Evening the odds

The thing that got me so upset about Demon's actions was their sheer arrogance. A contract is supposed to be a negotiated agreement between two consenting parties, not an imposition of one entities will over another.

By reducing the download speed from 8 Mbps to 128kbps, they reduced our download speed to below 2% of its correct speed. If Demon, as they claim, wanted to protect the 99% of their users from the 1% of "unreasonable" customers, they could have done this by reducing the speed to 2Mbps. That would have freed up bandwidth for the other (alleged) 99%, whilst still providing a reasonable service. What Demon is actually doing is punishing people for taking full advantage of the bandwidth they supply and advertise. By restricting the bandwidth they are misrepresenting themselves and their product. Their advertising strap line should be "8Mbps download speed, but don't dare use it."

When Demon supplied the service, they vaguely mentioned "fair use". This is meaningless in law as they refused to reveal their definitions. In other words Demon decided that they would make a an example of the people who pay money for an 8Mbps service and have the nerve to take advantage of it!

How many washing machines have you bought that have a clause that says that if you use it too often at the top spin speed we'll come and take it off you?

Anyway, back to the important bit - what happened next.

After thinking about what action I was going to take, I decided to see how widespread the problem was.

I started searching some of the forums on the web and soon realised that I was by no means alone. It became apparent that Demon had decided to start enforcing its fair use policy in December and started sending out their letters. Not only did they only disclose their criteria once they had decided to attack its own customers, but they even decided that these "guidelines" "may be subject to change without notice".

So we who are currently suffering Demon's arbitrary punishment are likely to be only the vanguard of a campaign to save Thus plc money. We are the 1%, but when we vote with our feet, the next 1% will be chosen, and so forth until they reach the point where the customers are so scared of being chosen that they dare not download anything. Then Demon will no longer need to invest in equipment to improve service because its customers will have already been neutered. More profit - very clever!

The following day, I saw the impact of Demon's actions. My business stopped operating. I could not check my web sites, as they kept timing out, my email was trickling in, my PC's were locking up, I could not use the MMORPG that I paid a subscription for. Logging in to Digg would take 2 minutes instead of 3 seconds and half the time it would timeout. In effect I was paying for a service and not receiving that service, not because of a fault, but by deliberate action.

At this point I wrote my first letter to the CEO of Demon. I could not name him, because when I telephoned the number on the letter (see yesterday's post) the support person refused to give it to me. Here is the letter:

Dear Sir,

Hostname:

I am writing to you in response to the undated letter I have received from your Customer Services team, which I received on Thursday, January 18^th, informing us that our speed would be restricted between 9am and 10pm commencing the following day, the 19^th.

Having now taken legal advice, it appears that your capping of our internet service is premature. There are a number of reasons for this and are as follows:

· No warning was given that we were approaching our “maximum usage level”.

· We were at no time told what that usage level was.

· We were provided with no documentary evidence to support your claim.

· We were given insufficient notice to be able to bring this matter to your attention before the service was capped.

We therefore look forward to an immediate restoration of our service at its previous level, as your terms and conditions with particular emphasis upon your “fair use” provisions, would not pass legal scrutiny.

I look forward to your immediate compliance with this requirement, to avoid us taking further action through the Small Claims Section of the County Court to mitigate our losses due to deliberate restriction of trade and use.

Yours sincerely

I sent the letter by recorded delivery on January 22nd and waited ... and waited ... and waited. To my surprise, I received no reply and no acknowledgement. Mmm, I thought, this is going to be fun.

Next ... Now I'm really going to sort this.