Unlimited or limited broadband

Public Technical problems / FAQ
1

Thanks for picking this one up :slight_smile:

I’m on a shoe string budget and need to get phone and broadband hooked up at our new house which currently does not have a phone line, in fact the line was cut and poked back through the wall when I was renovating :slight_smile: But now we need a connection so I am looking at various options on cable.co.uk and uswitch. There are many ‘budget’ broadband options that are unlimited such as, and I dread to say it but Tesco broadband coming in with an unlimited use broadband (estimated 10 - 16mb in my area) plus evening and weekend calls all at £202 for the first year although I expect that as I dont have an active phoneline there is going to be a connection fee. The other option I am looking at is with BT taking a fibre line (estimated 38mb) but with a 40GB monthly limit and weekend calls. What troubles me is I have no idea how much data will be used at home, for the past two months we have been using our mobile phones which have a 1.5gb usage each which even with SEOW planning and forum bashing I have not gone over and the wife is a pretty heavy ebay user and her data usage has been fine even if we somehow double our browsing at home we will still only be at 6gb. Then comes online gaming which at present I do from work but I expect when I get a connection at home I may get a couple of hours in on IL2 or another flight sim over the weekend and thats about the lot. We dont stream TV or films although I do on occasion download a torrent which tends to be around 2gb but even 5 a month would be a lot for us so theres another 10gb which still leaves plenty. The question is without TV, film or music streaming, light youtube usage, light gaming usage and I am guessing medium download usage is 40GB going to be enough? (I take full responsibility for my decision of course I’m just looking for peoples ideas on net and data use who are in a better position than myself to judge :))

Does anyone know what 1hr playing IL2 online will cost in terms of data downloaded?

Thanks again for any inputs

2

40gb is should be enough.

I work from home and even with heavy PowerPoint/large document sending and VoIP calls + gaming, I rarely get above 10-20 gb.

What does push it up is downloading games, applications, software etc. Then the usage gets up a bit.

Most decent providers will let you know if you get near your limit. Check the small print to see if there is any out of bundle charges and what they are if you’re worried. That way you’ll know how much you’ll pay if you go over.

If you’re not doing a TV and voice calls package, if you can get FTTC, I’d go with BT. Note its fibre to the cab, the last 1/4 mile is copper twisted pair - vDSL (very fast DSL). As I’ve said on numerous occasions, its worth it for the support.

Does anyone know what 1hr playing IL2 online will cost in terms of data downloaded

It’ll depend on what you’ve got your bandwidth set at, but its negligible.

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Thanks Simon as always outstanding information just what I needed :slight_smile: you lost me with the jargon but I managed to bluff my way through it with google :smiley:

I’m in beaconsfield now (HP9 1QZ) and according to this

my exchange is FTTC enabled and BT will be the provider, there are others according to cable.co.uk but the price difference is minimal so I’d opt for taking a BT line. Looking on the BT site it mentions that a warning email will be sent when close to the limit and going over will be £5 per 5gb so I am happy that we can stay within limits, now to convince Katy that we should spend the extra money and take a fibre, scratch that an FTTC connection instead of regular BB :smiley: