BT Retail continuing to chase users over excessive usage

The Register has highlighted the continuing policy of BT Retail to issue letters to the heavier users of its Retail
ADSL services, under the BT Broadband and BT Yahoo banners. We reported on this originally in December 2005.

Given that the maximum usage allowance on the BT Retail products is 40GigaBytes over a month, then if they are only targeting those with a usage above 100GB a month, it would seem a reasonable
margin of leeway has been given. BT Retail published an FAQ detailing what it would do to those regularly exceeding the
allowance back in February 2005, and has been mentioning the usage allowances since June 2004. So it should be
unlikely that any user getting the excessive usage email is unlikely to be aware that there are usage allowances on the BT Retail products.

The number of providers willing to let consumers have a totally free reign of usage on their network has been decreasing, and it is now to the point where very few providers other something they
describe as ‘unlimited’, that truly will allow a consumer to use all they like. For those people who have embraced the broadband culture fully, and are downloading figures like 100GB a month,
compared to the UK average which seems to be around 10GB per month, then it may be the case of looking at some of the small business offerings from providers. These will cost more per month, but
this may well mean providers are more tolerant of peoples usage habits.