NTL 1GB cap letters sent out

Posted by: AndyJenkins on Thursday, February 19, 2004 - 09:38 PM

Hundred of NTL Broadband customers have today received warning letters regarding exceeding the ISPs 1GB daily cap.

The letter (printed below) whilst not as stern as it could be, makes a plea on the guilt of the users who NTL are saying are in breach of the ISPs Acceptable Use Policy. NTL have identified several areas of the country where the extra payload on the telco's network is having a detrimental affect on the service as a whole for the other users. NTL are blaming this on users contstantly uploading and downloading large files.

Already the letter is causing outrage on the user community <a href="http://www.nthellworld.co.uk" target="_blank"">ntlhellworld.co.uk where a forum thread started 2 days ago has already exeeced 400 posts with nearly 9,000 views!

If your an NTL user who is concerned or interested in your bandwidth usage on the service, we can recomend no other tool for the job that is better than DocsDiag, which is available here. We'll the description upto the author of the application. "DocsDiag is a program for reading diagnostic data from DOCSIS cable modems. It should work with any DOCSIS-compliant cable modem that has SNMP access available to the end-user. It will be of primary benefit to end-users with cable modems that do not offer diagnostics via web pages."

We are writing to you because, unfortunately, some of our broadband customers in your area have been experiencing deterioration in the service we offer them. We have found that this is most often caused by a small number of our broadband customers who are continually uploading and downloading extremely large files, which has a detrimental effect on the network.

In order to ensure that we are able to offer all out customers a great broadband service we would like to remind you that we recommend that everyone reduces their daily level of activity to 1 gigabyte a day. This is the equivalent of downloading approximately 200 music tracks, 650 short videos, 10,000 pictures or around 100 software programmes per day. Our systems show us that recently you have been exceeding this level and we would like to remind you of the relevant section in the ntlworld User Policy.

[Reference to Section h in NTLs Acceptable Use Policy]

Please, for the sake of all our broadband customers, reduce the downstream bandwidth utilised through your cable modem to no more than 1GB per day. We would hate to have to impose restrictions on you but we are determined to offer all our broadband customers the best possible service.

If you are running and sort of ftp/web server or other applications, such as file sharing programs, please ensure that you follow the guidance we set out in the User Policy. For some advice on how best to achieve this please refer to http://homepage.ntlworld.com/bandwidthadvice.

Thank you in advance for you co-operation in this matter. Please do not hesitate to contact the Broadband Support Team on 01792 614432 between the hours of 08:00 to 18:00 if you would like to discuss this issue further.

NTL Internet Customer Care Team