Highway Robbers? No, Internet Providers!

I don't know about you but we have a limited internet allowance every month. We started off with a nice reasonably priced 25GB which I thought would be ample for me checking e-mails and looking for items on sale at Ikea.
Of course I forgot about my daughter. My daughter loves her laptop and her iPad and her iPod. She goes in to a semi trance-like state during power outages as she is unable to connect to social media and life suddenly seems pointless. Minecraft is the latest craze, which from research, doesn't use up too much internet. She and her friend like to play on the same Minecraft server at the same time and therefore it becomes much more fun to Facetime each other whilst playing. As I hear the screams and laughter coming from her room during these online games, I can almost see the Gigabytes trickling down our drain. Of course 25GB lasted about a week and then we had to buy extra - ouch!
We are now at the top monthly payment of 100GB and even that has to be monitored. If I don't take a daily look at our usage and warn her, then she could easily use double.
Which brings me to today's thought...


Last 12 month's usage

This is what my internet provider gives me on a regular basis so I can compare our usage and see which months we use more than others etc.


How do I know this is accurate? I don't have any way of checking their figures and can only trust them to tell me the truth. If they were unscrupulous people, they might just make the figures up.


My biggest complaint is that though we pay for 100GB a month, we can never use that amount. I am sure I'm not the only paranoid parent who fears the ridiculously high costs of paying for extra GB when you go over. Consequently, on the last day of the month, I might see we have 5GB left. They only let me know what I've used up to midnight the day before, so I'm left wondering what 5GB will allow me to have. I could watch funny YouTube videos, download music, Skype family abroad and buy Apps for my mobile 'phone, if only I knew I wouldn't go over the 100GB! Therefore, I use nothing to be on the safe side and they get their 5GB back unused. Before you ask, no any unused allowance doesn't roll over to the following month either, it's lost forever! They win, I lose. My daughter also plays Sims3 and she had a couple of expansion packs for her birthday. Great! To my horror, just to load one disc on her laptop sapped 5GB in an hour! In the second week, our allowance was nearly used so I had to ban her from playing until our new allowance started.
I understand that folks that live in towns and cities don't get this problem. Mostly their internet is unlimited. But not for us country dwellers. Not only do we have to pay for limited GB, we also have to pay for installation of the 15' mast that adorns the top of my house and faces south towards the town's transmitter.
Scariest part of all is that my internet provider can tells me what websites have used the most GB. They can say how long my daughter has been sat laughing at cute animals on YouTube or how many songs and videos she's downloaded too. I did suggest they hack in to my on-line banking to see how they are draining my account at the same time, but the person on the end of the phone said they weren't allowed to do that.....