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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.

I do have legal cover as part of the policy (i.e. BTE according to the description above) which I could use if appropriate - I've just got back from work so am about to sort some pictures out and write a description etc to send to the insurers then I'll see what they have to say about the further options.

I already said a couple of posts above, yes, the VED was showing as current when I checked it (i.e. it had tax, it was not SORN, and not expired). And yes, I'm sure the registered keeper will be getting a penalty for not having cover (or at least they should do), as well as the driver being penalised for actually driving it without cover. I missed your post above, that's pretty annoying given that my understanding was that some of my comprehensive premium has contributed to this fund...thanks for the advice, I will certainly be pushing whoever I can to make the claim against the MIB, but I guess I won't hold my breath. How would I even go about sueing, given that I don't actually have his address - I guess I would have to get that from the police?

VED was up to date, yeah. If that were the case, it should have been on the MID, no? The MID checks the car, not the driver, so if SOMEONE still had a policy with that car on it, it would have shown that the car was insured even if that particular driver was not. They checked at the scene and it had no cover. Which they verified with the insurance company directly, using the details he gave, which has resulted in finding out about this "future" policy.

Well, after all that, I got a text from the PC at 3am this morning. The policy number the other driver gave was a valid policy, but it was "forward dated" so didn't come into force until the 30th and therefore didn't cover him at the time of the collision. So £200 fine, 6 points on an IN10 for the next 4 years, the car is impounded, (presumably) this policy is now void, and (hopefully) he'll struggle to get any insurance for a while due to having a cancelled policy and an IN10. So that's something. Makes all the accident management stuff irrelevant though as there's no party for them to claim against so now I think I'm back to the broker, making a claim against my own insurance, and then for them to claim those costs from the MIB. Fun times all round. I can't figure out how driving without insurance but with a "valid" future policy was supposed to work out well for him, but it's irrelevant. Either through malice or ineptitude, he was uninsured when it happened, so ho hum.

Agreed. I hate being made to feel stupid when I'm reading it. But it's an important part of not getting screwed over... Nice to hear a positive experience of management companies. I think I'm going to end up going with it - the way they've explained it today I shouldn't have to worry about being out of pocket. I won't have to worry about the brokers getting difficult since this is their own service they offer so there's no reason for them to get aggressive with me. So I just need to get cracking and get the paperwork returned tomorrow once I've diagrammed what happened. Then hopefully I'll be well on the way to getting everything repaired regardless of what happens with the other driver.

I still don't know. I've spoken to the police control centre who said the only person allowed to tell me that information was the attending officer, he's on shift again at 10pm tonight and then off for 4 rest days. So I need to call them later to try and get through to him, and see if he actually has that information. The solicitors have already written to the company he said he was insured with (even though I haven't yet returned the paperwork that says they can act for me), but haven't had a reply. The car's still not on the MID today, but that doesn't really prove much. My assumption based on reading this is that he probably is insured and it probably is an administrative error on the part of the insurers, but it's a bit frustrating when you're trying to get to grips with all this and not only can I not get my head around this (needlessly convoluted) process, I'm also not sure who I'm ultimately aiming the process at. If he's insured then that's great and probably makes things easier, at this point I'd just like to know exactly what I'm dealing with. And it does make you wonder why things like the MID and CIE exist since no one really seems to want to enforce it.

TKIP is also broken. WPA2-PSK with CCMP/AES or WPA2-Enterprise with proper PKI is the "correct" way to do it.

In this case, the liabilty for a "win" fee (including their charges and disbursements) is limited by the agreement to "the level of costs recovered from the third party" i.e. theoretically "not out of pocket". The liability for a "lose" fee has no limit and contains only disbursements, but the solicitors said my legal cover provided by my policy would cover those. They specifically said that the "compensation" figure (which I keep 100% of in the case of a "win") would cover the repairs. So I don't think there's a way for me to actually end up out of pocket. But it's taken me two days of reading and emails and phonecalls to get that slightly more sensible description of what I'm about to agree to. I just find it frustrating, I don't think I'm stupid by any measurable benchmark, but this stuff is needlessly complex to read and I wonder how people with less of a grasp actually get on with it.

This is all a bit of a joke if you ask me. Spoken to the management company after emailing my broker with some questions. All the other party have to do is raise a tiny bit of an objection, and the accident management company will just send me back to my broker to make a fault claim anyway. So they're not adding any value by "fighting my corner", they will just give up. The fact that someone might dispute an accident was completely alien to her, she seemed quite surprised when I suggested the other driver might not co-operate (even though I've already pointed out how uncooperative they were when I asked for their insurance details). When I suggested that describing it as "no win, no fee" and then leaving me liable for unlimited court fees didn't really add up, they had an answer for that in that the legal cover provided by my policy would cover those in the event of a loss. I completely disagree that it's "no win, no fee" though - I guess it meets the strictest definition of the phrase, but it also makes the agreement sound a lot more "safe" than it actually is. So the accident management company are a "service provided by the broker" who barely provide a service, but just add a ****load of complications and delays along the way, and I'm sure it won't end once the matter is closed and I can look forward to them checking in with me regularly to see if I'm injured yet. When someone rear-ended me in 2005, I had a one page form which went back to my insurers and that was it. The decision didn't go the way I wanted (anyone who tells you being rear-ended is automatically not your fault is a liar), but at least it was quick and simple. edit - oh, and the brokers have now also said that I could open a claim with them, and they could then chase the third party. Which seems like what I want to happen, but without all this hassle of a management company. I really don't get what the point is, and I don't see why I would choose to use the ambulance chasers when I could just open a claim with my company and have them chase the third party. Best case, third party is liable and the costs are recovered and the accident is non-fault. Worst case, the costs are not recoverable and I would have had to go through my insurers anyway. Going through a management company doesn't seem to offer me any advantage in any way.

As above really, Win10 runs on one of my old 32 bit laptops with 2GB surprisingly well, even with a crap 5400rpm laptop hard drive in it. Certainly better than it ran 8.1, and possibly better than it ran 7.