The BBC News posted an article this morning describing British broadband usage limits imposed by ISPs. I was shocked to read that Virgin Media has a 2.7Gb (sic) limit per week because I was sure they had an unlimited downloads offering, subject to an acceptable usage policy.

We use the BBC iPlayer and Channe 4 on Demand services at home and I felt a little concerned that somehow I had overlooked this limit and that we would be in line for a hefty charge for additional bandwidth use.

The Virgin Media Acceptable Use Policy says nothing about an exact limit so I emailed the BBC to ask them to explain where the figure came from. They didn’t respond, but they updated the infobox in the article between 11:19 and 15:23.

Below you can see on the left, the original infobox, and on the right, the updated infobox.

There is no acknowledgement from the BBC in the article that the infobx has been updated and now might be more accurate. It looks like they made some factual errors with Sky and Plusnet too.

Since I graduated from university, I’ve read a couple of articles about the importance of how to write emails to colleagues. The articles told me emails were a reflection of myself and I thought everybody had read these articles too, but I was wrong.

When I was in the bank last weekend, the lady who was dealing with my question opened Outlook and composed the following email to a colleague:

hi, r u free to see a customer? x

Her colleague replied:

YIP

She finished the conversation with:

lady beside water cooler x

I can’t help but feel that these articles duped me into believing that people analyse every aspect of my professional life based on how I write an email.