I had a letter from Sky the other day which told me that I’d gone over my broadband usage allowance for the second time in 6 months so they had automatically upgraded me to ‘Sky Broadband Unlimited’

The letter then went on to say this new service should be more suited to my needs, I can track my usage online and they would need to re-test the performance of my line.

It then said I should refer to my Sky Statement for a full breakdown of the payments due for my broadband.

Nowhere in the letter did it mention the cost of this new upgraded service. As the sentence above suggests, I would have to wait for my statement to find out how much it costs.

The standard package I was on costs £5 per month and provides up to 2GB of download per month.

I only check email and surf at home and occasionally look at the odd YouTube video. Some days I don’t go online at home at all and I am therefore adamant that my usage has never pipped 2GB per month.

It is possible to view your Sky broadband usage by logging into to an online client area but it only shows monthly usage in a clumsy bar graph and if I am using 2GB per month I would really like to know what I was doing and when so that I could avoid doing it!

The package I was upgraded to costs £15 per month and provides unlimited usage but as I am absolutely certain I have never used over 2GB I called up Sky and asked to be downgraded. This was duly done and I was told they could not look into the usage in more detail but I should avoid downloading movies or wathcing srteaming TV which, I don’t do anyway.

My 2 gripes from this experience are:

1/ I don’t trust Sky’s usage figures.

2/ I think it’s very wrong to tell someone you’ve upgraded them without making it glaringly obvious how much this is going to cost. – Totally disgusting.

As a consequence I am now going to look much more closely at Virgin, BT Vision and other broadband providers. – Any recommendations?