gac

Unbelievable. Not BT, the fact that this thread is actually still going, and into its second incarnation. Just upgrade to an unlimited contract already.

But do you? It doesn't always follow that cheap is bad, particularly when SSE don't manage the network. It could be that this offer is just based on the cost price because they want it as a loss leader into the market knowing that they won't have any sudden investments to make because they themselves are just buying a service wholesale. That's why I'm trying to find out more about it, and review sites are (as a general rule) useless because no one, myself included, ever logs in to say "these guys did a great job"... IIRC you work for BT? I also have unlimited downloads and FTTC, BT are hardly unique in offering it, and I've had nothing but trouble with BT's customer services at work even on our multiple business-class connections so I wouldn't really want to go with them at home.

I'm a current TalkTalk customer, the service is OK but now that my 18 months is up and they managed to leak all my data I'm not massively fussed about staying with them so I've been looking around for other deals. SSE are doing a pretty bloody good fibre broadband offer, at £21/month inclusive of everything (including some voice calls, if I ever bother to make any). Normally I'd steer clear, but the broadband is provided wholesale through Daisy who seem like a fairly well known and stable company (they also just acquired the company next door to my office so the Daisy group as a whole seem in a pretty healthy state). So from a technical point of view I don't think there's anything to worry about. However the thing that always bothers me is customer service. TalkTalk are an actual ISP who own their own equipment and they still manage to find unhelpful tech support, since SSE are just a customer of Daisy are they even worse? Obviously I'm going for an unlimited package so I'm not worried about billing screwups, I just want to know that if it breaks I'll be able to get on a phone (or live chat, or whatever) and get any problems resolved quickly...

Yeah, I guess so. I forget that just because I'd never fall for something like that, other people would...

My insurers have said that's an option, as a separate thing from repairing my car. I actually wasn't aware that the general public could find out the registered keeper (I've never needed to think about doing it before) - I don't know who the registered keeper is but might chuck in the £2.50 to find out. I was assuming that it's not the driver, based on the fact he gave "it's a new policy" as an excuse for his insurance not being on the MID but the tax left on the car was some impossible to buy period like 7 months, suggesting it probably hasn't changed hands recently as the tax would have been cancelled and the new keeper would have only been able to buy 1/6/12 months. But then, it also turned out that he had no valid insurance at all anyway, so the new policy thing was nonsense - who knows. They did say that the uninsured party can also claim against me, which is kind of frustrating.

Well, I did all that above and have spoken to them briefly today. Still need to get a quote for the repair, although I think it'll be prohibitively expensive for me to pay out of pocket (it's a Civic Type R, I had a look on a Honda parts website and racked up £1200 just in unpainted parts to repair the visible damage, without including the labour, the paintwork, and anything I can't see). I asked about the MIB, and they said that's only there to cover people who were hit by uninsured drivers and suffered personal injury, it won't cover repairs. So that's a bust, although they did say that they may be able to chase the third party directly. Need to get down and start putting a quote together to see exactly how much the repair would cost from an actual bodyshop.

That's my point - even if you break it down by hour, what does that actually achieve in this case? The most useful thing is to be able to work out that you did 10GB of games downloads from Steam (unusual activity), 3GB of Windows Updates (semi-unusual traffic since the size varies), 1GB of Gmail (small traffic, daily occurrance). Even having a breakdown hour by hour does not help you narrow down any strange activity. The only advantage is that you could say "this shows traffic between 4am and 5am, my router is always off during that time" but would you really expect BT to believe you? They could prove/disprove it with PPP logs or physical layer logs - but they won't put the effort in until they have to, and I can't see any Ombudsman ordering them to.

Given that it's broadband, how do you expect them to list anything even vaguely analogous to individual call charges? The "call" comes up at 8:00am when you allow your router to connect, and goes dead at 2:30am when you turn it off. Are you expecting some kind of timeline of how much data you load from every website you visit every day? Why don't you just move to China or North Korea in that case, where the government and your ISP can monitor/restrict your Internet usage. I'm sure there's no problems with overcharging in Pyongyang.

Bought my old Fabia from an advert from a trader on here. I wasn't really looking at all as I was happy with my Leon at the time. But the ad was for a bright yellow Fabia with virtually the same engine, hybrid turbo, and tons of mods. I rang up, I went and test drove it, and then before I knew it I was on my way back up to Warrington to pick it up and worrying about how I was going to shift the Leon. As for the handling mods, as someone else says, you can't polish a turd. My Fabia had all the typical VW handling mods (Cupra bushes, RARB, coilovers) as well as a limited slip diff, and I swear the knackered standard Clio 172 that I replaced it with went round corners even better on its standard suspension setup and geometry so out of whack it had worn one front tyre almost down to the cords on the shoulder in the three months I owned it.

The T20s seem really good apart from the size - I'm kicking myself for not picking up the Xeon + 32GB RAM one I saw for a little over 200 quid on eBay recently. I think it would have made the perfect upgrade from my N40 Microserver, if I could live with it looking a bit unwieldy under/next to the TV. But a 32GB box that I could chuck my current G210 card in for HDMI and Plex, and then still run VMs on top of would be nice.

If the moderators feel fit to ban me for a few days as they did you, then frankly they would probably be doing me a favour. "I don't know about you, but £60 is hardly office boy's jager bomb money to me." Your made-up £60/month is ridiculous. I would clearly not pay that and I've said as much. Which is why I pay for unlimited internet, which is more like £60/year. Your stubborn refusal to do so has now cost you money, which it has always had the potential to do, and you have weighed up and accepted that risk. Now the worst has happened. I wasn't aware you were a pensioner (although the clues were there, there aren't many groups in society who have this much free time on their hands) and I understand that you're on low income. However, as I said earlier, unlimited Internet is an "insurance" of sorts. You know you're paying £60/year more, but you also know that you won't suddenly have a £60/month bill. Swings and roundabouts. As for my "marketeers" bubble, I'd prefer it if you didn't insult me.

But the excess charge goes away for much less than £60 per month. Why would you just not pay it, and remove this problem entirely? BT are by no means a shining example of customer service - so why haven't you already moved to Plusnet? Or Sky? Or anyone else who is doing any kind of offer? In one breath you're slating BT for their (supposedly) malicious overcharging, the next you don't want to leave in case the service is ****e. Make up your mind? Which is exactly the sort of thing that several people in this thread have been suggesting to you for days (not specifically retried downloads, but just looking at the update system in general and make sure it's properly set up). I don't even know why I'm bothering at this point, it may not be deliberate but you're basically trolling everyone here by being an askhole.

I actually can see how it would theoretically happen on uploaded data - if something "crosses the boundary" between lines and the BT end receives two PPP frames (or similar) instead of one from a single line, maybe that could count. I don't see how it could happen on download though, since if something crossed between your line and your neighbours line, this would be already on the customer side of the accounting system and therefore BT would already have accounted for it in their core As for whether it actually CAN happen, no idea, but even theoretically I can only see how it would apply to uploads and not downloads which is the vast majority of everyone's traffic

Where is this extra £60/month figure coming from? On the BT website, Infinity 1 only costs £20/month in total - given that you're already a customer, it would be a much lower cost for you to upgrade. Obviously I would not pay £60/month on top of my broadband which already costs £40. But that's not the scenario that you're looking at. Paying the extra would make BT's demand simply "go away". It becomes a non-issue. I also wouldn't be surprised if they waived the one-off excess charges if you agreed to sign up as an unlimited customer. As for "an approval of what's been going on", you don't even know that there has been something going on. Have you followed everyone's advice yet? Changed your wifi password, made sure the settings are as secure as possible, kept an eye on what devices are on your network? If you have kids, are their friends coming over and using your wifi while they're at your place? Have you recently upgraded anything? Have you disabled Windows 10 peer to peer downloads so you're not uploading Windows Updates to other computers? You're hell bent on making this look like BT being malicious, but personally I've seen literally zero evidence of that.

Your best option is just pay for unlimited usage and stop worrying about it? I don't understand anyone who wouldn't do that. Also you don't take into account the various encapsulation - to get 6GB of actual data from the Internet includes overhead by necessity. The amount depends on how you're downloading, whether that's a single 6GB file or 6GB of tiny files, that sort of thing. But it is not as simple as "I downloaded 6GB of files, so my broadband usage is 6GB". As for speed tests, what is this "app"? If it's an app on your PC that says you're downloading at 14Mbps then it could just as easily be the server end which can't keep up. Use something like speedtest.net, they have a massive infrastructure designed specifically for testing your speed, I would trust that as an actual throughput test better than an app. It's not the US you have to worry about, it's almost certainly China, if anyone. By turning your router off, you will likely be affecting your speed due to constant retraining, and this will likely get worse on ADSL (which, if my memory serves correctly, only really retrains once per day, fibre is more responsive to adapt to line changes). As for fresh IP address keeping you safe, it's a bit of a fallacy. You'll be getting one from the same pool, someone can automatically scan the entire range, and if they make the assumption that you're all customers of the same ISP using the same equipment, once they find any kind of flaw it would be trivial to automatically apply it to every vulnerable device regardless of its IP. The only advantage of turning it off is that if someone was actually in the middle of hacking you at 2am they would be disconnected. But given that as I said, they would likely be scripted exploits, they could do any damage within seconds and it wouldn't need them to be connected for long, they could just find your new IP and start again the next night.