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BT capped our Internet because of BBC iPlayer usage
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We found it impossible to watch anything on BBC iPlayer last night because all the shows stopped and started and stopped again and again, the stuttering unbearable. We ran a speed test and discovered that instead of the 10Mb broadband connection we used to get, the data transfer had dropped down to just 0.47Mb. We called BT and were told—they hadn’t bothered contacting us, we had to ask them—that our line had been capped because we download ‘too much’. We pay a fortune every month for unlimited broadband.
Apparently ‘unlimited’ means 40Gb in BT land and there’s no way we’ve downloaded that much in a month. We do get our favourite US TV shows via BitTorrent, to watch then ditch, but even in HD each episode comes in at no more than 1Gb and there are only four shows we follow. Four times one gigabyte equals four gigabytes times four weeks (assuming an episode a week, not always) equals 16Gb. And that’s only when seasons are being aired. We also don’t play networked games at all.
No, what’s caused BT to take our money but cut our service, and slap our wrists for daring to use what we pay for, is the constant streaming of video on our Macs via the BBC’s very popular iPlayer service while our TV is out of commission waiting for the insurance company to replace it (and that’s another paying customer horror—see here).
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ISPs have been complaining for months now that iPlayer demands too much bandwidth from them. They basically want us to pay them a fortune and just check our emails every few days, perhaps daring to download the occasional JPEG of a cute kitten once a month (okay, I suspect my friend Beautifu1 does that a lot more often).
They don’t actually want us streaming video, downloading music, playing networked games. All those things require the ISPS to provide us with the bandwidth, and they won’t improve their capacity (won’t, not can’t). So we’re all effectively rationed irrespective of the tariffs and data plans we thought we signed up for.
We’re stuck in contractual terms until BT implements [[Phorm]]–likely in 2009–which is an action that I’ve said we will take as a breach of contract, the contract saying nothing about agreeing to be spied on or hit with advertisements—or unless we can make such nuisances of ourselves they’ll be glad to let us out of our contract. If we just upped and left they’d hammer us for the fees due for the remaining 14 months or so, a collosal sum.
They can penalise us for using the service we pay for to full effect, and they can hound us for hundreds of pounds if we say that’s not right and we’re going elsewhere to get better service. This is not right but it is entirely legal. The regulator OFCOM has no balls whatsoever. What regulator does in the UK today? Disgruntled customers are forced to go the long and tortuous route to get what they deserve for their money. We have to become very, very annoying and demanding.
Yes, from now on BT must provide us with a perfect, always-on Internet connection and strong wi-fi connectivity. Or else they get hassled. All the time.
Starting this week we’re going to be calling and writing to them about their pathetic HomeHub 2.0 router. We’ve never complained about it before because we’ve tolerated its quirks and stupidities. Not any more. We want it fixed or replaced because we don’t want to lose the connectivity between our devices—Apple TV, iMac, AirPort Express, MacBook Pro—ever again. It happens a lot. The Internet connection stays active (unlike with the previous version of the HomeHub) but all wi-fi connections go down regularly, at least three times a day. The only fix we have is a reboot, and that’s no longer good enough.They’ll get a phone call informing them and seven days in writing to address the problems, and if they do, we’ll see how things go. If the new or fixed router continues to misbehave they will get told in writing that they have 28 days to provide the service we pay for or they will be considered in breach of contract.
We will also be querying the poor quality of our phone line, which can only ever be improved, we have discovered, by unplugging the HomeHub and removing the DSL filter from the socket before plugging the phone back in. Strange, but clearly something that BT will now have to work hard to fix for us.
The first letter, going to BT this week, will be about Phorm. The second will be about the router. The third will be about the speed cap. The fourth will be about the quality of the line. There will be phone calls a-plenty as well. Chances are, the first wave of letters and calls will take longer than a week but that’s okay. We’ll persevere.
My beloved wanted to challenge the speed cap last night but there was nobody in the relevant department around at weekends, he was told—it was a case of cap and run, it would seem. He has to call on Monday and make merry hell. The woman he spoke to told him there was nothing at all that could be done this weekend. Despite this, our speed this morning has improved a little. At time of writing it’s gone up to 2.42Mb with BT’s national average a not much better 2.99Mb. It would appear we were very lucky to get our previous 10Mb at all.
We did some research on the laughably-named Fair Usage Policy of which we were told nothing and received nothing in writing when we first signed with BT, or when the contract was renewed. It turns out it talks of capping during peak hours only, not permanently for any length of time. 8.30pm on a Saturday night is not peak time, yet that’s when we tried to watch comedy quiz Have I Got News For You on BBC iPlayer and found ourselves capped. It’s a mystery. What’s more, any TV show downloads we’ve ever done via P2P have been run at night. They’ve always been quicker to download by doing that, and don’t interfere with our usual broadband usage during the day.
So are we still capped… or suffering from a permanently downgraded service, just us or others in our area as well… or are we capped only at times BT calls ‘peak’ and the rest of us don’t? Right now we just don’t know what’s going on and we can’t find out until tomorrow, maybe, assuming we can get the truth out of someone (BT staff often speaketh with forked tongue).
It’s odd to think that BT is preventing us from accessing a BBC service that our TV licence fee pays towards and entitles us to make use of. And it’s not because we haven’t paid BT—we have, and do—but because we believed our unlimited Internet access was exactly that, and we were never provided with a phone call or letter to tell us that unlimited actually does have limits. Irony of ironies, BT quietly sent out new plug adapters for the HomeHub to lots of customers including ourselves last week, because apparently there was a risk of our previous adapters going ka-boom (apparently if nudged by a vacuum cleaner—I’m quite serious, that’s what the letter said!). Quality materials and workmanship indeed.
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