Originally Posted by SMHarman

Why are we moving to metered water then, because unlimited use is not a workable business model.

You expect to turn on a tap and get full pressure (bandwidth) as an when you wish.

You water company will clamp down on you if you leave a tap on 24/7, don't fix a leak on your property or generally act in a manner that would result in significant increase in the water utilisation at your property. NTL will clamp down on you if you downlload 24/4, loan you bandwidth to your neighbours or generally act in a manner that results in significant bandwidth utilisation at your property.

NTL DO NOT CAP. If they did to stick with your analagy, they would stop you surfing, you would turn on a tap and no water would come out until midnight. They have guidance as to acceptable trafic limits and while I can see how you can exceed them some of the time, to do it all of the time is hard work. I would need to find enough stuff to full my HDD every 40 days. Where do i put it then?

When the internet becomes a workable method for video streaming at broadcast quality, VOIP becomes a globally used communication standard etc then the limits will require visiting, but at the moment, the increased speed is likely to give you a less waiting on your internet page loads, are you really going to be able to visit them 50% more quickly? For example, visiting this site, you still need to read the text of the posts. This takes much much longer than it did to download the page.

In fact in the time it has taken to write this post there has been no upstream requests, and the usual random flickering of the downstream light on my CM. Hardly bandwidth eating activity.