My friend and I have been having trouble with our ISP - BT Openreach - for a while. They have the monopoly in the UK and…

I recently upgraded to the “Unlimited Broadband” with BT and shortly received an email telling me I had nearly gotten to 100GB of transfer, and if I went over they would slow down my connection from around 5mbps to 1-1.5mbps… thus limiting my consumption.

Yes, apparently unlimited is defined as 100GB and there is a penalty for going over it.

… anyway, I love this. Courtesy of @cheeseache and part of his new venture http://fab.fm/linechecker.aspx

More information and disclaimer shit

>Unlimited!!! Broadband package of UP TO 20 MEG speeds provided where possible. Speeds will often fall below the capabilities of your phone line. Reasons for this include a shoddy arse-choir of a telephone network that has been rotting for decades, a general unwillingness by slowpenreach to fix faults until they start turning into maggots, a lack of all knowledge from most slowpenreach staff in the job they’re supposedly trained to do and a ridiculous network of stages, quality gates and departments to get through before a fault can be properly ignored by a real person who’s had some training.

We have reduced our prices to attract cheap-arses who don’t give a piss about network reliability or speed so long as they can check facebook and read shit about z-lister celebrities. As a consequence of this we don’t invest in our infrastucture, so our network isn’t capable of providing a reliable and fast service to anyone who actually wants to get what we claim you can get. When we say your service is Unlimited we do mean Unlimited… unless you’re aware of the dictionary meaning of the word “Unlimited” and in that case your “Unlimited” service is actually limited to 100GB of download data per calendar month. We also limit your upload data per calendar month to whatever we feel is acceptable to us at the time. We also reserve the right to change our interpretation of the word “unlimited”, in fact we reserve the right to change the meaning of the word “unlimited” an unlimited amount of times per month. Your UP TO 20 MEG speeds will also be capped (limited) by us at certain times, such as if there’s more than 11 people on the network or Kevin in Yorkshire is watching old television commercials on YouTube. We’ll not slow down emails too much and twitter is mostly ok, but shit like downloading podcasts, music, porn… the usual shit, well thats going to be unlimitedly limited. In the highly unlikely event that you manage to get a speed of over 12mbps out of us at any one time, we’ll ensure we slash that down to an limited unlimited 1.2422mbps. If you are already getting slower speeds than that (likely) we’ll either drop you down to 150k or make a special red light on the front of your router come on. There is no charge for seeing this red light, but we’d suggest you don’t put your router in your front window.

You’re welcome to use our Unlimited!!! service for using the Internets and other web shit. If we suspect you’re doing anything like downloading music, games or films on the sly then we’ll pass all your details onto them (without your permission or any real evidence) and then they’ll come to your house, put tin-foil on any tooth fillings you have and give you a bloody good telling off. Do it 3 times and a special woman called ‘Mandy’ will come and find you, she’ll wave her finger at you and then ban you for talking by zipping up your mouth (Like what Bungle used to do to Zippy when he took the piss out of him). It’s for your own good and protects the Luxury Yacht building industry and creates jobs for Accountants who specialise in tax loopholes.

You can cancel your contract at any point within the usual EU shit rules. Whatever they are! If you manage to wriggle out of your contract then we’ll keep on billing you because our accounting system is useless. We also reserve the right to make other excuses up. Giving your router a pet name is against our Terms of Service. If you do it your account will be cancelled and you’ll be forced to watch All-Star Family Fortunes ALL the time. We will also continue to charge you and take a piss in your sink.