Post by OziDug on Jul 4, 2010 14:36:42 GMT
I switched to BT recently after having regular hassles with Nildram (now part of Pipex) who had a 10Gb limit on the accounting. I used to hit the 10Gb limit regularly - and that's a lot of bandwidth, considering I work full time. When my usage went up while I was on holiday, I challenged their figures, whereby it suddenly dropped to around 2 Gb per month for 8 months (they never responded to my emails), then it leapt to 10Gb again! By that time Pipex had taken over the account and they don't take prisoners when confronted by complaints so I did the only thing I could - switched ISP to BT, with a similar cap on the bandwidth (10 Gb).
At the end of my first month, I got alerts saying that I was in danger of exceeding the cap, so I reluctantly went to a 20Gb cap, but on the 27th of last month I got an alert, so I'm fighting back.
There aren't too many weapons available, but I had a look at two: NetMonitor and SurplusMeter. NetMonitor is three years old, and the author has obviously lost interest, because the evaluation copy had already expired when I ran it, so I couldn't evaluate it (and I wouldn't buy it if he's not interested).
SurplusMeter (http://www.skoobysoft.com/skooby/download.html) looks fine:
- I can nominate the day within month that the billing period starts;
- It displays a sliding graph of days in the billing month, and underneath that, bytes down and bytes up;
- Daily Allowance and data allowance from to-day to the end of the month (If I've got a surplus it will be spread over the rest of the month;
It has a Pause button, which is a shame. You press Pause when you're doing local network transfers because unless it's working with a PPP modem, the software can't distinguish between local and internet traffic. I'll have to think about that - there might be a way.
All in all, it looks as if it might do the job. And it has shown me that, in the course of preparing this posting, I've used 434 Megabytes, which I don't understand at all. ...
Still, worth considering if you're looking at bandwidth usage. And it's free.
At the end of my first month, I got alerts saying that I was in danger of exceeding the cap, so I reluctantly went to a 20Gb cap, but on the 27th of last month I got an alert, so I'm fighting back.
There aren't too many weapons available, but I had a look at two: NetMonitor and SurplusMeter. NetMonitor is three years old, and the author has obviously lost interest, because the evaluation copy had already expired when I ran it, so I couldn't evaluate it (and I wouldn't buy it if he's not interested).
SurplusMeter (http://www.skoobysoft.com/skooby/download.html) looks fine:
- I can nominate the day within month that the billing period starts;
- It displays a sliding graph of days in the billing month, and underneath that, bytes down and bytes up;
- Daily Allowance and data allowance from to-day to the end of the month (If I've got a surplus it will be spread over the rest of the month;
It has a Pause button, which is a shame. You press Pause when you're doing local network transfers because unless it's working with a PPP modem, the software can't distinguish between local and internet traffic. I'll have to think about that - there might be a way.
All in all, it looks as if it might do the job. And it has shown me that, in the course of preparing this posting, I've used 434 Megabytes, which I don't understand at all. ...
Still, worth considering if you're looking at bandwidth usage. And it's free.