A Brief History of the Tubes

In the beginning it was expected that if you bought an Internet connection you could go ahead and use it however you liked, as much as you liked. If you needed more bandwidth you could apply for an ISDN line- but unless you owned a business you could find yourself paying for two phone lines and a rather large internet contract. As the Internet addiction spread across the country like a plague and standards continued to evolve there became an increasing need for fatter pipes to deliver content, this prompted the release of ADSL- broadband as we know it.

Pricing

The major flaw in the broadband plan was the price; you could get a 56k connection for as little as £10/year or £10/month if you wanted guaranteed uptime or speeds, in which case the provider would simply pass you through their faster servers. If you could adhere to some rather more strict usage rules (you don’t mind randomly being disconnected, having to queue to connect or having large server contention ratios) some providers would even offer you a connection for free- I for one sampled the joys of free internet for at least a year. Broadband by comparison was significantly more expensive and to get the top end BT 512kb/s you could find yourself dishing out £30/month. Even then the connection you received was completely unmetered. To increase their customer base without overloading their servers they decided to implement a new plan: limited bandwidth connection agreements.

Limitations

Under the terms of a limited bandwidth agreement you are given a specified total amount of data you are allowed to transfer in a month over your connection. These subscriptions were originally targeted at your casual internet user; someone who may use it for research, children’s homework or sending emails but finds it troublesome to tie up the phone line when doing so. In this spirit the price would also be lowered and we started to see connections pop up for £10-15/month. These cheap connections could not be abused by power-users as any incursion over the contractual limited was greeted with a rather nasty charge per GB in the red, unfortunately for them this would soon become the only model available.

Congestion

As the popularity of the internet grew the use of streaming video sites became the norm for most households and contention in every area was increasing, users began to demand to know why their connection speeds waned at certain times during the day. As you can probably imagine; when multiple users try to use the same servers for heavier usage than the companies originally planned for all at the same time, everyone suffers. The majority of this blame however was placed on power-users who quickly became branded as the scourge of tea-time browsing. These users were all pirates who spent all night and day transferring data into illegal networks, ruining your enjoyment of the Internet and as such they must be dealt with. Enter the fair-use policy.

Fair?

The fair-use policy is a fantastic creation for businesses as it effectively allows you to attempt to deceive your customers without breaking any law. You can advertise in ten feet letter ‘UNLIMITED INTERNET for £20’ provided you add an inconceivably small asterisk to the end. This asterisk, innocent as it is, will imply in almost invisible font at the bottom of the offer the applicability of a fair-use policy. Further investigation into this fair use policy will reveal that any incursion over a specified bandwidth usage will result in the wrath of your ISP being flung down upon you. This new method of managing your network means you can reduce your network congestion without changing your prices or upgrading your infrastructure. In the end who loses out? – Us power-users.

Users

To those of us who have uses for a fat intertube that extend beyond a bit of Facebook, Farmville or Youtube these new terms and conditions tagged onto what is advertised as an Unlimited service can cripple our enjoyment and usage of the service. If you find yourself transferring large files via FTP or torrent etc., remotely accessing your PC for work, playing any game with a P2P aspect (Blizzard updater, L4D/MW2 match hosting etc.) and even sharing your connection with other people who may do the same- you will almost definitely find yourself exceeding boundaries on occasion. I’m sure any Comp Sci majors will understand completely what I’m getting at. This project of terror was completed when Virgin took over NTL and introduced their fair-use policy and a complex one it was at that. When Virgin released their 50Mb internet they released it with no-fair use policy. Given the service operated on a frequency completely separate from that of the 20Mb/10Mb services it theoretically meant the contention ratios should be much lower, and they were- one test we carried out early in the 50Mb program heralded download results of 7.2MB/s (57.6Mbit/s) and upload speeds of 220kb/s (1.76Mbit/s). Sadly since the popularity of this service has increased we have not been able to achieve download speeds beyond 49Mbit/s or upload speeds beyond 1.6Mbit/s. Admittedly it’s not exactly a worst case scenario.

Limited Unlimited Offers

These days if you require a truly unlimited connection you must carefully check the fair-use policy of every provider that appears to offer ‘Unlimited’ Internet. After recently encountering a door-to-door Sky salesman trying to convince me to switch from my current provider to them I decided to investigate his claims of a truly unlimited Internet plan for ‘free*’ (* if you purchase Sky Talk). Upon closer investigation I found there appears to be only two choices of major provider in the UK who offer truly unlimited Internet in some manner: Virgin Media and Sky.

Firstly for both of these deals to be applicable you must live in a Cable enabled area as Virgin only allow truly unlimited Internet on the 50Mb package, which is only available via cable. See here for further details: http://shop.virginmedia.com/help/traffic-management.html

Virgin offer two deals for the 50Mb package, buy it with a phone line and receive a larger discount or buy it as a standalone product and receive a smaller discount. I’ll be calculating the cost over the course of a year because you can always cancel and get the ‘new user’ deal again next year.

With phone : 	(15 * 3) + (28 * 9) + (11.99 * 12) = £440.88/y (£36.74/mo)
Without phone :	(33 * 3) + (38 * 9) = £441/y (£36.75/mo)

What Virgin is doing here is trying to push their new phone service; as a result it’s 1p a month more expensive if you don’t take their phone service with the broadband. The prior deal brings us more in line with the benefits of an ADSL line so we’ll be using that for comparison. As a bonus the phone line provides ‘Unlimited calls to UK landlines and Virgin mobiles all weekend’ if that’s of any use to you.

Pulling apart the specs on offer you’re getting 1.36Mb/s per £1 download speed and 43.55kb/s per £1 upload.

Due to Sky operating solely over ADSL there are more plan options. Firstly as a BT landline will be necessary you have two options for purchasing this; pay monthly or pay for a year in advance and receive a discount. You also have the choice to subscribe to Sky’s talk package for a small discount. With regards to BT, this condition is hidden in the small print: “You need to make at least two calls a month to avoid a £1.50 monthly charge. Payment is non-refundable.” So even if the connection is purely for Internet you’ll need to ensure you ring your mobile twice a month to avoid extra charges. Also, depending on your current standing with BT you may be charged an extra £29.99 if there is any need to install a new line. Sky also offer an all-in-one offer including Line Rental for £18.50/month but this requires that you are also subscribed to Sky TV which pushes the cost up beyond reasonable measures, so it has been omitted. Let’s take these offers apart and see how they stack up:

With phone + DD:	(7.50 + 2.50) * 12 + (12.79 * 12) = £273.48/y (£22.79/mo)
With phone + Prepay:	(7.50 + 2.50) * 12 + (113.88) = £233.88/y (£19.49/mo)

Without phone + DD:	(12.50 + 2.50) * 12 + (12.79 * 12) = £333.48/y (£27.79/mo)
Without phone + Prepay:	(12.50 + 2.50) * 12 + (113.88) = £293.88/y (£24.49/mo)

As you’ve all guessed by now there seems to be some want for dominance of the landline market and Sky has joined the battle. It’s quite clearly cheaper to take the phone package with the broadband. The phone package offers “Free evening & weekend UK landline calls”, though the small print points out that calls lasting over an hour in duration will be charged from the one hour mark.

Looking at the specs it seems you’ll be at best getting 1.02Mb/s per £1 download and 51.31kb/s per £1 upload.

The Results

There we have it, when stripped right down; Virgin offer the best economy download speed for your money and Sky offer the best economy upload speed. So what does this mean for you?
Well, if you have a lot of people sharing one connection and you require the use of your connection’s upload without affecting other users then the extra overhead afforded by the Virgin 50Mb package should help you manage your connection better.
If, however, you require less upload and you can guarantee suitable ADSL speeds at your location by all means save yourself some cash and economise on the Sky connection.

Prices correct as of 16.09.10.