I faced the annual problem for almost every university student just a week ago: accommodation. If you take into consideration the flat’s location, price, accessibility, etc., it is difficult to find one that meets all your expectations. Compromises had to be made between the six of us. But, in the end, we found our flat, and our next obvious task was to look for a good internet provider.

Internet connection never posed itself as a problem for us. The reason is ResNet. ResNet is a service that provides quick connection for its students living in halls, and it is connected to the main university line, which uses JANET. This special connection guarantees 8mbit upload and download for all of its students on ResNet—all 3000 of them. The speeds are lightning quick, and moving away from the usual 3MB/s download is a depressing thought. So, we had a job to do.

Be’s unlimited offer

be-unlimited

Roland and I scoured the internet for a connection for 6 people. Our requirements are that the speeds are so incredibly fast we wouldn’t regret moving away from Unite House and we were willing to pay up to £30 a month. A quick internet search returned a few providers: zen, Be, and Easynet. They offered various speeds, the smallest speed starting from 8mbit, but the only thing that mattered was that we were satisfied with what they were offering—until we saw their policies in small print.

There exists in this country evil things such as the Acceptable Usage Policy and the Fair Usage Policy. The differences between these two are minimal, and they are often used interchangeably. These documents with minuscule font sizes line out the things you can do and cannot do with their service. Most of them are reasonable, such as the prohibition of doing anything illegal, really. Normally, you have to scroll to the bottom of their policies to find the good stuff. On Be’s AUP, there’s a heading titled “What about excessive network usage” at the bottom:

Be’s Acceptable Usage Policy

be-aup

Ironically, this part of the Policy is written with ambiguity in mind:

“If it’s felt that any Be unlimited or Pro member’s Internet activities are so excessive that other members are detrimentally affected, Be may give the member generating the excessive web traffic a written warning (by email or otherwise). In extreme circumstances, should the levels of activity not immediately decrease after the warning, Be may terminate that member’s services.”

This means that Be has the ability to shut us down whenever they want to. Who knows what they may feel. This marketing trick is used throughout the country by all Internet Service Providers. It is disguised to safeguard users from others that are … using (too much of) the internet, when all it does is a bandwidth cap in small prints. This business practice is to be frowned upon.

In the end, we haven’t settled for a provider, and we realised that, maybe, it is impossible to get that connection that we are enjoying in Unite House at the moment.