I was probably NZ's highest residential data user for February. Remember, Kim Dotcom spent most of February in jail :-). I've had to contact Orcon several times about this, and the helpdesk/support person's reaction when I ask them to look at my account every time is - "HOLY CRAP!"

I'm a very long term customer of Orcon, having been with them for (I think) over 10 years. I've always been pretty happy with their service, accepting that glitches and problems eventually all get sorted out and things always improve, and I've always recommended them to others. I'm part way in to a 2 year contract on a Genius, 30GB plan. Although it has an annoying number of problems (like dropped calls, features randomly not working) and the hardware is appalling, the service is OK and I'm confident it will improve.

Last month, while my back was turned, Chrome downloaded $1,300+ of data. This was not video, internet radio, games or torrents; it was just Chrome having a seizure after spending some days with multiple tabs open. There was no obvious way to tell this was happening, and I was unaware of it until the invoice arrived, and by that time I was already in the hole for >52GB for the following month. This is not data that was deliberately downloaded or written to a hard drive. Multiple systems on the network, the likely culprit is Chrome running on Ubuntu.

That is the background, and in that context I'd like to hear (perhaps even from Orcon):

• Orcon used to send warnings when data caps were approached (I have a mail inbox that contains several); why was this service silently dropped? Other than the obvious cynical reason, why don't Orcon help their customers by re-instating this, set at a threshold that is reasonably far above normal usage so that it is invisible? If the whole point of caps is to manage network resources, some indicators would also help to this goal. Surely?

• My Orcon usage page is broken; I cannot see any data usage for the past 12 days, so I cannot definitively verify the problem is not continuing. How are users supposed to manage their data when the tools we need to do this have been either discontinued or are not working?

• While this is in no way Orcon's problem, I had thought they might be more helpful in identifying the problem and preventing a recurrence. They claim they are unable to provide or identify the source(s) of this data usage; is this correct? I had thought that all activity was logged for monitoring by DIA etc. (They can, however, identify the type of traffic, which is slightly helpful, though they haven't done this yet).

• In the absence of any help or tools from Orcon, how do I go about identifying the cause of this problem, because I really do not want this to happen again. I have been running EtherApe which shows Chrome chatters an awful lot (far more than Firefox) but nothing so far that would lead to such devastating data usage.

I'd also be interested to hear if this has happened to others, and how they dealt with the financial side, this is hurting quite a lot - at the moment, I'm an extremely unhappy Orcon customer. It really is true - you cannot really judge a company until things go wrong, and see how they handle it. Despite a discount, I really feel Orcon are being opportunistic here (as is their right, of course - but this doesn't make me a happy customer). In fact, I'm seriously thinking of walking. Orcon is a very different company to the one I signed up with all those years ago.

Thanks.

(tl;dr - too much data; Orcon: tough, your problem; other people's experiences?)