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Re: Wanadoo £17.99 per-month 512k
Hmm, At first glance I don't have a problem with Wanadoo having a low cost, but restricted use service. That's on the basis that the restictions are clearly understood at point of sale, and certainly they are spelling that out, on their web site far better than ntl do in respect of the ntl caps. However if there is a cap it needs to still be appropriate to the service offered. BT's 1GB a month is ludicrous for their 512k light service. I don't think Wanadoo is much better.
More significant however is Wanadoo, appear to be hiding the really bad news under cover of their rebranding from Freeserve. Their website now shows all BB use will be capped, and the thresholds are for combined upload and download. Amazingly they make ntl look generous, especially at the 512k level which is restricted to 15Gb a month.
This site and others have had many comments that the upload saturation of BB services is more of an issue than the download. So the combined data transfer does make sense. But I am not convinced any of these limits imposed are realistic. As the limits are total data transfer, albeit averaged over a month, they cold be a severe limitation. Wanadoo's site says the limits will be applied later in 2004 (they've taken a leaf out of ntl's "coming soon" policy). Crucially they say somehow the connection will be restricted for the rest of the month, if the use limit is exceeded, only to web browsing and email, but how they do that is unclear. Supposedly an upgrade path will be on offer for higher bandwidth use, but costs and availability of that are unclear.
Even more worrying is the potential development that Wanadoo are likely to do an ntl, and impose these changes on existing customers. Certainly I can find no concessions on Wanadoo's web site to say that freeserve customers will have concessions.
One wonders how informed the average BB punter is as to the differences in BB services from ISPs or if punters simply are blinded by advertising profiles. One hopes that they would choose similar cost but uncapped ISPs.
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