Are Esat charging for going over the cap yet?

vibe666

just wondering. gone over by 4gb and wondering if I'm going to get a bill or not.

last time I went over (1gb i think) they just disabled login so when i turned my modem off and disconnected, I couldn't reconnect again.

PaulMcG

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=220233 have a look here vibe666... i don't think they are.

OfflerCrocGod

I've hit 26GB before and have had no prob. Of course YMMV.

Raskolnikov

I called Esat about this, they said they're not going to charge for going over the cap. She said that they don't want people coming back to them with bills going into the hundreds of Euro. Now, wether they're disconnecting people for going over the cap, I don't know.

hacktavist

Does anyone know by 8gb do they mean a total of upload and download or is it just download?

center15

If you have a 8Gb cap, that's a 8Gb upload cap and a seperate 8GB download cap

vibe666

cool, thanks.

just topped 20gb today, so i'll get back to downloading then.

dub45

Raskolnikov wrote:

I called Esat about this, they said they're not going to charge for going over the cap. She said that they don't want people coming back to them with bills going into the hundreds of Euro. Now, wether they're disconnecting people for going over the cap, I don't know.

-

This type of assurance is absolutely worthless. You have contracted for a particular cap and if and when they decide to charge people for exceeding it they will be well within their rights.

Steve S

dub45 wrote:

-

This type of assurance is absolutely worthless. You have contracted for a particular cap and if and when they decide to charge people for exceeding it they will be well within their rights.

You are of course absolutely right. Still it is nice to know that we might be able to get away with it for a time.

skywalker_208

ahem:

http://bt-esat.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/bt_esat.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_sid=Bz5iQQwh&p_lva=&p_faqid=179&p_created=1084818123&p_sp=cF9zcmNoPTEmcF9ncmlkc29ydD0mcF9yb3dfY250PTE0NCZwX3NlYXJjaF90ZXh0PUJyb2FkYmFuZCBMaW1pdCZwX2NhdF9sdmwxPX5hbnl_JnBfY2F0X2x2bDI9fmFueX4mcF9wYWdlPTE*&p_li=

vibe666

doesn't tell me anything i didn't already know though does it?

i know they have a cap.

i know they 'reserve' the right to enforce it.

What I was interested in, is whether that ARE enforcing it or not.

well, time will tell, as of right now, I'm at 26gb, so I guess I'll find out one way or the other.

Tech Pete

center15 wrote:

If you have a 8Gb cap, that's a 8Gb upload cap and a seperate 8GB download cap

I was informed it was 8GB in either direction.
As in its 8GB's in total. I broke my cap by dling 4 and uploading 4.
Damn Torrents :O

So they disconnected my service.
I tried to get back on but they said it was that or i get charged.
Since my usage was over 100 GB's over 4 months i instanly agreed to being disconnected as against being charged....

Bottom line...
Dont use IOL if ur gonna break the cap....

jimme

@Tech Pete

Its 8GB up and 8GB down, but that wouldnt have mattered in your case anyways.

bk

My impression of Esat is that if you go a bit over the cap, that is ok, they won't do anything.

But if you go consistently and heavily over the cap, then they will disconnect you. IMHO that is fair enough.

dub45

bk wrote:

My impression of Esat is that if you go a bit over the cap, that is ok, they won't do anything.

But if you go consistently and heavily over the cap, then they will disconnect you. IMHO that is fair enough.

It seems to me that in some ways the Companies cannot win on this one: (and believe me I dont normally have sympathy for them!)

They all clearly state that there is a cap and that you are liable to pay for it.
So anyone signing up for a contract accepts that - you dont have to like it but you have contracted for it.

If a company like UTV states their policy upfront and charge for exceeding the cap people slag them off.

On the other hand if Companies dont charge or allow some leeway people go mad and you read people on here boasting about downloading four and five times the cap surely putting pressure on the companies to charge as people exceeding their bandwidth constantly will only increase contention and thereby cause slow speeds for others.

So when the likes of Esat and Eircom finally start to charge can anyone really blame them given that people have accepted the caps when they signed up in the first place?

vibe666

yeah, but you see, that's the whole problem. they HAVE a cap on products that in every other country in europe have uncapped.

true you can get similar products in the uk and europe, but they are like €20 a month or less.

As it stands we're paying more than double for an inadequite service and the big ISP's do it because they can get away with it. it's nothing less than artifically fixing the prices.

I have a friend who's in the uk who has a 1.5mbit connection (incapped) for £30 per month. slightly less than I'm paying for a capped 512kbps service in the country right next door.

I can download (within the limits of my cap) 16gb and upload a further 16gb, but my mate could (if he could find enough to download) download up to 270gb per month. not sure where he'd put it all mind, but that's not the point.

the point is we're being shafted from every angle in this country and we're all fed up.

but, like every other consumer sector in ireland we're forced to accept it by simple lack of a realistic alternative.

dub45

vibe666 wrote:

yeah, but you see, that's the whole problem. they HAVE a cap on products that in every other country in europe have uncapped.

true you can get similar products in the uk and europe, but they are like €20 a month or less.

As it stands we're paying more than double for an inadequite service and the big ISP's do it because they can get away with it. it's nothing less than artifically fixing the prices.

I have a friend who's in the uk who has a 1.5mbit connection (incapped) for £30 per month. slightly less than I'm paying for a capped 512kbps service in the country right next door.

I can download (within the limits of my cap) 16gb and upload a further 16gb, but my mate could (if he could find enough to download) download up to 270gb per month. not sure where he'd put it all mind, but that's not the point.

the point is we're being shafted from every angle in this country and we're all fed up.

but, like every other consumer sector in ireland we're forced to accept it by simple lack of a realistic alternative.

I am not unsympatheric by any means to the some of the points you make but others are simply not true.

£20 a month translates into approx. €30 a month which is what UTV charge for Clicksilver and apparently Esat come quite close to that when you combine bb with some of their phone packages.

NTL while still restricted is actually marginally cheaper in Ireland than it is in England.

You have to remember too that for a huge majority of bb users the cap is not an issue speeds are. And speeds are affected by people who insist on exceeding their caps by huge amounts.

I still have to see a credible explanation for what people need huge caps for other than occasional releases of unix etc etc.

Steve S

dub45 wrote:

I still have to see a credible explanation for what people need huge caps for other than occasional releases of unix etc etc.

And why exactly do we owe you (or IOL or Eircom) an explanation?

Would you also like us to explain to you why we're borrowing the books we're borrowing from the library? Or why we'd like to see A Clockwork Orange and Natural Born Killers?

Steve S

Oh and by the way:

I think that one reason that IOL may not be charging for usage above the cap is that they don't seem to be able to keep accurate records on what's happening.

Last month I went a bit nuts and had total traffic over 30GB. But today I just checked my total usage since September and they have it at about 15GB total (8 down, 7 up). That's clearly wrong.

There's also the issue of billing cycles vs. calendar months. They seem to reset the meter every calendar month but billing cycles do not correspond.

lomb

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=212690

looks like iol are charging now. i think a few people are in for a shock

Steve S

If they are indeed charging, I must say that they are very shortsighted in purely business terms.

They risk pissing off some of their best potential customers. People who go over the cap would also tend to want the fastest available connection. When and if IOL and others start offering higher-end residential products, they could reasonably expect these people to sign on, provided they are competitive. And there's the rub.

Instead, they soak them with some giant bill for going over this bogus and arbitrary "cap." Then they all jump ship to NTL as soon as it is available in their area.

IOL and Eircom seem to think that they have no competition (why they don't feel compelled to compete with each other is another matter). But they do in more and more areas, at least in Dublin. And NTL right now is handing their heads to them. Nobody who has access to NTL would knowledgeably choose Eircom or IOL at present. They are going to have to compete with NTL sooner or later. The question for them ought to be: do the short-term gains of charging ridiculous fees (why 3 cents per MB, by the way?) to our potential best customers outweigh the long-term gains we can expect to earn from them? Any confident company would answer in the negative.

dub45

Steve S wrote:

And why exactly do we owe you (or IOL or Eircom) an explanation?

Would you also like us to explain to you why we're borrowing the books we're borrowing from the library? Or why we'd like to see A Clockwork Orange and Natural Born Killers?

You dont owe me an explanation - I did not say you did. I said that I have not seen an explanation I stand by that.

On the other hand I presume that you read books you borrow from the library and that you watch films for intellectual stimulation or enjoyment. It is probably a reasonable assumption that people who regularly exceed the cap are not downloading out of copyright books by the dozen. on the other hand maybe they are!!

Steve S

The point was:

it is patronising for you (or IOL or Eircom) to presume to know in advance what uses we might put a broadband connection to and how much monthly traffic it might involve.

Would you accept a phone service that would cut you off as a subscriber if you exceeded 2 hours of conversation per day? Would you say "It's reasonable enough because I can't imagine what anyone would have to talk about for that long"?

dub45

Steve S wrote:

If they are indeed charging, I must say that they are very shortsighted in purely business terms.

On what do you base this statement? Presumably the higher the cap the more bandwidth a company needs thus increasing their costs which have to be passed on to their customers. Their is no evidence that high downloaders are by any means in the majority of customers - it is reasonable that the majority of customers will want fast reliable speeds to carry out their business. The contention caused by high downloaders can adversely affect the quality offered to customers.

Steve S wrote:

They risk pissing off some of their best potential customers. People who go over the cap would also tend to want the fastest available connection. When and if IOL and others start offering higher-end residential products, they could reasonably expect these people to sign on, provided they are competitive. And there's the rub.

Again whats your basis for this? Customers who regularly exceed the cap are not necessarily 'good' customers as far as your average ISP is concerned. They potentially lower the quality of service, they require extra administration and the issuing of bills etc.

Steve S wrote:

Instead, they soak them with some giant bill for going over this bogus and arbitrary "cap." Then they all jump ship to NTL as soon as it is available in their area.

Nobody is soaked. Neither is the cap arbitrary or bogus. Customers are informed of the penalties for exceeding the cap they have a choice of whether to sign up or not and when they do they have a further choice to exceed the cap or stay within it. The cap will be decided by the isps on what they think their market will accept and be willing to pay for.

Steve S wrote:

IOL and Eircom seem to think that they have no competition (why they don't feel compelled to compete with each other is another matter). But they do in more and more areas, at least in Dublin. And NTL right now is handing their heads to them. Nobody who has access to NTL would knowledgeably choose Eircom or IOL at present. They are going to have to compete with NTL sooner or later. The question for them ought to be: do the short-term gains of charging ridiculous fees (why 3 cents per MB, by the way?) to our potential best customers outweigh the long-term gains we can expect to earn from them? Any confident company would answer in the negative.

Companies dont always compete on price. Eircom compete in the market on their reputation, reliablity and public inertia. Both IOL and UTV compete with Eircom through differentiating their product. Other companies compete with different products, wireless for instance.

As NTL require customers to take their tv product there may be lots of people with access to NTL who will quite deliberately not take their internet product in spite of appreciating its worth for internet purposes.

You presume that loads of potential customers want very fast speeds and huge caps. For a huge number of people reasonable speeds and reasonable caps are more than sufficient. 'Confident' companies are more than aware of this.

And if you read generally about the future of broadband there is a consensus out there that the future is based on charging for what people download.

I think that Netsource (or whoever it was) had the right idea when they lumped all their heavy downloaders together and let them 'contend' for that bandwidth.

Moriarty

The future isn't in charging users ridiculous arbitrary figures that they pulled out of their arse one drunken evening. That's what we currently have in Ireland with the 3c/mb farce.

Steve S

dub45 wrote:

On what do you base this statement? Presumably the higher the cap the more bandwidth a company needs thus increasing their costs which have to be passed on to their customers.

At least you're clear that you don't have a basis: you simply presume.

You'll have to explain to me why the 'costs that have to be passed on' are at least twice as high here as they are anywhere else.

Their is no evidence that high downloaders are by any means in the majority of customers - it is reasonable that the majority of customers will want fast reliable speeds to carry out their business. The contention caused by high downloaders can adversely affect the quality offered to customers.

We used to hear similar arguments relative to modem pools and clients-per-modem. The claim was that some internet users should be cut off for hogging the modems. But of course this was putting the onus on the customer for what is really a management problem: if you're running a utility (which is what the internet effectively is), then don't dictate to your customers how they should use it. Find a way to accomodate them. The fact that every other nation in Europe as well as the US and Canada have managed this indicates that the obstacles are not insuperable.

Again whats your basis for this? Customers who regularly exceed the cap are not necessarily 'good' customers as far as your average ISP is concerned. They potentially lower the quality of service, they require extra administration and the issuing of bills etc.

What's your basis for those last claims?

Nobody is soaked. Neither is the cap arbitrary or bogus.

Really? How did they come up with 3 cents/MB over the cap? Why 8GB (or 4GB)? I'll tell you how: somebody pulled those figures out of their ass.

Customers are informed of the penalties for exceeding the cap they have a choice of whether to sign up or not and when they do they have a further choice to exceed the cap or stay within it. The cap will be decided by the isps on what they think their market will accept and be willing to pay for.

Precisely the point of my post. They will find, wherever NTL is implanted, that their market isn't willing to pay them much for their pitiful 512kbps lines with their onerous caps.

Companies dont always compete on price. Eircom compete in the market on their reputation

Good one!

You presume that loads of potential customers want very fast speeds and huge caps. For a huge number of people reasonable speeds and reasonable caps are more than sufficient.

The same excuses were made for years to explain why Ireland didn't have or need broadband access in the first place. I'm sure you were one of the ones braying that modem speeds were plenty fast for anything a reasonable person would want to do.

'Confident' companies are more than aware of this.

If you think Eircom (whom I suspect you work for) are a 'confident' company, then you haven't seen a confident company.

And if you read generally about the future of broadband there is a consensus out there that the future is based on charging for what people download.

On what planet?

dub45

Moriarty wrote:

The future isn't in charging users ridiculous arbitrary figures that they pulled out of their arse one drunken evening. That's what we currently have in Ireland with the 3c/mb farce.

I did not say it was. The current pricing is obviously meant to be a disincentive to people who exceed the cap. Other charging models exist such as 'free' downloading during offpear hours (mainly during the night hours).

lomb

dub45 wrote:

And if you read generally about the future of broadband there is a consensus out there that the future is based on charging for what people download.

I think that Netsource (or whoever it was) had the right idea when they lumped all their heavy downloaders together and let them 'contend' for that bandwidth.

reality is this: if there is enough demand for a product and competition then customers are accomodated especially when a market saturates and finding market share is difficult for new upstart companies. why is ireland different to the uk where uncapped broadband is roughly the same price as capped broadband.
esat are making a serious mistake charging people. i sung esat praises b4, even if offered a competing product from ntl i would shun ntl. now im not so sure. if they really are charging particulary b4 a warning they will damage their reputation as some people may owe them upto 1000 euros. 3c a MB is lunacy if its 48 euro for 16GB, they should charge 3euro per GB for overage perhaps with a discount for bulk usage. their reputation will be tarnished just like UTV's.

Steve S

dub45 wrote:

I did not say it was. The current pricing is obviously meant to be a disincentive to people who exceed the cap.

How do you know that that's what it is?

Because I have another view:

1) Eircom and IOL are operating a cartel. There is no real competition between them.
2) They are the only options available in many parts of the country.
3) They figure that, for as long as this situation continues, they will profit as much as they can from it.
4) Therefore they set arbitrarily low caps and arbitrarily high (and incidentally, almost identical) prices for exceeding them.

Where have we seen this sort of behaviour before? Oh, yes, I remember: Telecom Eireann. And they used to trot out similar arguments to yours. And they were as lame then as yours are now.

lomb

Steve S wrote:

How do you know that that's what it is?

Because I have another view:

1) Eircom and IOL are operating a cartel. There is no real competition between them.
2) They are the only options available in many parts of the country.
3) They figure that, for as long as this situation continues, they will profit as much as they can from it.
4) Therefore they set arbitrarily low caps and arbitrarily high (and incidentally, almost identical) prices for exceeding them.

Where have we seen this sort of behaviour before? Oh, yes, I remember: Telecom Eireann. And they used to trot out similar arguments to yours. And they were as lame then as yours are now.

i agree with this completely.

dub45

lomb wrote:

reality is this: if there is enough demand for a product and competition then customers are accomodated especially when a market saturates and finding market share is difficult for new upstart companies. why is ireland different to the uk where uncapped broadband is roughly the same price as capped broadband.
esat are making a serious mistake charging people. i sung esat praises b4, even if offered a competing product from ntl i would shun ntl. now im not so sure. if they really are charging particulary b4 a warning they will damage their reputation as some people may owe them upto 1000 euros. 3c a MB is lunacy if its 48 euro for 16GB, they should charge 3euro per GB for overage perhaps with a discount for bulk usage. their reputation will be tarnished just like UTV's.

If ESAT or the others thought there was a significant and profitable market for higher capped products they would offer them. You forget that posters here are not generally representative of the market out there. Most people want to browse the net, book cheap airfares send their email and mabye buy the occassional song for album via Itunes. such people do not require large caps. When streaming video and new products like that become commonplace then the cap will become an issue for your ordinary joe soap.
And as I mentioned in another post the pricing policy on those exceeding the cap is based on disincentive - they dont want people doing it.

dub45

Steve S wrote:

On what planet?

Just one example to show the many requirements for bb which do not need large caps.

lomb

dub45 wrote:

And as I mentioned in another post the pricing policy on those exceeding the cap is based on disincentive - they dont want people doing it.

why not? if i download 17GB why not charge me 1/16th of my monthly rate if u have to charge me.
how is it possible that uk providers can offer 'capped' products that offer 350GB per month download for 50 euro? is the link to the uk via fiberoptic not able to carry large amounts of data? do we need more fiberoptic links to the uk? this is supposed to be a land of high tech. instead we have one of the worst telecom infrastructers in the developed world. and we know who to thank for that :rolleyes:

Steve S

dub45 wrote:

Just one example to show the many requirements for bb which do not need large caps.

Huh? That's not very clearly expressed. Care to rephrase?

As for the link itself, I laughed when I read this:

The current flat-rate charging model will only result in price wars that will damage the industry and ultimately do nothing to attract new customers.

Basically, what the article is arguing is that the flat-rate model has to go because it forces broadband providers to compete. That is not surprising: we all know that companies like Eircom will do whatever it takes to avoid having to compete.

What's funny is that the article seems to be advocating some sort of mass move of broadband providers to 'volume-based' pricing. In other words: in order to avoid 'price wars that will damage the industry' (also known as: competition) we'll all collude so as to change our pricing model. And collusion is the word. The fact that it's illegal is beside the point, I guess.

What the article forgets is that 'price wars' are another name for capitalism. If they don't like it, well, maybe they should find some farming collective to work on.

lomb

dub45 wrote:

Just one example to show the many requirements for bb which do not need large caps.

what does that mean that the majority of people who dont download much pay say 37 euro instead of 40 and the minority pay 200 euro to make up :rolleyes:
i think u will find when telecom eire ran ready to go they required top ups every 2 months or they suspended outgoing calls. then meteor came along and their prepaid service allowed a single top up every 6 months. then o2 retaliated and allowed never needing a top up at all. what changed? competition! esat and eircom are hapily subscribing a steady stream of subscribers but when the market saturates and they can sign no more, expect uncapped services for 50euro. unfortunately with eircom dragging its heals on enabling lines this could be a long time away.

lomb

lomb wrote:

why not? if i download 17GB why not charge me 1/16th of my monthly rate if u have to charge me.
how is it possible that uk providers can offer 'capped' products that offer 350GB per month download for 50 euro? is the link to the uk via fiberoptic not able to carry large amounts of data? do we need more fiberoptic links to the uk? this is supposed to be a land of high tech. instead we have one of the worst telecom infrastructers in the developed world. and we know who to thank for that :rolleyes:

and incidentally it is very difficult if not impossible to retreat to capped products once a subscriber base is used to the charging no matter how 'unfair'

OfflerCrocGod

They have begun charging? Oh well, I needed an incentive to fill out this IrishBroadband Breeze form.....I just got it. I think I'll take a late night walk up to the post box to make sure my form gets to IBB as soon as possible. Don't like paying to get ****ed up the ass by Esat and €ircon. They can wave my cash bye bye.

kida

I expect to see Eircom going the same way soon. People who go over have no rights at all. They are simple enforcing the T&C they signed up for, they should consider themsleves lucky they got so long with out it being enforced.

I don't agree with the CAP but you get what you have no right to complain when it is enforced.

lomb

why do my overall download stats for esat say ive downloaded 15 GB and uploaded 11 GB in 6 months when i would have downloaded about 120 GB and uploaded 60-70 GB in this time. also the stats only show the usage on midnight of the 30th so say u have downloaded 15.99GB and u check this on the calculator on iol.ie. this is only valid for the night before. lets say u then proceed to download 2GB on the 31st. by midnight of the 31st it will still say 15.99GB.

the caps are insane for their top flight consumer product and eircoms are even more insane. they really are destroying their reputation (esat i mean as eircom doesnt really have any) if they charge me for breaking the cap by half a gig, i am going to transfer my phone services away from esat and everyone i meet i will tell them what i think of them. then IBB or ntl here i come for broadband services.

edit: i pulled this off another website :Infrastructure issues............

They must have (or foresee) severe provisioning problems to do this. With wholesale bandwidth prices continuing to fall (the majors like my Comcast pay something around .05 cents US per gig), it would be very stupid to get that greedy.

If they really wanted to get bittorrent and the other filesharing apps off of their network, most users probably would have preferred they QoS that kind of traffic to the slow lane.

so 5 cent per gig hahahaha even if it was twice that here even if i went 10 gig over it should cost esat no more than 1 euro. just shows how shortsighted their business model is. they will lose customers for sure, some of which will never return.

OfflerCrocGod

It seems everything has been re-zeroed for the begining of the year....I've just lost over 200GB of downloads. I'm back to 15Gb of downloads, weird