I’ve been a little miffed over the past couple of months with the introduction of lower tariff ADSL accounts from our business ISP, Force9. Especially since the accounts we have are no longer shown on their site, so its difficult to tell what we could be charged if we went for more up-to-date accounts.

It appears that since August 2004 they’ve introduced two classes of account: a Lite and a Premier. The Lite actually comes with a monthly bandwidth limit of all of 2GBytes. The Premier is unlimited. Whilst the Lite starts at about £20 a month for a 1Gb connection, Force9 charge up to £2 per additional GByte of transfer. We currently pay £46 a month for a 1Gb connection.

So I looked into our bandwidth usage. Some months we use about 8GBytes at our main office, so on a Lite account that would cost us only £32 a month, but in August we used 32GBytes (and indeed yesterday we used 3.7GBytes alone!) So it seems worthwhile sticking with what we’ve got.