Posted: 20th Oct, 2004 By: MarkJ
We've been able to get a response from Tiscali regarding some earlier news (
HERE), where readers reported that Tiscali had begun sending out usage warnings for its uncapped broadband services(s).
Tiscali's spokeswoman states, "
I can confirm that we have communicated usage issues with some of our very heavy broadband users."
The problem is supposedly only related to a minute proportion of customers. When asked to elaborate on their definition of 'very heavy' use, we were told that..:
"
We operate a contention ratio of less than 20:1 and some of these users are downloading over 150Gb a month. The industry average figure for a broadband user downloading is 1.85Gb a month so 30x times this is in excess of 50Gb, which is well above the limit Wanadoo has set for its top 1Mb product (30Gb)."
Typically anything around 100GB per month is quite a significant amount of data consumption for products targeted towards the residential market.
However, Tiscali is emphasising the extreme end of the scale and we're still unclear as to exactly where they 'start' to draw the line, which is perhaps more important to know.
One other area of concern was a promise to 'manage' customer downloading at peak times. On this subject Tiscali was a little muted, although did confirm that they "
may restrict the speed of downloading at busy times". It's noted that "
browsing, email [AND] streaming are completely unaffected" by this.