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Unlimited broadband under the spotlight

A new petition has been started on the government website about broadband ISPs unfairly advertising packages as unlimited.

A recent report by price comparison website Uswitch, attacked providers over the use of the word ‘unlimited’ in their marketing material and unfair ‘fair usage’ policies.

Now a broadband customer has started an e-petition on the government website to call for the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) to stop providers from advertising their services as ‘unlimited’.

The problem appears to be that some customers sign up to an unlimited service, expecting to be able to download lots of movies and songs as often as they like.  However, some then find that their broadband speed slows down after a certain point as they may have downloaded more than what is deemed average. The broadband providers’ fair usage policy then comes into effect.  This is usually done by restricting the download speeds of the user when a user may be eating up too much bandwidth. 

Most consumer broadband services are contended, meaning the bandwidth is shared by across a number of other users.  When one user starts downloading heavily, it could affect the download speeds of other users, therefore they try to balance the load if required through traffic shaping.

The type of users affected are probably those who are constantly downloading movies, or file sharing, often leaving computers on until completion. However, now that there is more video content available on-line and a growing number of IPTV (TV over Internet) services are available, it is likely that bandwidth usage will continue to increase.

In the current market, very cheap unlimited usage packages are probably not ideal for the heavy downloaders. These were probably not aimed at heavy users, so those types of users are better off paying a little extra. Many broadband ISPs now do provide information on which of their packages are suitable for different types of usage.  Like most things, you do get what you pay for.

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• Is unlimited broadband really unlimited