Thetownend.com

Hello all, DMR is spreading his wings and flying the nest in January.

Anyway we are getting Sky and for whatever reason we cant get the unlimited broadband - we can have Sky Broadband Connect which states 40GB monthly usage.

I have little to no conecpt of these sort of things. 3 people, 'normal' internet usage, all out at work during the day etc - is this likely to be sufficient?

Not at the rate at which you probably consume internet pornography :)

Didn't you used to work for Sky?

40Gb is the equivalent of around 50 odd films in .avi format. So yea, it's plenty.

40gb is an average user tariff, if you download music or films and you are a heavy YouTube user and you are the only user you will be able to download a few films (probably less than 10) in a month.

If you are the only user of the connection you will get away with it, if there are more of you and you all occassionally download films and watch a lot of YouTube then you may well get close to using that 40gb limit fairly quickly.

Facebook uses fairly large amounts of download, YouTube and iPlayer use huge amounts, dont just think that its about downloading films/games/music its about general usage of the internet as well.

Also if you (or anyone on the connection) use Steam or any online gaming then 40gb may not be enough for you.

I download the occassional film/music and have 5 PC's/laptops connected to the net (2 of them for gaming online) and I regularly use 80+gb per month but on BT thats not a problem at all.

So it does come down to exactly what the 3 users will be doing on it, if its just facebook/web etc then it wont be a problem.

Can you get Virgin where you are moving to? If so, check their pricing as its normally pretty much the same as Sky except you get better broadband.

Virgin cable is a much better service indeed, and with Virgin if you go over your download limit then they only cap you for 1 or 2 days rather than 1 calendar month then its back to normal again.

There is no limit on Virgin cable. They do have a traffic management policy which caps your speed if you use too much on a single day, never caused me an issue though and I'm a heavy downloader. Plus you have the option of going as high as a 100Mb connection.

totaly misread the question  :)

Traffic management is EXACTLY the same as having a download limit, if you exceed a limit in 1 day they will cap you for the next day, whats the fucking difference? pedant.

If there is no limit then why would they cap your downloads after you exceed it?

A call centre complaints monkey is not a techy wizard now is it?

And would like to stick with Sky as one bill for everything is more convinient and I get a discount.

ive had my speed capped before :-) Think i downloaded around 30/40gb in 48hrs. :-)

It resets every day at midnight, they don't cap you the following day. It also only operates during peak periods and even when it kicks in you still get a usable speed. It also doesn't apply at all on their higher speed packages. Seems different to me and as I said before, I'd have torrents running 24 hours a day and it never caused me any problems at all.

Another recommendation here for Virgin.  Cable broadband is far better than anything that comes down a phone line.  A permanently on connection and greater bandwidth both up and down.  I'm a very heavy user and have never really noticed any traffic management or throttling.  Recently uploaded 120GB of photo's to the Virgin online backup which took 7 days but worked perfectly.

Except for BT Infinity, which is on a par with Virgin and comes down a phone line.

Correct.

Coming my way soon, have noticed a few of the new cabs going up very near me  :beers:

I have the same usage allowance and have not exceeded it yet. 4 of us in the house and use it quite alot.
I can never check my usage as it is always unavailable(shitty talktalk) so that might be why?

I've had it at home for over a year now. We had it installed at work last week and the engineer mentioned that it's increasing to 100Mb from next April.

Should make the ftp'ing a bit easier Sam  ;)  According to my isp my line should be capable of 30 down 12 up, my routers also VDSL compatible so will be a one box solution

Another recomendation for Virgin Media.

Arriba if you need to keep check on your allowance you can download this app that runs in your task bar and will tell you how much you have used daily,weekly and monthly.

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/tbbmeter.html

That would only work on one pc, if there's more in arriba's household then it wouldn't be much help

Thanks for this. I'm still on standard ADSL and unable to get cable in my area, despite there being cable within about 20 yards of my flat, but am now aware I can get BT Infinity.

I despise BT, but I can get 35mb, slightly better than my current 2.2mb, so I'm now quite excited about having a quicker connection! (Should I move to BT.)

Anyone know whether I can keep my router? It's a Belkin N1 Vision and I'm reluctant to have a BT homehub to share my connection with all BT customers using BT openworld or whatever it's called.

Barry you can block that option on the bt homehub in the settings, i had to do it as it was slowing down my connection but after turning it off i gained about an extra 1mb of speed.

I would think you need a BT router, at least for the modem part. Doubt its standard ADSL2+.

Thing that puts me off Infinity is the 18 month min contract.

You don't have to get it from BT Batch

ID Net do a 12 month, I'll ask my ISP what contracts he does next time I speak to him, in fact I'll mail him this week

http://www.idnet.net/solutions/home/broadband/default-fibre.jsp

Forget my edited post , iPad now ok.

The kit supplied is a separate modem and router (HomeHub). Google suggests your router has a WAN port, so yes that should be fine. The engineer might not set it up for you, but easy enough to just swap out the HH when he's left.

Interesting, will wait and see what Sky offer as rumours are they will be getting in on the act. Didn't realise BT was wholesaling already though, so thanks.