I'm looking at ISPs for basic web browsing and a lot of streaming live TV. I've pretty much settled on a shortlist of Crystalweb & Vox.
For Vox the generous on/off timings for the unlimited bolt-on (henceforth "UBO") is a big attraction but I want to make sure that I understand how I would make best use of the UBO.
As I understand it new connections after 18:00 (plus or minus a few minutes for clock issues) will be counted as UBO data but there is a slight "gotcha" in that any connection established prior to 18:00 will have been set up to deduct data from the basic Fat Pipe Lite (henceforth "FPL") 25GB allowance and so any data consumed down that connection, even data consumed after the 18:00 UBO activation time, will still be deducted from the FPL allowance. The particular scenario that might catch me out here is, if I started streaming a 1 hour TV program at 17:55, then almost all of that data would end up being deducted from my FPL allowance even though most of the stream data was delivered to me after 18:00.
First question. Is the above correct?
If yes then is it sufficient to simply stop (as in completely cancel and break connection with the server) any active stream at say 18:05-ish and immediately restart it in order to ensure that the connection is correctly booked against the UBO data allowance rather than the FPL allowance or is it necessary to disconnect from Vox entirely and re-login? If so then I'm guessing that a VPN might also pose a challenge since stopping a channel inside a VPN would still leave the connection to the VPN endpoint intact hence the VPN session would also need to be terminated in order to ensure that a brand new connection was seen by Vox when the streaming was restarted at 18:06-ish.
Finally, and assuming all my assumptions are still on track here and the above is acceptable, does Vox have a good enough dashboard such that I can run an experiment to make sure that I am avoiding post-18:00 streaming data getting billed against my FPL allowance? My experiment would be to look at my FPL data usage at say 17:55 and make a note of it, start a stream immediately (i.e. prior to 18:00), drop the stream at 18:05-ish, and then restart the stream for at least an hour plus whatever other streaming I want to do that evening. I would then check my FPL data usage first thing the following morning and it should show almost exactly the same data remaining as my 17:55 figure did minus about 10 minutes worth of streaming data consumed between 17:55 and 18:05. Are the tools there and the data usage updated sufficiently promptly for me to be able to run this experiment and get a reliable result?
- Julian
For Vox the generous on/off timings for the unlimited bolt-on (henceforth "UBO") is a big attraction but I want to make sure that I understand how I would make best use of the UBO.
As I understand it new connections after 18:00 (plus or minus a few minutes for clock issues) will be counted as UBO data but there is a slight "gotcha" in that any connection established prior to 18:00 will have been set up to deduct data from the basic Fat Pipe Lite (henceforth "FPL") 25GB allowance and so any data consumed down that connection, even data consumed after the 18:00 UBO activation time, will still be deducted from the FPL allowance. The particular scenario that might catch me out here is, if I started streaming a 1 hour TV program at 17:55, then almost all of that data would end up being deducted from my FPL allowance even though most of the stream data was delivered to me after 18:00.
First question. Is the above correct?
If yes then is it sufficient to simply stop (as in completely cancel and break connection with the server) any active stream at say 18:05-ish and immediately restart it in order to ensure that the connection is correctly booked against the UBO data allowance rather than the FPL allowance or is it necessary to disconnect from Vox entirely and re-login? If so then I'm guessing that a VPN might also pose a challenge since stopping a channel inside a VPN would still leave the connection to the VPN endpoint intact hence the VPN session would also need to be terminated in order to ensure that a brand new connection was seen by Vox when the streaming was restarted at 18:06-ish.
Finally, and assuming all my assumptions are still on track here and the above is acceptable, does Vox have a good enough dashboard such that I can run an experiment to make sure that I am avoiding post-18:00 streaming data getting billed against my FPL allowance? My experiment would be to look at my FPL data usage at say 17:55 and make a note of it, start a stream immediately (i.e. prior to 18:00), drop the stream at 18:05-ish, and then restart the stream for at least an hour plus whatever other streaming I want to do that evening. I would then check my FPL data usage first thing the following morning and it should show almost exactly the same data remaining as my 17:55 figure did minus about 10 minutes worth of streaming data consumed between 17:55 and 18:05. Are the tools there and the data usage updated sufficiently promptly for me to be able to run this experiment and get a reliable result?
- Julian
