Imagine LTE Download Limits

calsimset · 12-09-2020 7:25pm #1

Hi

I'm just wondering if anybody else has experienced this issue.

Originally Imagine ran a daily 20 GB download limit and after you reached this threshold your speed was throttled until 12.02 a.m. Fair enough.

They then changed to a 1 TB monthly limit and did away with the daily 20 GB limit. However despite this I have noticed my evening speeds became terribly slow. I assumed they had overloaded the mast and rang this week, only to be told something much worse (and much sneakier).

The tech support guy was actually very knowledgeable and explained everything very clearly. The 1 TB limit still holds good but they also have a daily limit beyond which you are 'deprioritized' and your internet effectively becomes junk.

So what's the limit? He couldn't answer. It changes daily. It's calculated on the average daily use of everyone on your mast and is automatically applied. I had been over this limit 6 out of the last 8 days. You have no way of knowing how much data you can use before you are throttled.

Even worse, he explained that if you live in an area where people do not use their broadband much, you may have a very low download limit as it's an average of everyone's usage. Conversely if you live in an area of high usage (where a lot of young people live?) you will benefit and have a very high daily download limit.

This information is actually hidden in the small print (I found it) but is glaringly absent on Imagine's FAQ page where their answer to usage limits refers ONLY to the monthly limit.

But it gets worse. During the lockdown they contacted all their customers to grandly announce that in an effort to relieve daily congestion any downloads between 1am and 7 am would not count against your monthly download limit. So if you wanted to download a game for your kid's console you could do it then and you wouldn't be congesting the service for others during the day. Great idea right?

What they didn't say was that any such downloads WOULD CONTINUE to count towards your daily download limit. Most games are 50 gb. Even if you buy the disc you will always have a 30 gb download on top of that before you can play. Hello Imagine, you cannot effectively outlaw the use of video games on your network. All such games require big downloads, let's not pretend otherwise. The net effect is you do your best to relieve congestion by downloading large files at night. And by the time you get up you have exceeded the download limit and are throttled until midnight. Nice.

I'm disgusted at the underhand nature of these changes by Imagine. They tell you you have 1 gb of monthly usage but they make your internet unusable after 12-14 gb of daily usage. In effect you can therefore only actually use around 500gb per month which is less than what you could have used with the 20 gb daily limit. I get throttled now after around 12 gb, though of course this changes daily. They then hide this information in small print and only reference the monthly allowance in their webpages/FAQ.

So did anyone else know this? And do Imagine have a presence on boards.ie? I couldn't find a group just on Imagine so am posting in general Broadband area.

ED E · 12-09-2020 8:37pm

Sneaky, but Imagine have always sold it as some amazing tech when its just vanilla 4G. If they didn't limit usage it'd be 2Mb all the time.

SparrowHawk · 13-09-2020 6:46pm

Can you post where it is in their terms and conditions?

Gonzo · 13-09-2020 9:02pm

SparrowHawk wrote: »

Can you post where it is in their terms and conditions?

https://www.imagine.ie/acceptable-use-policy/

Fair Usage Policy – Broadband
The fair usage limit for data usage on the Broadband Service in any one month is 1TB. This limit is not to be exceeded. If you exceed the fair usage limit, we will notify you by phone, text or email to advise you that you have exceeded the fair usage limit and request that you modify your usage behaviour. If you subsequently exceed the fair usage limit Imagine reserves the right to suspend or terminate your Service(s).

I'm against caps/fair usage policys in general for fixed line broadband and FTTH but Imagine do need their cap as their network is already strained as it is. If they allowed unlimited usage the network would probably grind to a halt for everyone.

SparrowHawk · 13-09-2020 9:40pm

Is there anything mentioned about the throttling mechanism?

keithoh · 14-09-2020 4:11pm

The way the allowance works is that Imagine take the average customer usage of 270G a month and double it and then divide that by the number of days in the month and that is your allowance a day at full speed. Anything over this and they will de-prioritize your connection. So basically they are still only allowing around 20Gb a day at full speed.

I got the following info from them previously

"The monthly allowance of 1Tb, if breached, leads to your signal being reduced to 1Mbps for the remainder of the month, multiple breaches will lead to a permanent throttle on the service for the remainder of the contract.

The daily allowance of 20Gb, called the FRAP limit, if breached, does not lead to your service being throttled, it leads to your signal being deprioritised. The speeds that you attain while deprioritised are dependent on how busy the network is."

calsimset · 14-09-2020 6:43pm

That's interesting. From checking my data the tech support guy said i was being deprioritised after approx 12 gb. I assume, putting the two pieces of information together, that i am connected to a low-usage mast and the average 270 gb pm usage is significantly lower on my mast, leading to a lower daily limit before being deprioritised. It still seems unfair though that someone else paying the same monthly fee gets a significantly better service and are in effect rewarded for living in an area where they use MORE data than we do.

And it really is not clear how they apply the deprioritisation from their terms and conditions and it is definitely misleading to ONLY refer to the monthly actual data cap win their FAQ without ever mentioning their implicit daily cap (technically it's not a cap or even a throttle but in effect it's both of these things as your service becomes unusable while deprioritised.)

Shelly51 · 02-10-2020 2:12pm

We were told today that we breached the limit on 2 occasions since July and therefore our service has been restricted until the end of the contract - FOREVER! No warning was given and this does not appear in their fair usage conditions either.

Cannot get through to anybody to clarify or resolve the issue - have requested call back on 4 occasions and now with the restricted level of service which is virtually NOTHING - we can't even use our landline.

Has this happened to anybody else??

Gonzo · 02-10-2020 4:02pm

Shelly51 wrote: »

We were told today that we breached the limit on 2 occasions since July and therefore our service has been restricted until the end of the contract - FOREVER! No warning was given and this does not appear in their fair usage conditions either.

Cannot get through to anybody to clarify or resolve the issue - have requested call back on 4 occasions and now with the restricted level of service which is virtually NOTHING - we can't even use our landline.

Has this happened to anybody else??

Imagine can do anything they want since you have no other alternative to their service, they are professional cowboys. - NBI cannot roll out FTTH soon enough to the rest of the country and finally everyone can get the chance to choose what provider they want and more importantly a future proofed connection that allows you to use the internet as much as you like without penaltys.

Dero · 02-10-2020 6:32pm

Shelly51 wrote: »

We were told today that we breached the limit on 2 occasions since July and therefore our service has been restricted until the end of the contract - FOREVER! No warning was given and this does not appear in their fair usage conditions either.

Cannot get through to anybody to clarify or resolve the issue - have requested call back on 4 occasions and now with the restricted level of service which is virtually NOTHING - we can't even use our landline.

Has this happened to anybody else??

Yes. It happened to us a few months ago. It was a horrible, stressful experience as we were all locked down and at home all the time (2x teenagers, 2x WFH).

I went to Comreg who said submit a formal complaint to Imagine. I did this and after some very stressful calls I eventually got it reversed without needing to go back to Comreg.

In the process though, I discovered that they were metering our data incorrectly and basically adding ~300GB per month. This is what tipped us over the limit. They never acknowledged that this was a factor in un-restricting us, but it must have been.

In any event, you need to submit a formal complaint to get the ball rolling. If they don't resolve that, then Comreg will get involved.

Orebro · 02-10-2020 7:01pm

Dero wrote: »

Yes. It happened to us a few months ago. It was a horrible, stressful experience as we were all locked down and at home all the time (2x teenagers, 2x WFH).

I went to Comreg who said submit a formal complaint to Imagine. I did this and after some very stressful calls I eventually got it reversed without needing to go back to Comreg.

In the process though, I discovered that they were metering our data incorrectly and basically adding ~300GB per month. This is what tipped us over the limit. They never acknowledged that this was a factor in un-restricting us, but it must have been.

In any event, you need to submit a formal complaint to get the ball rolling. If they don't resolve that, then Comreg will get involved.

This is shocking carry on. Imagine would make the Mafia blush - I knew they were bad but not THIS bad.

JoeyTee · 21-11-2020 2:22pm

Yep. They limited my broadband this week. 10 days of 1mb/sec download. We got a new console, downloaded some games and we were hit by a warning. We quickly went over the 1tb. But we had no way to monitor our usage. None of the logins they gave me would work. It took three calls to customer care to get it working.

I'll stick to their rules. But 1tb goes quick when your streaming YouTube, Netflix, Downloading the odd game or two and a have security cameras. I wouldn't mind if they had an option to upgrade and pay a little more but they just don't.

I'll be forced to move on once I have an alternative.

Gonzo · 21-11-2020 3:31pm

I wouldn't recommend anyone with Imagine buying a next gen console, the file sizes and updates are very large, often more than 100 gigs per game and Imagines daily cap will constantly get broken trying to download anything on these systems.

joeirish · 05-01-2021 9:48pm

So I'm only averaging around 2GB per day or around 60GB per month. And it does look like I have had my connection slowed. Once connected to a site it works reasonably well but long delays actually getting connected in the first place. Is this the same issue of something else?

Dero · 06-01-2021 2:12pm

That is most likely a DNS issue. Before your browser can connect to a server, it must translate the name to an IP address. If this is slow, it will cause a delay before the page loads, as you are seeing.

It seems to be common with Imagine. Have a look at the last few pages of the Imagine LTE thread for some suggestions to improve it (i.e. don't use the Imagine DNS servers).

joeirish · 06-01-2021 3:12pm

Dero wrote: »

That is most likely a DNS issue. Before your browser can connect to a server, it must translate the name to an IP address. If this is slow, it will cause a delay before the page loads, as you are seeing.

It seems to be common with Imagine. Have a look at the last few pages of the Imagine LTE thread for some suggestions to improve it (i.e. don't use the Imagine DNS servers).

Thanks. I used to teach this stuff at university so I suspected as much when Imagine starting going slow. I just haven't hd to actually chnge DNS servers for many years and never on my MAC.I've now done this and immediate improvement. So what do folk recommend as fastest DNS? And can I just have a list of them on the Mac network preferences?

Dero · 06-01-2021 5:01pm

I use one each from three popular providers (Quad9, Cloudflare & Google)

9.9.9.9
1.1.1.1
8.8.8.8

joeirish · 07-01-2021 1:18am

Dero wrote: »

I use one each from three popular providers (Quad9, Cloudflare & Google)

9.9.9.9
1.1.1.1
8.8.8.8

Hey thanks for that. I assume that I just add these one after the other on the Mac Network preferences? On my Android device I can only have DNS 1 and DNS 2. Which should be first or does it not matter? Thanks

Dero · 07-01-2021 11:47am

joeirish wrote: »

Hey thanks for that. I assume that I just add these one after the other on the Mac Network preferences? On my Android device I can only have DNS 1 and DNS 2. Which should be first or does it not matter? Thanks

Hi.
Yes, just add these (or any other DNS addresses) in your Mac Network preferences. The same goes for Android/iOS/Windows/Linux etc.

You only strictly need one DNS server; the others are for redundancy, so yes, any two will do the same on Android. For the same reason, you can put them in any order you like. You are basically ranking them in order of preference. In reality, any of the above will always be available unless your Internet connection is down, in which case it is moot anyway.

jmurrayie · 04-03-2021 5:58pm

Dero wrote: »

Yes. It happened to us a few months ago. It was a horrible, stressful experience as we were all locked down and at home all the time (2x teenagers, 2x WFH).

I went to Comreg who said submit a formal complaint to Imagine. I did this and after some very stressful calls I eventually got it reversed without needing to go back to Comreg.

In the process though, I discovered that they were metering our data incorrectly and basically adding ~300GB per month. This is what tipped us over the limit. They never acknowledged that this was a factor in un-restricting us, but it must have been.

In any event, you need to submit a formal complaint to get the ball rolling. If they don't resolve that, then Comreg will get involved.

Hi, could you tell me how you discovered that the data usage was incorrect. We too were permanently put to 1mbps for breaking fair usage on 2 occasions, and we doubted we could have breached it, but according to them we have. We are now left with no option but Eir 5mbpsðŸ˜

Dero · 04-03-2021 9:40pm

jmurrayie wrote: »

Hi, could you tell me how you discovered that the data usage was incorrect. We too were permanently put to 1mbps for breaking fair usage on 2 occasions, and we doubted we could have breached it, but according to them we have. We are now left with no option but Eir 5mbps&#55357;&#56877;

It was fairly straightforward. When they restricted us, the connection became unusable, so I disconnected from the Imagine box and started using a mobile dongle. I checked the Imagine portal every day, and lo and behold, the data usage went up by ~10GB per day, despite having nothing physically connected (there was no wifi). I verified this over a few days and took a few screenshots.

Once I told them what was happening they verified that nothing was connected my end and removed the restriction. However, I already had a formal complaint in and with Comreg, so that may have helped as well.

They never explained what was going on (and never apologised), so I can only guess.

wardy79 · 06-11-2021 8:46am

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058112718/imagine-lte-download-limits

I’m kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place with imagine as I can get no other provider in my area as no wired broadband available. If you have a next gen console it’s a disaster , for example forza is coming out this week on Xbox series x and the download is 114gb so how am I supposed to download it ? I can’t download it during the day as I’ll get data warning emails from imagine and if I want to download at night I need to set an alarm for 1am to download and stop the download at 7am and I still get snotty emails about our usage. I have a teenage son who loves his games and the downloads are getting bigger, it’s a pain in the backside and not practical

_Puma_ · 06-11-2021 9:07am

I terminated my contract with Imagine on the final day of the 24 month contract term. Not a day later. They wernt getting a penny off me for termination fees. I was one of the lucky ones to be getting the NBI Fibre first. Just happened to coincide with the contract being up with Imagine.

Used to run into their usage policy a lot and affected my ability to do my job at home. Speeds on our Mast were still always congested regardless.

With the rollout of the NBI they have been back in our area putting up signs and trying to get people to sign up who would be unaware that NBI Fibre has been rolled out here.

Imagine didn't always use to be this bad and once they started to oversubscribe their masts these policies started to be introduced. They were realistically the only the provider available to us (I did use 4g Vodafone as a backup also that improved drastically) so I was thankful to have them but looking back now, their policies and greed oversubscribe of masts has tipped the balance.

Imagine LTE Download Limits

Comments