Irritated With My ISP...

Every few months I have the same problem with my ISP.

Under my current payment plan, I get unlimited downloads, but if I exceed 10GB in a month, my connection is slowed to 64kb/s until the end of the month. Now that’s a pretty good deal, considering I tend to use about 7-9 GB of downloads in a month.

The problem is about once every six months, I get an email from my ISP – generally in the first week of the month – informing me that I’ve already exceeded my monthly limit, and that my connection speed is going to be capped. Generally, further investigation indicates that according to their records, I’ve somehow downloaded more than 5GB of data in a single day, often with the highest usage in the middle of the night.

So it’s fairly clear that there’s something wrong with their usage meters, but since there’s no way to prove that I’m not downloading huge masses of data every six months at four in the morning, there’s not a lot I can do about it – and they do offer good service during the ten months of the year when they’re not apparently making up the usage figures, so I don’t really want to switch providers.

Anyway, today, a new twist – I get an email informing me that I’m at 80% of my usage, and warning me that I will be charged for any usage over the limit. Well, it was annoying when they were just slowing my connection, but if they think they’re going to start charging me for their own errors…

Checking their website, I believe the problem is that my current payment plan was discontinued several months ago, and replaced with an identical one, except in the new one the download limit is 12GB before the connection is slowed. Obviously, they didn’t bother informing me of that, or of switching me to the new one… I’m guessing that the problem is that since my plan no longer exists, the automated response system can’t work out what my payment plan is, and thinks I’m on one that charges for downloads over the monthly limit.

I’ve switched to the new one; hopefully they’ll process it properly, and the increased download limit should prevent this being an issue again, even if they are still recording weird spikes in my usage… *sigh*