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Originally Posted by dizziblonde
Jumping in after reading this yesterday (amazing what you'll read in the persuit of work avoidance) with my 2p worth.
What concerns me is where we'll go from here... long ago before I moved I was on the parents' BT internet connection. £15.99 a month for "anytime dial-up" (they lived out in the middle of nowhere so that was all there was - dial-up). It started off fine - a 2 hour kick off I could cope with. Then we got the 12 hours a day max or we boot you onto a (practically unuseable) high-users number. Since I moved out I hear that it's now got to a 150 hours maximum a month or we shift you onto pay as you go when you go over that - the initial change in the policy was the start of a very slippery slope.
I moved house recently and one of the factors was that it was into a cabled area (we can't get ADSL - BT haven't done the exchange) and broadband was on my list of priorities to get. Between me and my fella we are probably "normal" users of the service - mainly web-browsing, software patches, the fella plays online CM network games... we don't hammer the connection - but there are weeks when we'd go over the 1 gig limit (I don't have monitoring software - just going on the size of some update files and demo files - the Unreal Tournament one that was mentioned recently). The file sizes seem to have got massive with the explosion of broadband - software manufacturers do seem to be bloating the size of their patches, updates etc because they feel file size doesn't matter as much because "most people have broadband now anyhow." We do - but we're going to be limited - and I can see 6 months or so down the line that NTL WILL start enforcing this limit more strictly - they've left it a year before starting to mention it - once we get used to the friendly letters and stop complaining about that - they'll move onto the next step.
Like I say - I don't download excessively, I don't have streaming radio on all day and night, but I do go over the 1 gig level on more than a few occasions - especially when I'm off work... I'm not a P2P fanatic (got sick of wading through the junk on the networks) - but the cap concerns me because of the precedent it's setting to move the goalposts further in the future.
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I think you've summed up my main concern with caps quite well. What might seem like an appropriate restriction today, will be inappropriate tommorrow, especially with the way all IT stufff gets bigger as it "improves" with time. Thus the prcedent of a cap is potentially dangerous - it doesn't immediately affect me now, based on my current use patterns, but if it the limit remains set in stone and unalterable, it will catch up with me, and any "average user" one day.
ntl by thier attitude and outdated sysnopsis of what 1GB actually means (10,000 pictures = 1GB - what of a white cat in snow as my fellow anticap colleague recently suggested, what about modern 4 megapixel cameras which are now common place), show a level of intransience, and a dark ages attitude to the real world.