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Originally Posted by Dr. Plummer
The letter is from a 'Donald' in internet customer care team, I would of thought this was an AUP matter?
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One reason could be that the "overuse" isn't covered by the AUP directly as such if the issue is to do with maxed out upstream rather than downstream problems.
The AUP makes no mention of a specific upstream limit, although I believe a rule of thumb being used at one time was about 300MB a day being a figure considered excessive.
I can see one possible reason for them not being specific about this though as AFAIK on-line game play by its very nature uses more upstream bandwidth than most other "normal" use.
For me it was no accident that the original change to the AUP came at the time NTL were going all out to sign up people for the various Xbox & PS2 type use. By signing up more people playing games they were perfectly well aware this would shift the usual balance between upstream and downstream usage.
If this is the case then asking users to avoid running up-stream servers at peak times should be the focus not limiting downloading at all.
As it stands all the heavy users could comply completely as regards the AUP downloading limits, or even give up downloading completely, but still cause congestion by running servers during peak times.
Essentially what is required is an "Intelligent" rewording of the AUP that would promote and steer both upstream and downstream use for file transfers towards off-peak times. Most will have no problem complying with this as file transfers can be scheduled to off-peak times whereas browsing and game-play can not.
The result at the end of the day must surely be to get the maximum use out of the equipment with the minimum disruption to individual users.
The current AUP does neither. It instead applies what may well be unnecessary restrictions on some, thus annoying them and many others, but without actually improving the quality of service for anybody because the tool being used is too blunt and aimed at the wrong target.