andysworld!

Well it’s not often that I praise an Internet Service Provider, and as you may have seen by my recent “rants” and “tweets”  I had a little issue with my ISP Eclipse Internet, based in Exeter, Devon, UK in the last approx 23 hours. (alright my lover!)

So I thought I’d put my hand in the air, and put the record straight on this, one, the simple fact is we have a 40GB limit under the Fair Usage Policy between the hours of 9am – 11pm, if you exceed it, you are restricted to 256Kbps. (horrible!).

At the end of May we’ve been downloading new Microsoft, VMware software, and new Vendor virtual applicances for testing, these were only a few DVDs, but the data adds up. We do track throughput and data usage here in the office, for our own statitics, and have been doing this for the last 6 years. This is collected from the router, so ALL traffic is monitored in and out of the network. This isn’t collected from a single PC.

Data throughput from 2006 - Present day

Our average daily peak usage (9am – 11pm) is approx 1.5GB, that is general email and web browsing. At the end of May (24th, 25th, 27th) see here

DVD downloads from Microsoft, VMware and other vendors

we boosted the limit up a bit, on June 6th 2011, we received an email from Eclipse Internet stating we had hit the Amber  zone, and if we continue to download at the current rate, we would be stuffed into the Red Zone, and limited to 256kbps. We cannot stop the mail flow during the day, or the web browsing, so we did move large downloads into off-peak, hoping not to get the Red Zone treatment, my only small complaint, was we did email Eclipse asking how much data allowance we had left in peak hours, which went unanswered.

Yesterday evening at approximately 11pm we received the dreaded Red Zone email and we were restricted to 256kbps broadband speed.

0.1MBps Download and 0.3MBps Upload

0.1MBps Download and 0.3MBps Upload

This was horrible, the internet is un-useable at the speed, you really notice all the cookie, tracking websites, waiting for websites to load, I’m glad I usually have between 1.5Mbps – 2.7MBps (to be confirmed!).

At 4.00pm today, enough was enough, and I called Eclipse Internet, Business Sales, and spoke to a very nice Sales agent called “John”, to switch our current older product (Evolution Pro 3) to Business Bronze, we’ll we get 50GB peak, and it costs less, on a 1 month contract – Fantastic, oh, and the Data Allowance gets reset! –

We’ve just been switched to Business Bronze. A Result. Thank you Eclipse!

We are very happy with Eclipse Internet, and we’ve now been with Eclipse for 7.5 years.

So far this month we downloaded 70GB!

and if I look in the new Control Panel, I’ve got some new controls and graphs to play with

Data controller to prioritize traffic

and a new statistics utility

New data graph

We will just have to see if 50GB is enough!

Thanks Eclipse!