Customer penalized for breaching broadband limits hit one million in the UK

The number of broadband users in the UK that have either exceeded or have been close to exceeding the cap placed in their broadband data download limits that the majority of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have place on their services has hit a million according to research by the analyst firm uSwitch.

It was shown in the survey of the broadband landscape carried out by uSwitch that even though many ISPs are currently advertising their services as “unlimited” more than half of the providers still place limits on the amount users can download, and in the last year there have been heated arguments and mass confusion over the use of the word “unlimited”.

Currently in the UK four out of five broadband customers in the UK have no idea of the download restriction placed on them by there provider or though the package they had subscribed to was unlimited, and the fundamental reason for these figure is that the survey also found that of the nine providers surveyed only two of them said what the limits were.

The fact that many ISPs sell a mixture of both unlimited and limited broadband packages all under the same umbrella and a substantial number of providers protect themselves from any repercussions from taking steps to disconnect users that breach the data limits imposed by using the “fair usage” policy makes things even worse.

Only a single company at the moment actually offers totally unlimited data download through the whole of its product range, namely Be (and O2), although unsurprisingly there are no unlimited download packages available at present for mobile broadband.

The first to report on the “unlimited” issue was the BBC and many argue that it has a vested interest in the issue due to its use of the iPlayer, which is a service offering Video on Demand and one which is currently being accused of being the main reason for breaches of download limits.