Purchasing more bandwidth

[fergus]

I'm on a 3 gig account. I've used 5.2 gigs this month so far, i.e. 3 gigs normal, 2.2 gigs capped. I've never bought extra bandwidth before.

Now I urgently need full speed for something so I purchased an extra gig but it doesn't seem to be kicking in. Any ideas why its not working? Do they expect me to pay for all the usage beyond 3 gigs before I can get full speed again? In other words must I buy 3 gigs so I cover the 2.2 gigs I used over the cap and then leaving me with 800MB uncapped??

I think this is going to be the last straw for me. If I just threw R159 down the toilet then thats the end of iburst for me.

 

[slimothy]

no if you use 5.2 gigs (your original 3 and 2.2 while capped) and buy 3gigs, then you get 3 gigs on top of that , you do not need to pay that 2.2gig deficit. I have never once had to pay off what i've used while capped before I can get full speed again.

And when you buy an extra gig it should kick in right away, you do not even need to disconnect. However they were playing with the bandwidth manager alot in the last week so that might have something to do with it, but remember if you guy a gig on the last day of the month and only use 200MB, come midnight tonight that other 824MB will be lost forever.

 

[fergus]

Ok, thanks for that slim. Its kicked in now but too late for what I wanted to do. I'll definitely use the gig up though. I have plenty to download. I just discovered www.itconversations.com which is really cool so I'm downloading tons of interviews from their and I'm getting the latest gentoo as well.

 

[fergus]

Here's another question for you slim: How does it work when you go over the cap. Does the connection immediately throttle down to 64K or is it like adsl where the cap kicks in at a certain time?

 

[slimothy]

it seems to run a check against a database every few minutes, so once you go over the limit you have a few minutes before you get throttled at best, our throttle is controlled 100% by software so it can be very dynamic where as ADSL users are redirected to a totally different part of the network when they get capped and connect, so untill they disconnect they can enjoy full speed.

 

[fergus]

ok thanks. The iburst cap is still better than the adsl one though.

 

[CyberMatix]

This morning I had 280MB left, so I thought I would download some stuff from intl. to use it up - no way I'll give anything to WBS. Anyway, 1.5GB later I was still happily downloading at full speed. Only then did the cap kick in. FWIW

 

[slimothy]

i'm capped and around 4PM i got full speed for an hour, then it slowed down to 4k for a good 20 minutes and then normal. I think it's because they're doing alot of maintanence according to thier incident report, if they happen to give you more bandwidth when you never asked for it, i say take it