I've been with the UK's Bulldog Broadband for quite a while now and been fairly unwilling to change ISP's due to them being pretty lax about enforcing any kind of Fair Usage Policy. Got a letter last night explaining that "in the interests of customer service" all Bulldog accounts will be moved over to Pipex Homecall (Pipex bought Bulldog some time ago).
Just wondering if anyone has any experience of Pipex Homecall with regard to downloading/filesharing? Their FUP, at
http://www.homecall.co.uk/terms/fair_usage.html , says:
Quote: |
Our Fair Usage tool automatically identifies the very small number of extremely heavy users and manages their bandwidth only during peak hours (6pm to 11pm Monday to Sunday, inc Bank Holidays), to protect the service for all our other customers. Outside peak hours, the use of the Internet by these heavy users is unaffected. |
also:
Quote: |
During peak hours (6pm to 11pm Monday to Sunday, inc Bank Holidays), customers affected by the Fair Usage Policy will share bandwidth with each other and will be separated from other customers. The total amount of bandwidth available for affected customers to share will be at least as much as for those customers unaffected by the policy.
The speed that affected customers experience when downloading at peak hours will therefore depend on what other affected customers are doing. If they are all web-browsing and reading emails, then all affected customers experience normal broadband speed. If, on the other hand, they are using Peer-to-Peer or file-sharing software, they will experience slow broadband speed. Outside of peak hours, no restrictions will apply. |
Which sounds a fairly reasonable approach, but I'm sure I've heard that Pipex are pretty terrible for P2P. That said, most of my bandwidth these days goes on Usenet and FTP which don't max out the connection both ways (like P2P protocols can), so I wonder if I'll even be affected.
On the plus side, they're increasing my 2MB connection to 'Up to 8MB' free of charge. If Pipex is a really bad idea, who is reasonable in the UK market? Needs to be available through a BT line, as LLU services like Be* aren't available in my area (yet).