rollinstone wrote:
It seems to have come down a fair bit than a year ago, this disk says £17.99 a month
While prices may be lower than last year, it generally comes at a cost.
You will find many lower cost packages have either a restriction on the amount of data transferred within a given period or have a lower speed, or even a combination of both.
BT for instance, have a package that limits the data to 1Gig per month, whilst Tiscali have a package with a speed of 150k (3 times faster than dial-up).
Regarding the 512k £17.99 per month package you mentioned, although there is currently no data limit imposed on the user, Wanadoo intends to introduce a capacity limit later this year of 2Gig per month.
Once this limit is reached, it seems usage will be restricted for the remainder of the accounting month, although there will be an option of paying £12 to have the data limit lifted for the remainder of that particular month.
BT considers less than 1Gig per month is used by more than 50% of all Broadband users, and so obviously 2 Gig per month is suitable for even higher number of Broadband users
Therefore you need to carefully consider your usage requirements to ensure your chosen package fulfils your requirements.
If you are unsure of your usage pattern for data transfer, there’s a useful little program called ‘Netstat’ which will help keep track of your pattern.
It may not be the best around, but it’s free and available at:
http://www.analogx.com/contents/download/network/nsl.htm
Many members on ISPR have strong views on Broadband packages with speed/data limits and consider such offerings be an affront to the word ‘Broadband’.
I personally disagree with them, but you may wish to consider their views on this matter.