Giving money to BT for free

You would think BT has enough money barring the pension fund hole but that's another matter. Recently we have signed a new contract with BT over broadband. We have got a good reduced rate in exchange for a capping of 12 gigabite per month. We get fined for over use the current month being £8.

Why are we going over our limit? I now have our wireless network box encrypted so any laptops in the area apart from ours cannot hitch a free ride on the net. I have found a free little program called Networx which logs net use by all computers to help evaluate our bandwidth situation.

So I am thinking we might be signed up as a slave for some robot army, programs are closed down all except one machine with Mozilla and Outlook Express open. Outlook turns out to be the broadband hog.

We leave one computer on 24/7 for various reasons to do with databases. I had emails set up to look for new emails once a minute, then I altered it to once an hour. If no one is using the net our machine with OE open consumes about 7 meg per hour.  24 hours x 7 meg is 168meg per day.

On a 30 day month this is 5 gigabytes per month which is nearly half our monthly allowance.

So no more gifts to BT..................