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

Not Happy

Is there a problem?

NTL have just put in a daily download cap of 1Gbyte on all broadband services. Its not so much the cap thats the problem but that way its been handled.

They snuck this into the terms and conditions on Friday evening without telling anyone, I still havent recieved an official announcement yet.

Its a blanket cap on all services regardless of bandwidth. So if you have a 1Mbit connection you could break the limit in less than 3 hours, but on the 128Kbit service it will take you 18 hours. Which is a not very fair.

And the wording is rather worrying, it says that if you download more than 1Gbyte then you are in breach of the "reasonable use" clause and can have you connection terminated. They are saying that in practice they are only looking for persistant offenders, but it doesn't actually say that in the modified TOS.

While my use is typically well under the new cap (>100Mbyte/day) there are the occasional days where I do lots of downloading/upgrading. So once or twice a month I probably break the new TOS. This has me s**ting myself as NTL are the only broadband operator in my area.

The obvious way to protest against this is to download exactly 0.99 gigabytes of stuff every day, even though it's stuff you don't want.

Thats would eat up time if you did it each and every day, it does take a good few hours. But every once in a while it might happen.

I agree with EV - you should make a point about this. Find someone else with an always-on broadband connection and set your computer to download a 0.89Gb file off their computer daily while you're at work.

I'm not just going to leave Kazaa running all day. Its got some large security problems, especially as I use Kazaalite to get rid of all the spyware.