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Tiscali Warns Heavy ADSL Users

Posted: 03rd Sep, 2005 By: MarkJ
UK ISP Tiscali has issued a customer newsletter that touts the removal of its monthly download usage caps from several packages. Sounds good, but then the update goes on to replace it with a new Fair Usage policy, which makes a point of targeting P2P users:

We have removed the caps on all our packages except the £14.99 1meg (2GB cap). Customers can switch product at any time quickly and easily by visiting My Account on the Tiscali website.

You don't need to do anything, we'll remove your cap in September and reduce your price to £17.99 in October.

--------------------------

We are also changing our Fair Usage Policy to benefit all our customers. This will take effect from mid September and will be referred to in our Terms and Conditions. Find out more about our Fair Use Policy:
http://www.tiscali.co.uk/products/broadband/build/tcs/tfu.html


Tiscali itself estimates that roughly 1% of its 600,000 broadband users account for 30% of available bandwidth during peak hours. Much of the blame is placed at the feet of P2P users, which is understandable since most over-consumption comes from there.

Those found abusing the service will receive 3 warnings before being booted from the ISP. However, traffic management will also be deployed:

This fair usage policy automatically identifies the very small number of extremely heavy users and manages their bandwidth only during peak hours (being 6pm to 11pm Monday to Friday, and 12pm to 4pm on weekends and bank holidays), to protect the service for all our other customers. Outside peak hours, the use of the internet by these heavy users is unaffected.

It's unclear why Tiscali has suddenly felt specific Caps to be inadequate, although we wouldn't be surprised if marketing has a lot to do with it.

Far too many providers have used 'Fair Usage' policies as a license to print "unlimited" across their packages. ISP Review views 'Fair Usage' policies in exactly the same way as 'Capping'.

Tiscali must have some private idea of what it considers heavy usage (Gigabytes wise); simply saying 'Fair Usage' is a way of avoiding having to openly state restrictions and thus be better for marketing their services.
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