Like any decent internet company, as Demon Internet is, they have a fair usage policy. And they dropped me an email telling me this.

THUS plc currently regards 50GB as being a fair maximum usage level of downloads during a rolling 30 day period for Home 8000 customers, and 60GB for HomeOffice 8000 customers. Please note that these limits are guidelines and are subject to change. We are now writing to advise you that our use analysis shows that over the past 30 days you have downloaded 72.00GB. Consequently, in accordance with our Fair Usage Policy, we have had to take immediate corrective action.

Fair enough. On investigation, it turns out that Apple iTunes is to blame for my wholly excessive usage. On 26th December, it noticed that someone had published another two video podcasts, so it downloaded them, then downloaded them again, then downloaded them again, and so on, in a merry loop that quickly snaffled through my download limit. I’m not alone - the Apple iTunes support forum has a curious amount of people suffering the same thing.

Demon Internet is a splendid company at providing internet: but their staff are unable to make me a happy customer.

So, let’s set down my stall.
- I’m not really to blame here. It’s a bug in iTunes, being discussed by other people.
- It happened so quickly, Demon were unable to warn me that anything was wrong.
- I’ve discovered what went wrong.
- I’ve fixed the problem.
- I was awfully nice and polite with everyone at Demon.

In response, Demon will punish me with 128kpbs access for a whole month. And, worse, there’s nothing I - or even they - can do about it.

Here’s what’s wrong with their customer service system:
- Their customer service teams cannot override the automated system. After discussions with technical support, they’re satisfied with my explanation of what the problem was, and they can already see that I’ve fixed it. They’d like to help me. But they don’t have the power to do anything with the FUP capping system: meaning that I’m stuck with a dog-slow internet connection. And they’re really frustrated by it.
- A rolling FUP period isn’t built for a problem like buggy software. iTunes used a bucket-load of bandwidth on 26th December. And because of this, there’s nothing I can do to bring my usage within acceptable limits until this day falls off the 30-day rolling period. The team at Demon recognise this, and they’re unable to do anything about it.
- They don’t have a way to take cash now to fix it. There’s a £40 monthly tariff which is genuinely uncapped - their Business connection (rather than my HomeOffice connection). It’s around twice as expensive as I’m paying now: but if it would restore my internet connection, I’d leap at the chance of paying this penalty. They can’t accept one-off payments, and an upgrade to this tariff would take “10 working days”. In short, there’s no way of paying money to fix this; if there were, the staff would have been rather more productive today.

If I was in charge, I’d hopefully…
- trust my customer service team enough to bend the rules and override the FUP cap, if they’re happy that the customer is acting in good faith
- allow the customer to buy himself out of a problem (hell, £1 a gig over that limit would be just peachy)
- and use an FUP system that doesn’t mean one days’ errant software won’t penalise my customer
…but then I’m not in charge, so sadly need to sit and watch the internet with download speeds for the next month or so.

Still, at least I’ve a good reason for not checking my work emails.

Apologies for the radio silence (radio silence! hah!) recently.

I’ve a good excuse - I’ve been on holiday. See above for a clue where.

I’d have posted this before I went on holiday, but BT have broken my broadband at home. At least, this is according to Demon Internet, a company for which “customer service” means putting thick-accented Indians on the end of an 0845 number who tell customers such gems as “the 0208 exchange is currently being worked on by BT”. (Not got a problem with overseas outsourcing, by the way; I am a happy customer of many companies that use it. Demon’s product is great; their customer service, however, isn’t).

Anyway. Hopefully by the time I get home (I’m typing this through a free internet connection somewhere in Australia), all will be well again. I will be blogging about beer, as well as radio in Australia; and might even write some of the blog entries on the plane if I’ve any access to power.

In other news: I’ve switched off my del.icio.us link feed to this blog. I’d prefer my sparkling editorial to be read by visitors (ummm) and not my quick del.icio.us links. If you’d like to continue using my del.icio.us links, you can use this RSS feed in your RSS reader. (It’s also Atom capable).