h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

After two years of my heavy internet usage my ISP has finally had enough of me and is cutting me off today.

The first threatening letter (F63554?thread=620097) was in the days when the ISP was called Wannado (which *still* sounds to me like a brand of baby wipes rather than a telecommunications company.) The company, in the UK at least, was bought out by Orange at some point in late 2005 and all talk of threats to my service receded.

Late last year I got the first letter from Orange saying that I was using the internet too much, and would I kindly scale it back a bit. I ignored it.

The letters kept coming every 6 weeks or so, each one sounding just that little bit more threatening than the one before. Finally on Monday I got a letter that reads in part:

"We wrote to you a month ago to tell you that your broadband usage was well above 40Gb per month, and in breach of our Fair Use Policy. We asked you to reduce it so we wouldn't have to close your account."

"Since then your average monthly usage has been 63.97Gb. Unfortunately this means we'll be suspending your account on 27th April [...] your account will be closed 4th May."

Well that's today and I'm still here. I've been using the account just as much as ever this last week since the 27th and can see no evidence of a suspension in place.

I've got me MAC code and have placed an order with BT for their Home Hub service. This comes with a genuinely unlimited usage account and is four quid a month cheaper than Orange. The account goes live on the 15th May. If my web access via Orange does, as promised, disappear, I've got a Tescos dialup account in reserve that I can use to tide me over.

So bye-bye Orange, you steaming pile of fetid donkey manure

<applause?

I've found BT great, been with them for five years or so now.

*wonders what GD's doing with all those Gb*

FUP

P2P; torrenting; general file sharing; 4OD; and some, ahem, archive material.

9:30pm and I've still got full access


Let's see what happens at midnight...

Well, I'm going to have to stay here until midnight now just to see what happens...

But GD's no longer online - maybe the event already happened?

* waves *


I'm still here

Perhaps your ISP has a heavy backlog to get through of people to disconnect. It would be amusing if the people doing the job had exceeded their own bandwidth somehow and couldn't get in to make the changes.

25 minutes to go... Now I'm excited.

Nice one, SEF!

Me, I'm getting a bit worried. I've still got a fair chunk of Lost season 3, episode 19 still to download. What I've done is to stop all the other torrents and pushed this one wide open in the hope of picking up as many peers as possible.

Eight after midnight, and I'm still here.

Obviously Orange can't tell the time nor read a date as well as being a rubbish ISP

Still here, GD? Perhaps the future's bright after all.

I appear to be, yes.

Perhaps if I stay hooked up they won't cut me off. Now can I think of some reason why I should stay on line for the next 11 days until my BT package arrives... hmm... Yeah, that'll be a piece of cake

Just set a few dozen torrents to download. Then you'll be using your connection to the fullest.

> "Eight after midnight, and I'm still here."

GMT vs BST ?

Well, the last I heard Rotherham where Orange's Customer Care Centre is based is in the same time zone as me. A different century, yes. But definitely the same time zone.

Is there a 1am update?

5 minutes to find out