Zen Internet (who supply DSL for my family) have just e-mailed me to say that they're implementing what's essentially capping on their older discontinued products. Earlier this year, they announced that they were going to withdraw their Home 1000 & Home 2000 (amongst others) products, replacing them with DSLMax products. The new DSLMax products would be capped at differing amounts, depending on how much you wanted to pay monthly. This had been on the cards for a while.
One thing they said at the time was that the customers on the products that were being withdrawn from sale for new customers is that the existing customers could stay using those products for however long they wanted to - lots of users migrated over to the new DSLMax product. I decided to stay on the existing Home products for all of my lines for the primary reason that it was uncapped. The fact that the highest available download speed on the Home when they closed the product was 2mbit, whereas on DSLMax was 8mbit (theoretical) was the trade off.

The e-mail saying that they're now capping the usage is a kick in the shins. I realise that Zen are a company and that they're obviously not able to sustain vast loses that certain users are causing them. Fortunately the cap is at such a level that it won't cause me any issues - it's more the principal, and the fact that this probably is the beginning of the end.

Original e-mail follows:
On 1st March 2007 we are going to introduce a monthly usage allowance on all Home 1000 and Home 2000 broadband services. The usage allowance will be 100 gigabytes (GB) per month.

WHY?
A small number of our Home 1000 and Home 2000 customers are extreme users of our service. They leave their computers downloading files 24 hours per day, day after day, week after week. This extreme usage costs Zen hundreds of pounds per month for each extreme user . many times our income from the monthly subscription fee. In the past we have subsidised this usage but we are no longer prepared to incur this loss.

By introducing a 100 GB monthly usage allowance we will limit the financial loss generated by the extreme users whilst leaving the vast majority of our customers completely unaffected.

HOW MUCH IS 100 GIGABYTES?
100 GB is a vast amount of usage, enough to download 40 feature length movies, thousands of songs, and to browse the Web for as long as you want. In other words, 100 GB is more than enough for anything other than the kind of extreme usage described above.

WHAT HAPPENS ON REACHING 100 GB?
The usage allowance for Home 1000 / 2000 will be handled in the same way as the usage allowances for Zen 8000 Lite / Active / Pro. If you reach 100 GB part way through a month your Internet access will be blocked and your web browser will display a page giving you the option to buy additional usage for £1.49 (inc. VAT) per GB. For full details, please see:

http://www.zenbroadband.com/athome.aspx?page=510

HOW WILL THIS CHANGE AFFECT ME?
Your peak usage over the last 3 months was only 6 GB so this change will not affect you unless you completely change the way you use the Internet and become an extreme downloader.

If you have any questions about this change please do not hesitate to contact us.

Best regards
Richard Tang
Managing Director