Freeola stop unlimited broadband!

[Harrison]

I received a letter at the weekend from Freeola. It stated the following:

Freeola has removed all uncapped broadband tariffs from the current range of services on offer. We are writing to let you know that we will be moving you over from your current Uncapped product onto our new 8Mb MAX 30/300 product, which will provide you with a higher speed service.

Your new package offers you the fastest connection speed available on your line up to 8Mb, a large data usage allowance of 30GB at peak times, and a huge 300GB at all other times. There will be no change to your monthly payment. 8Mb MAX tariffs have generous data usage allowances, but if you reach the monthly allowance any additional usage will be charged at a rate of 80p pence per Gigabyte.

Also, according to the letter Peak times are between 8AM and 10PM!

This is really crap! 30GB per month is nothing! Granted 300GB is quite a lot and would probably be enough per month (Last month I used about 250GB of bandwidth according to the logs), but not when it is only off peak times between 10PM and 8AM it is not. I would use the 30GB Peak time allowance in probably 3 or 4 days at most.

And I bet they know this. By reducing the Peak time bandwidth to 30GB they are basically trying to cut the amount of traffic on their network as most will not leave their computers on over night using the bandwidth (they hope).

And at the moment I was on a maximum of a 2Mb connection, but the new service is finally upgrading this to up to 8Mb, but then reducing the bandwidth allowance. Madness! And no good for me!

So it seems I may need to find a new ISP, and one that can do a seemless transfer from Freeola without me losing my connection for days, or weeks. Any UK Uncapped Broadband services anyone here can recommend I look at?

[Demon Cleaner]

That is a mess. Unfortunately I cannot recommend an ISP.

[Harrison]

I just checked my usage for this month so far, and already I have downloaded nearly 40GB over 4 days, so if I were already on this new tariff I would now be 10GB in debt and already owe them an additional £8.

Over a month, if I kept that bandwidth usage up I would end up using around 300GB of bandwidth this month and be charged about £50 for bandwidth usage. No way am I sticking with Freeola!

[Stephen Coates]

I just checked my usage for this month so far, and already I have downloaded nearly 40GB over 4 days, so if I were already on this new tariff I would now be 10GB in debt and already owe them an additional £8.

Over a month, if I kept that bandwidth usage up I would end up using around 300GB of bandwidth this month and be charged about £50 for bandwidth usage. No way am I sticking with Freeola!

Thats bad.

I am yet to see another ISP which is completely unlimited, but I havn't been looking so can't be sure whether there is one or not.

Why is it that most ISPs are having these limitations?

Hope you find a suitable ISP soon. Unfortunately there arn't any I can recomend. Is demon unlimited?

[AlexJ]

Sadly my ISP also discontinued their free unlimited service, and I couldn't find an alternative that was totally uncapped. I went to Eclipse in the end, it's got 20GB during peak hours and unlimited outside those hours - it's not great but uTorrent allows me to slow the transfer down during the peak hours.

[J T]

My telewest is unlimited, 4 meg. It's pretty good, but all done through a cable connection. This may be changing though as NTL/Telewest is changing to Virgin Media.

AOL used to be unlimited - don't know about now, but they were fairly rubbish, expensive too. and had to have their crappy software installed.

[Harrison]

I've been looking around and Pipex offer an 8Mb unlimited broadband package for £24.99, and this also includes a static IP address and faster 448Kb upload rate.

I've never been too sure about Pipex though. Anyone else know much about them, other than the Hasselhoff adverts of course! (Something that is definitely persuading me so far )

[J T]

Uh, they also sponsor Fulham FC

[Harrison]

I've now also dicovered BT and Demon are still offering unlimited bandwidth broadband. I probably wouldn't touch BT after hearing lots of stories from people with problems, but as I did used to be a Demon customer and never had a problem with them I will look into that more.

As with all of them it depends on their fair use policy. Some just restrict heavy users during evening peak times if they feel they are using too much bandwidth, whereas others restrict and then ban.

[Puni/Void]

It is really sad, and also a bit strange, that companies are still using download caps in 2007. After all, that should be a thing of the past. I'm sorry to hear that you might have to switch ISP, Harrison. Hope you will find an ISP that doesn't put any limits on downloads. If you had been in Norway, you would have found that almost no ISP's has any limits on downloads or uploads whatsoever. Teho can probably back me on this one. The only company that had caps on downloads, was Telenor. Think they abolished this in 2001 or something.