within the 60 GB limit most months, anyway, so have not hit the restriction anyway).

I've used PlusNet for a while now and even your peak month (December) is below my regular usage on the Extra account at around a tenner a month (reduced because of small referral benefit, reducing my cost).

I should have added - I think PlusNet pricing is higher only for Market 1, but there was some past discussion here or on PN about customers on Market 2 needing to request their charges be made lower (it was existing customers not seeing an automatic decrease feeling somewhat annoyed, IIRC). Should not apply to you as a new customer, but in case some other PN user on Extra is paying significantly more than myself and is on a Market 2 exchange, they might quibble at the low monthly fee I mentioned.

Re Market 2 and market 3 prices, the website (a week ago so maybe still) was showing a 3-tier system, M1, M2, M3. The pricing pages and so on are quite clear. There are now two prices, M1 and not M1, with the "not M1" = to M3 in the confused parts of the website.

As you say , anyone still paying M2 prices should get it sorted.

peak is 9am to 6pm monday to friday and i think it does include uploads


the system we use for backup is crash plan which does only upload changes - because of our upload speed were still in the initial backup phase of all the data but with one iMac with 1tb internal and multiple external, another with 2tb internal and two laptops with 160gb drives there is a lot of data from the years to upload. thats why we have it set to only upload between midnight and 8am now.

Ok so looking around i think what could be the best option would be to change one line to bt unlimited and the other link to plus net 60Gb and see how that fairs as hopefully mean if one goes down other line can take the slack. plus we shouldn't have any issues with usage then but will check bts fair usage policy first.

also share band is looking to be the best option for bonding unless anyone knows of any better options.

any other suggestions?


hopefully this will either mean cheeper internet or same cost for more usage for us.

Quick question do BT offer any just broadband unlimited or are they all bundled with calls as our calls are currently done as part of our sky package