"broadband" hah

[beermat]

mindygoths company decided she needs broadband, so are getting BT Business satellite 500/1 for her.
Which, upon reading the BT openwound website ["fair share"] policy, doesn't mean 500Kbits/sec with a contention ratio of 1 (ie just her), it means just one PC. No lan, lan naughty. And the bloody bt openwound account will have a throughput limit of 750Mb per week after which one gets throttled, and further occurances of exceeding the data count limit means users "will be contacted by the Help Desk to discuss ways to change their usage patterns.".

WTF?

Yes, she'll be able to get big attachments (oh err missus) quickly, as long as she doesn't do it too often in the week...

I think I need to get my own satellite provider. One without such silly throttling limits. (500Kbps=apx 36Gb per week, so with a data throughput quote of 750Mb, she can only use 2% of the potential bandwidth!)

Ah well. Back to tins of baked beans and string. No naughty downloading videos or music for me.

Comments

[dan-lane.livejournal.com]

what about those services that offer satellite downlink with a modem uplink?

[beermat]

I shall look around and see if I can find anything usefull.

[poggs.livejournal.com]

Am I the only one who thinks this is fair? We're talking consumer technologies here! We pay £20k for a 2Mb line at work, which guarantees us 2Mb to ISP, and we get 2Mb.

I pay £30/month for a 1Mb cable modem at home, which is dirt cheap for being able to download at 120-odd kilobytes/sec. I know its not available all the time, and I don't fool myself in to thinking I have a 1Mb leased line.

The Internet as a whole is more enjoyable if you don't spend your entire life sharing MP3s and downloading movies.

[beermat]

I have to pay 90 quid a month for BT ISDN line (business highway) & Demon ISP. for 64Kbps. certainly not cheap. only takes 28hrs to get down a CD (so getting things from eg MSDN for development is a bit of a joke)

What the bloody satellite (currently our only broadband option due to living-in-the-sticksness) service *should* provide is tiered accounts, pay per megabyte or similar tarrif ; if one uses the throughput (width (500Kbps) or depth (how much one downloads)) then pay for it.
To be limited to using only 2% of the thing is annoying.
It suggests their satellite system can't cope with anyone actually usuing it for any serious data transfers...

[poggs.livejournal.com]

OMG, I thought 'Satellite' was some trademark thing, not actually satellite delivery. Hmm - yes, tiered could be a good idea, or you could pay for anything more than 1Gb/period you download. Might make the thing entirely self-financing... up to a point.

Make your own wireless link?

[maluse.livejournal.com]

How far away is the nearest place you could get ADSL? At the prices you're having to pay it may almost be worthwhile to rent a bit of loft-space & roof aerial space from people on the way so that you can hop wireless signals there.

Though it does look like someone's actually taking the town/country broadband divide seriously and forcing BT to do something about it, a colleague who lives in darkest East Sussex has just had his exchange status go from "no ADSL ever, peasants!" to an ADSL threshold of 25 users.

Re: Make your own wireless link?

[beermat]

trigger level of 25? Interesting! DSLAMs or whatever the exchange needs for provision of DSL service must have come down in cost a fair bit.

There's a whole bunch of exchanges around us here that are now either to be DSL enabled or have trigger levels and are almost hitting them.

All of which is fine and dandy for the folk next door to the exchange itself or in the villages. Alas we're at the top of a hill aways from the exchange (4Km or more) and there's a bastard length of aluminium cable in our runs :(((