The first thing to know is “there is no such thing as an unlimited broadband connection”. Few years ago, ‘unlimited’ meant that you can download and/or upload unlimited amount of data. But as time passes by, ISPs tend to control how users can connect to the Internet and the amount of data they can transfer. The ISP term for this is ‘MVT, Monthly Volumetric Threshold’. This term means the amount of data a user can download and/or upload in one month. ISPs now use a different plan to provide Internet to users. They set a limit for the MVT and they announce the connection as ‘unlimited’. Once the user passes the MVT, the ISP transfers the user to a secondary service. The secondary service means that your download and upload rates are divided by a factor of 5 to 10 depending on the honesty of your ISP. So, our first lesson is: ISPs used to be more honest.

ISPs should have a kind of regulation to provide reliable services. Reliability of an ISP depends on many factors; how good the hardware is, the continuous availability of electrical power, building security and access control, backbone connection redundancy, and many other factors. And as a user, I can not check on all of these things either because I will not be allowed to or I would not care enough to check.

Many people with large amounts of money seek to invest in the IT world. This is due to the rapid and explosive growth of the IT markets and applications. Most of them want to operate on ‘hit-and-run’ basis and want to make big money in no time. This is why they drop more money in the advertising than on the actual thing. And this leads more ‘innocent’ people to fall into their traps. So, our second lesson is: history is the focal point in trusting the future promises of the ISP.

In many countries, changing the ISP is expensive. This is mostly right regarding ADSL connections. These constraints the telephone company put are planned to impose the ‘take-it-or-take-it’ rule. In such a case, when you do not like your ISP, you will have to pay a lot of money to change to another one. This is merely theft. The actual work done to transfer an ADSL subscriber from one ISP to another is very simple. Directing the ports from one ISP to another at the telecom end does not cost them any new hardware or massive software change. So, the third lesson today is: live in a country where telecom companies are not thieves (as if there is such a country).

And one more lesson I can not tend to forget; always buy bandwidth more than you need because you will not get what you have signed-up for.

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