BT Broadband usage

[Guest]

I went with BT last December 2013 for limited 10GB Broadband and its been plenty ,every month I get an email and I have used around 6, all of a sudden about 3 months back I started getting emails to say I have almost used up the whole 10? I am not watching films or videos and have only watched two programmes on iplayer in the last 3 months.
I got on to BT who said they agreed I was using up to around 6 and now its almost 10 so I should check my usage but my argument is whats the point it wont tell me where its being used, on the BT site quite a few people are saying the same thing about usage.
Any ideas how do I find out whats happening, I am loathe to upgrade when its not necessary.

[DavidNewton]

First the cynical view - is your contract about to expire? That is are you able to give them a month's notice to switch? It is in BT's interest for you to upgrade, not just for the extra charge they take but also because you will probably have to take out a new 12 month contract.

Now other possibilities. Are there any extra devices using your connection - phone, game console, Sky box, You view, tablet etc. believe that BT have a daily usage monitor on their website it might be worthwhile doing a daily check of overall usage. If your computer is the only device connected the you can run a usage monitor on your computer and compare the usage reported by that with that reported by BT to see if there is someone 'piggy-backing' your connection.

I have not used such monitoring software so cannot make a personal recommendation but the the thinkbroadband website is fairly reputable and they recommend tbbmeter

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/tbbmeter.html

One advantage it has ober the BT usage monitor is that it shows real-time usage so you can get a good idea when and why your usage is going up.

David

[Guest]

Thanks very much David for replying, I managed to get into my details last night and it said nobody else is using my network.
And yes my contract finished in December ?
Nothing else is being used here ,my Husband did buy himself a Tablet ? dont know why as he has no patience and its switched off and back in its box now which is where I knew it would end up,I did check and its definitely not connected to the broadband.
Thanks for that link am going to do that now, and thanks again.

[Chrissie Smiff]

Downloading uses a lot and even looking at you-tube often can make a difference Val. Watching programmes on I-player of course will eat it up. When we only had the minimum 10GB I used to check the usage monitor regularly because hubby is always downloading something. In all the time we were on it though I only had to pay the extra £10 twice. After that, if we were getting close to 10 and it was near the end of the month I used to ask hubby if he could wait for any downloading for a day or two. We very seldom watched I-player in those days though. Since we went onto the new superfast fibre one we have 40GB, so I don't have to worry.

[Guest]

Thanks Chrissie I have hardly looked on youtube or iplayer this last month though? and some months when I only used 6KB I looked at quite a lot , anyway I have decided to go for unlimited as I cannot make sense of their customer service and they have already charged me £5 for going over .

[Chrissie Smiff]

As it's up for renewal Val why don't you do what I do when ours is and ring them to try to get a deal.

[Guest]

To be honest Chrissie I really cannot be bothered I get so worked up with the stupid people you have to deal with , have just gone for it.

[Ann from Sussex]

To be honest Chrissie I really cannot be bothered I get so worked up with the stupid people you have to deal with , have just gone for it.

Oh Val, that strikes a chord with me at the moment. My phone line has had a fault on it for two weeks. Sometimes I can't make calls or get online, sometimes I can (like now). No-one can ever ring me though. They say there is a fault on their network and I have been given three different dates for it to be repaired by. The last one is tomorrow and, so far, it hasn't been repaired. I dread having to ring BT because their call centre staff are so hard to deal with. They don't listen to you, and won't deviate from their script so you can't have a conversation. I want to speak to someone reasonably local who knows what is happening but that doesn't seem to be possible. It is so frustrating and annoying. They are a terrible company to try and deal with but, out here anyway, they have you over a barrel because they own all the infrastructure.

[Guest]

Ann I went to try to talk to them online and I had to hang on for ages till they could find an advisor she went off to see what was wrong and never came back ?? all of a sudden another name popped up who was deaing with it, I said I hope you wont disappear like the last one did she didn't even apologise, really got to me when she said oh yes you only ever use around the 6 mark.
If you go on their site quite a few people have the same problem with usage suddenly shooting up, so at least now I dont have to worry.
When our phone went we had to wait ages for them to come.
Hope you get sorted soon.

[Ann from Sussex]

Well I have had a kind of development this afternoon. Went to the house of a friend in the village and another friend who lives in the next village was there. She told me that BT are digging up the road between our villages, she was held up because they have traffic lights up. She said there is also a hole in the road further on which is by the box that we know holds our phone connections. The last time I rang I was told they needed to dig up the road somewhere to repair my line so it does look as though they are doing something at last. It would be nice if they let me know how it is progressing though.

[Guest]

lets hope they sort it then good luck

[PeteW1959]

Have you set a password on your router? I don't know about BT, but a lot of routers come with no password set or something really simple like 'password'. Someone could be connecting without you knowing.

It might be worth looking at the connection logs on the router. Every device has a unique code (the MAC address) and you shouldn't see anything in the log other than your PC, your husband's tablet and any smart phones you have.

[Guest]

how do I find that Pete?

[Caroline]

BT routers come with passwords - you will have had a plastic card with it on - or look at the bottom of the router itself.

A thought - do you have a smart phone which uses the BTFON wifi? We had a warning about excess usage on the old BT slowband (we had unlimited). Turned out that my daughter was playing her games on it without realising.

[PeteW1959]

I am not familiar with BT routers, and besides there are several different versions. For most you have a default IP address that you type into your browser address bar and you then get a login screen.

The address may be in your documentation, on the bottom of the router or failing that a common address is 192.168.1.1

Once you are logged in there will be a menu where you should find something about connection logs or history.

[DavidNewton]

I have no personal knowledge of the BT Home Hub but my daughter has one and needed to access the settings. The web page that helped her was

http://www.filesaveas.com/bthomehub.html

Apart from describing the Hone hubs so that you can identify which one you have there are links throughout for more information. The one that describes how to log in to the hub is

http://www.filesaveas.com/bthomehub_login.html

David

[Christine in Herts]

We had a BT outage in our area for most of December: phone off, but slow internet available 8-24 Dec, and then everything cut off over Christmas until early Jan. They ascribed it to stolen copper cable.

We managed to find a senior executive email address available online. We got a reply from someone of PA-type status and managed to get a little further on with having some kind of service, in the sense that we were kept better informed about what was going on.

We also asked for a refund - and got one. I get teh impression that they don't bother refunding people who don't ask. I have to say that I find this behaviour almost indistinguishable from theft! What I'm getting at is that it's [a] worth hunting for a senior contact and [b] do ASk for teh refund to which you should be entitled if your service is deficient for more than whatever they specify... 36 hours? You'd need to check.

Christine

[Guest]

thanks everybody, most helpful , we dont have a smart phone or anything else in this House , am sure they have a problem somewhere as there are so many complaints about the same thing on their forum.

[Christine in Herts]

But please make sure that you claim compensation! They're extremely unlikely to offer it!

Christine

[Guest]

Ann how did it go ?