BT

[french frank]

probably the wrong thread. I'm on BT Infinity 1 - 40gb monthly download allowance. I really think they ought to change the wording of their allowance policy

If you exceed your usage allowance, you'll be charged for additional usage in units of five gigabytes (GB), at £5.30 per 5GB, which will appear in your next bill, and you will be sent a third email to let you know

I really don't think that can mean that if you are 1 gigabyte over you will be charged an additional £5.30. At 41gb I haven't reached one of their stated units which incur an additional £5.30 charge.

I think I may have raised this before and been told that "5gb or part thereof" is the assumed sense.;grrr;

Yes, I suppose it means if you are 22 Gb over you will be charged 5 x £5.30. I never really know what this download thing refers to. I only download odds and ends - like Andrew's new R3 schedule file :-)

[Frances_iom]

probably the wrong thread. I'm on BT Infinity 1 - 40gb monthly download allowance. I really think they ought to change the wording of their allowance policy

BT is now run as an American company - ie no regard to customer satifaction+ general use of the small print to hit customers - they also to use an American term 'nickel + dime' customers by charging for every small item they can distinguish - the only good thing is that with competition the UK hasn't decended to the total rip-off as seem in Comcast voted the most hated company in USA

[Dave2002]

3. The broadband usage allowance appears to get used up quite quickly. This could partly be because BT gets the YouView TV viewing mixed up with the broadband usage, and this is confusing and annoying. We just managed to avoid going over the usage allowance in January. BT really needs to get that fixed ASAP. We don't actually know whether our projected over limit usage was real or not - see also point 4 below. ***

4. Monitoring broadband usage could be important if there are issues with limits etc. However the broadband monitor does not update frequently enough, and sometimes it is several days between updates.

It is now over 6 months since I wrote the original post to this thread. Despite what it says on the BT account management site, the inadequate distinction between broadband usage and TV usage still persists. OK - the site says it's being fixed, but come on - half a year later there is no change!

I was reminded of this very recently when we viewed the Crime of Passion programme from Saturday last night on iPlayer using the YouView box. I originally downloaded this to my MacbBook, but then was reminded that we had the YouView box, so we used that. I was still unsure as to whether actually watching programmes via iPlayer would count against our download allowance, but eventually found a web page which seemed to indicate that using the on demand services via the YouView box would not be charged for.

One other gripe is the charges which BT impose for 1571 calls. I noticed that I made two calls within 1 minute, presumably having failed to note down the details of one of the incoming calls. A quick way to lose near as makes no matter 20p. Other companies manage to offer 1571 services for a fixed monthly charge - which might actually cost more, but means that at least the services provided get used.

The way we have reacted to BT over the last 6 months seems to be resulting in what Ellig and Taylor (see http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.c...ract_id=982620 The Irony of Transparency) call deadweight losses for BT - basically we are so disappointed with some of the poor aspects of their service that we don't use most of the service at all, thus resulting in a loss of expected revenue for BT. This is a shame, as some aspects of BT's service are good.