Penalty For Excess Data Usage

[Saturn]

Hello fellow users,

Not so much a question but a warning for fellow users of TPG's "NBN Cable Broadband S Bundle."

I have only been on this NBN plan for around three weeks now and as fellow users would know it has a data usage limit of 10GB per month. I was not keeping a close watch on my data usage and went a little over the limit. Next morning when I fired up my computer I found it would take perhaps 30 minutes to load TPG's home page!  Internet performance was hopeless! Totally unusable!

So I contacted TPG and they informed me that my data transfer speed had been dropped down to 32KB per second as a penalty.  That would be fair enough if true, but I believe my speed was probably down to a fraction of 1KB per second to produce the extremely long load periods for simple web pages.

Looks like one has to be very careful about excess data usage with TPG because they don't just slow you right down for punishment, they virtually cut you off from the Internet!

[ellenevans · Accepted solution]

32Kbps is the speed they throttle you down to which is nearly useless. This is 32 Kilobits per second which should give you about 4 Kilobytes per second. Windows or other apps/programs might be using up this tiny bandwidth (even if you aren't using them they might be running in the background). If you press Ctrl, Shift and esc at the same time, then click on the "Performance" tab, then click on "Open resouce monitor"(at the bottom), then you can see in the "Network" section what is using your internet (I'm assuming you're using windows). I can load tpg.com.au on a 32K connection in about 1 minute, but websites like youtube.com are off limits.