UPC Download limit -over what time?

digitaldr

I got 20meg fibrepower from UPC about a week ago and am very pleased with it. Also pleasantly surprised by UPC customer service - calls answered reasonably quickly and all my queries dealt with efficiently.

I don't think I'll exceed the 250 gig a month (have limited my uploads a bit on p2p) but was disappointed that there is no easy way to check my usage. Now I know I could have monitored traffic on all the computers on the network but it would be a pain in the a*s to have to tot everything up. Instead I got a linksys WRT54G on adverts 9having asked UPC not to give me their crappy wireless modem) flashed with Tomato firmware and now my router keeps track of my traffic. By default stats are saved to the routers RAM and are therefore lost on a powercycle. It's also possible to save to vRAM but this might fill up (would probably take a long time though). In the end I used this script to back up stats on mu UPC ftp space.

Anyway now that I have a reliable way to monitor my traffic I was just wondering how UPC define the 250 gigs a month. Is it on a rolling 30 days basis like Smart or does it work on a calender month starting from your install date.

jor el

I've never seen it confirmed anywhere whether it's a rolling 30 days, or a fixed monthly period. You might need to ask UPC, but not sure if they'd give you the answer.

digitaldr

Just to answer my own question - I emailed UPC at aup@upc.ie and got a reply 10 minutes later. Usage period starts on 1st of the month.

vibe666

they have the ability to measure on both a rolling 30 days and from the 1st of the month, but the usage limit applies from the start to the end of the calendar month.

Random

any way to monitor your usage via UPC themselves?

digitaldr

No - I asked them last week. Seems strange - as far as I know every other ISP allows you to view your usage. I wouldn't imagine it would be too hard for UPC to implement. It's as if they don't want you to know! I wonder why??

KoolKid

Could you have any legal standing here claiming you have no way to track your usage?

digitaldr

Lady in tech support suggested I use software/a router to monitor usage so this might be their "get out of jail card".

By the way here's how my router (running tomato) keeps track of things:



and here's the bandwidth backups saved on my UPC ftp space (see first post):

vibe666

ditto for tomato, but if i had the Cisco EPC2425 modem/router combo instead of my standalone modem (and my own router running tomato) it would be a lot more inconvenient to add a 2nd router without losing my phoneline or causing a major NAT headache that would ruin any online gaming or voip/p2p i might want to do.

not sure what i'm going to do when they roll out the 100mbps if i end up getting that as i don't believe there is any modem only option.

it's perfectly within UPC's power to give users the ability to monitor their usage just like every other ISP does, they simply choose not to so (IMO) they can both discourage people from using it right to their 'unlimited' limit on a regular basis AND catch people out who unwittingly go over with an 'extreme' upgrade with a swift kick in the financials.

emphyrion

Does anyone knows if the UPC broadband limit (30mb) applies to the wireless connection or ethernet cable connection? I remember when I was eircom, the ethernet cable limit was much higher that wireless limit.

Random

i'm confused emphyrion, what do you mean? the transfer limit would be on the account itself. whether you connect via ethernet or wifi it's all coming from the same source.

jor el

emphyrion wrote: »

Does anyone knows if the UPC broadband limit (30mb) applies to the wireless connection or ethernet cable connection? I remember when I was eircom, the ethernet cable limit was much higher that wireless limit.

There is no such differentiation with any ISP, in fact, it would be impossible to do this. Ethernet or 802.11 will make no difference, the limit is between the ISP and your modem, the interface from modem to your computer is irrelevant.