Broadband Usage

[bradleyy]

I am thinking about getting broadband from BT, but I don't understand this 1gb monthly usage thing. Is this everything i look at, ie: every email I look at, every new page I open, does that count towards it? What happens if I go over 1gb? Also is 1gb really enough. Thanks for any help.  

[littleoldme]

Hi, bradley - yes, opening new pages does count against your limit. Whether it's enough or not depends both on how much and in what way you use the internet. If you only go on at weekends to send e-mails and do a bit of browsing, it will be plenty. If you're on every day for six hours at a stretch, downloading lots of music files and swapping lare photo files with friends etc, it probably won't be. I don't know how BT Broadband do things, but with my broadband provider (Pipex), if I were to go over my monthly limit (8Gb, which is more than enough for me), I'd be able to purchase extra 1Gb chunks separately. I expect BT do much the same, but it's something you'd have to investigate.

Hope this helps.

[littleoldme]

Oops - *large photo files.

[Hammer]

If you are a 'normal' user - a bit of surfing, a bit of email, the odd gaming session, shopping etc then 1gig should be fine. Even if you use it most days for an hour or two you will still be fine.

If you download lots of music or videos, or are into filesharing then it might not be. Similarly if you surf for 10 hours per day, possibly not.

I am online most days and don't get anywhere near 1gig per month if that helps...

[bradleyy]

thanks for your answers guys, also do you know if you can check how much you have used?

[kempie]

Yes, you can monitor your usage and pay for extra usage over 1GB but putting things in perspective, if you were to use your 1 Mbit connection at 'full throttle' you would theoretically hit your 1GB limit in 2 hours 16 mins.

[PatTheRat]

If you download on anything more than a casual basis dont go for the 1mb/sec connection due to its download limit. 1gb is rounghly 250 songs only.

I recently wiped my hard drive and within a week I had used up over 1gb of memory (so my monthly limit would have been used up, and exceed due to including surfing and e-mails etc).

The package you refer to is called BT Broadband Basic. Check out the package just called BT Broadband.....its up to a 2mb connection with a monthly limit of 15gb. Its a bit more expensive but worth it if you can afford it, or think you may download a good bit.

[mikeyp]

Yep, 1Gb does seem like a pretty harsh limit. I use about that per day!

[Sasha13]

I'm on BT Broadband with the 1GB limit - I get about 30 emails a week, send about 10, surf the net for about 3 hours a day on average and download about 15 songs per month. The most I've used is 0.75GB. You can monitor your usage through BT Broadband help which is installed as part of the software you get with the package. You can also set it up to send you emails when you're approaching your limit. If you go over your limit you can purchase an additional 2GB for �4. So far I've found it to be very good, but if you're thinking about downloading a lot of music, movies or doing on line gaming then I suggest you go for a higher limit. Hope this helps!

[stevie21]

If it helps at all, when I had a cap on bandwidth (with a different provider) it related to everything I downloaded plus everything uploaded so filesharing hits this pretty hard if you upload too.