This happened a while back, but it still makes my blood boil when I think about it, so that makes it worth a Rant in my book. Get yourself a coffee – it’s a long one!
A year or so back, I was trying to get my broadband upgraded from 2Mb to 8Mb. Talk Talk, who had been my ISP for around 5 years at that point seemed utterly incapable of actually sorting out an upgrade path, even though they had been selling 8Mb to new customers for fucking months.
I figure that I would cut my losses and switch to a different provider, and a couple of friends of mine had switched to Orange and seemed quite happy with them. Foolishly, I took their word for it.
I duly bought into Orange’s 8Mb unlimited broadband package. After 2 months with Orange, I received a very shitty letter stating that I had exceeded their Rair Use policy and that if I did not reduce my usage immediately, they would ‘take action’.
Hmmm.
To say that I found this letter regarding my alleged breach of their ‘Fair Use’ policy annoying would be an understatement of epic proportions. There were a number of points which I felt compelled to respond to.
To set the scene, here is an excerpt from the Orange website page covering Fair Use:
Am I likely to be affected by the Fair Use Policy?
If you don’t use file sharing software or download large files from the Internet it’s unlikely you’ll ever be affected by this policy. If you do, all we ask is that you do so considerately, perhaps by downloading outside the peak hours of 6pm to midnight.
Sounds fair enough, right? I thought so.
First, let me point out that for the 5 years previous to my switching to Orange Broadband, I was on an ‘unlimited’ package from Talk Talk. My usage patterns had not changed at all between Talk Talk and Orange and yet at no time during my service from Talk Talk did I receive any threats or warnings regarding my usage, nor even any suggestion that I was in some way contravening their own Fair Use policy. In fact, the only reason that I switched to Orange rather than any of the other ISP’s offering unlimited broadband was that their ‘unlimited’ service was cheaper – I was now seeing why.
As suggested in their letter, I went back and re-read the Fair Use policy on the Orange website. To describe it as ‘vague’ would be giving it far more credit than it deserved. What really annoyed me, though, is the fact that like Talk Talk it suggests that what is most important is that bandwidth usage remain largely outside peak hours so as to avoid interrupting the service of other users, but what they were in fact pulling me up for was a simple bottom-line GB-per-month breach. If they had actually bothered to check the activity logs for my account, it would have been obvious that my usage patterns consisted of short bursts of intense activity followed by days or even weeks of relative inactivity. You could also see that the vast majority of my downloads were done overnight – a deliberate act on my part to avoid any breach of Fair Use (as described in the Orange paragraph above), and one which Talk Talk apparently appreciated more than Orange did.
un·lim·it·ed, adj
1 : lacking any controls : unrestricted <unlimited access>
2 : boundless, infinite <unlimited possibilities>
3 : not bounded by exceptions : undefined
One of the things that really annoyed me about this whole issue was the fact that I had basically bought the biggest and best package Orange had to offer and yet here they were placing limits on it that made it of little or no use to me. This is the digital age; DVD downloads, PC game downloads, video on demand, digital music downloads. Fairly soon, my level of usage will become the norm, not the exception, and what will they do then? If they had advertised the package as a 40GB per month package, I would not have purchased it, plain and simple. I have no interest in such a limited download package. When I purchase an ‘unlimited’ package, I expect it to be just that, unless I am well and truly taking unfair advantage by irresponsibly hammering the system during peak hours on an ongoing basis. I was not doing that then and never have.
I also noticed that the Fair Use policy did not hint at what the imagined ‘reasonable’ download limit might be (it still doesn’t), but since in their letter they touted 40GB per month as the magic number, let’s do the maths on that:
On an 8Mb connection, a download speed of 1GB per hour is easily sustainable. So in an average month they would be anticipating allowing 40hrs of downloading.
In an average month, that works out at 40Gb ÷ 30 days = 1.33 hrs / day of allowable download time. By what stretch of the imagination could an hour and 20 mins of downloading a day be considered ‘unlimited’?
Even taking this up to my ‘excessive’ usage of 88.08GB per month, that works out to:
88.08GB ÷ 30 days = 2.9 hrs / day
So, by Orange standards, an average of 3hrs downloading a day (mainly outside of peak hours) is considered to be excessive?
Now, I have to say that Orange did not get off on the right foot with me, having initially set up my supposedly 8Mb account at 2Mb by mistake, letting me run with it for several months, and then when I complained forcing me to take out a full new 12 month contract in order to have the mistake corrected, but in spite of all this I let it go and decided to persevere, thinking that I would have no more cause for complaint. Perhaps that was naivety on my part.
To summarise; the Fair Usage policy is vague to the point of being useless, nowhere is there any mention of 40Gb being a fair limit, even at 80GB per month the average download time works out to less than 3hrs/day, and the vast majority of my downloading is done overnight, avoiding peak hours.
I responded to the final point in their letter, by making it clear that I had no intention of ‘significantly reducing my usage immediately’ and that if they felt that their network infrastructure was not robust enough to cope with my requirements, they were free to cancel my account as threatened and I would be happy to take my business to a real ISP.
For the conclusion to my Orange saga, be sure to read ‘Customer Disservice’.
By the way, my new ISP is BT – their ‘unlimited’ packages are all clearly defined and huge. but I don't recommend them either, they are too fucking expensive.
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