You might be surprised to find that your unlimited broadband internet service has a sneaky download limit tucked away inside it after all. Currently, only Sky Broadband Unlimited and Virgin Media XXL are offering truly unlimited services, just about everyone else employs a ‘fair usage’ policy. These can range from the miserly to the surprisingly generous (BE Broadband’s policy, for instance, has never been implemented). As millions of us are cheerfully downloading music, or catching up on missed TV programmes via BBC iPlayer, we might find the cold touch of a fair usage policy fingering our collars (or our bank accounts), especially as internet television and film downloads are catching on like wildfire.
If you’re one of the more heavy-duty downloaders, you’d be wise to cut down on your usage or confine your downloading/uploading to the wee hours when fewer people will be browsing locally; you can generally download as much as you like then without inconveniencing anyone else. Fair usage penalties can take one of several forms: charging you an excess fee, throttling your connection so that you can only download a limited amount, reducing your usage at peak times or limiting your access to peer-to-peer sites.
If you love movies and download, say, ten quality films a month, you’re already guzzling 40 GB. If you upload and download pictures on social networking sites like Facebook, too, you’ll almost certainly be feeling that cold finger slipping inside your collar. Installing a free Broadband Download Monitor can help but, ultimately, you might need to upgrade to a beefier package, if you can’t curb your download enthusiasm.