with all the gripes about AOL people have, one thing i can say for the 2 years i was on it, they never sneaked in stuff like caps, or limited usage, 0800 and as long as you like. £15 a month.
as for the bang for buck AOL are paying NTL, i saw somewhere they payed £85mill ion to be on the service in december last year, and they've been prepping since then. so its one off payment my guess, rather than bandwidth.
http://www.ispreview.co.uk/cgi-bin/n...yZEEVypqgaRroz
Anyway, you wont go through NTL proxies, it'll probably all be just routed traffic like DSL, where you initially connect to your exchange then off to the ISP's servers. so therefore its only internal traffic AOL need to worry about, this could explain the lack of a CAP. also this is a REAL bad move for NTL, why even bother with them? when you can use there service, with Xbox £29.99 on AOL for £27.99 with more content and access to the US caches?
then again, i cant see how NTL and TW get away with not opening up there services to competitors, look how BT has been butt k'd in the past years, cableco's have there networks to themselves. at least BT and Sky setup partnerships. NTL is um... alone?