[Ignition]

Originally Posted by DieDieMyDarling

In your opinion what makes a 'power user'? How many hours a day do you spend on the internet? How often do you watch Internet TV, listen to Internet Radio, are you subscribed to any Music download services, film download services, do you play online games a lot? etc.

I play Planetside, download TV series if I miss them, music from time to time, remote administration, 2 PCs running, so browsing, email, also newsgroups (binary and text)

EDIT: Bandwidth: /Current Downstream: 245.37kb/s º Current Upstream: 5.73kb/s\

From what many people are saying the 1mb teir will not be a viable low speed service due to the low cap. So in my opinion 2mb will become the low teir, in many peoples minds.

Not really, I doubt many 300k users use it for big downloads, its' attractions are that it's always on on a price point close to that of freecall dialup.

I totally disagree. My average useage for the past few months has been about 35GB (including upstream). I have in the past used a lot more, but i just don't use the internet as much as i did. We're both guilty of the same thing, i'm looking at it from my perspective, and you're looking at it from yours. You want more speed, i like the idea of more speed, but can't justify it in light of the low caps. It always becomes an argument about P2P and illicit software/movies etc, but there are many legitimate uses of bandwidth that can take up just as much GB's.

Nope, I'm looking at it from the point of view of at what point a company can make money and afford to innovate while keeping as many customers as possible happy. Based on what I know about the UK and international internet industry these limits are a reasonable compromise, and more generous than current competition in the low price higher speed market.

Check out Wanadoo, they've added hundreds of thousands of users on the back of low cost high speed capped services. This is why I'm saying your viewpoint is that of a minority, the facts say the majority like this kind of service.

You say if these services become more common that the prices will drop and capping will be done at a higher level. P2P is already very common, the numbers of people using the various P2P methods are sky high, the UK included. Yet we're seeing companies run the opposite way, choosing to take advantage of it and charge more for it. Was it you who said if the 5% of people overusing the service were to be capped, then the companies would lower their prices? If not I apoligize, but it's a very naive mindset. ISP's rely on high users, and people that will pay for the faster speeds. Ntl will use the 3mb teir as a selling point, they can boast the fastest speeds, knowing full well that not many of their customers (in comparison with those on lower teirs) could make use of the speed. Most of the people (in my opinion) who would want and make use of a 3mb service will be those who overrun the guidelines now on the 1.5 connection.

35% of ALL internet usage is Bittorrent. Bittorrent is responsible for 55% of all P2P. ISPs are having strain placed on their networks by P2P, as they pay a metered charge to their bandwidth providers, and P2P by nature tends to use non-peered connections. Check the links I gave to see how other providers are being forced to act to keep their prices to reasonable and provide good QoS.

I'd be very interested in finding out just how many people thinking of getting 3mb will use it just to download the odd file, at a faster speed, and how many will be getting it so they can download a lot of files, and do it faster. I'd have thought most would be in the latter category. And that those people are valuable to Ntl, as if they leave and very few people subscribe to the 3mb teir, they won't have the funding or the drive to look towards 4mb, 5mb and 10mb for the future.

Agreed to an extent on the first point. Entirely disagree on the second point. If the top tier is unprofitable where's the incentive or as you put it the funding to raise speeds so that you can lose more money each month on data transfer?

Considering Ntl have their own backbone and provide all the bandwidth themselves i'm sure they could do a much better deal than that. Don't you think?

Level3, Sprint, Cogentco, Cable and Wireless.net and all the other transit providers would disagree that ntl provide all the bandwidth themselves, someone has to take your data to other countries and they expect to be paid for the use of their networks.

It's those people paying £38 for not much use that keeps Ntl earning money. The 5% of people overusing the service cost nowhere near as much sa the money Ntl are making by charging low use customers £38, £25 and £18 a month so they can send a few emails and tallk to granny simpson across the water. I agree with your argument, you shouldn't be paying £38 for a bit of occasional browsing, emails and the odd security update. In an ideal world there would be two seperate teir systems. A speed system and a bandwidth allowance system:

I wouldn't bet on the 5% not costing that much. Interesting you use the word 'overusing' there. That 5% are a big margin muncher.

Teir system 1:
1mb = £9.99 a month (5GB cap).
2mb = £14.99 a month (20GB cap)
3mb = £24.99 a month (30GB cap).

So long as you don't mind paying premium rate for tech support, supplying your own modem, paying for engineer calls if that kit goes wrong, need I go on? There's a hell of a lot more to the costs to provide the service than just bandwidth!

Teir system 2:
1mb = £17.99 a month (20GB cap).
2mb = £24.99 a month (50GB cap).
3mb = £37.99 a month (100GB cap).

If ntl's costs are per GB similar to those BT have just to take traffic from ADSL exchanges and deliver them to ISPs (NOT including external bandwidth) those costs are a non-starter, unprofitable by default.

Or something similar. That way people could choose which is more important to them, speed or cap. Or, possibly they could come up with a decent pricing system for extra GB's on top of your cap. In the same way that some mobile phone providers offer Text bolt on's etc. Maybe £1.49 for 1GB, £6.49 for 5GB, £9.99 for 10GB, £15.99 for 20GB, etc.

Good idea! Perhaps in the future this will be looked at!

I disagree, as i pointed out above, companies rely on the people who overuse the service, as they are the ones prepared to pay for the newer, faster speeds, so they can get MORE downloads, and keep the ISP driving towards still faster speeds. It's how Ntl advertised broadband in the first place, UNLIMITED service. It's an interesting point you make about the quality of the service, Ntl's quality has been disgraceful! Email servers that work when they want to, Newsgroups that hardly EVER work, outages at least once a month in most area's. AOL are uncapped, and i've not heard of many problems with them.

Point re: driving forward addressed above. Newsgroups from what I've seen of them are being very well behaved. Outages once a month? Due to the size of the network outages are inevitable. To say everyone has an outage once a month is pretty unfair. AOL use BT's network for most of their ADSL service. As a comparison how many problems have you seen with the ntl operated virgin.net? If ntl are this atrocious how come despite only covering about 35% of the country they are the 2nd biggest retail ISP?

Btw, another point about contention etc. Most people who use P2P and the likes, tend to do most of their downloading at night, when the service isn't being used as much, it'll be interesting to see how the new 3mb speed will affect daytime useage, when the people who just want to download their updates faster, are doing so at the same time as peak service, when people on all the other teirs are downloading too. Compared to the 5% of users that download lots of files overnight, when most people on the other teirs aren't using their bandwidth.

Doesn't really make much odds when people are piling up loads of stuff to download in a queue. Those really hammering their service are just as likely to be doing it in peak time, when there are at the PC queueing stuff up. I doubt that many are up in the middle of the night just to queue up. Also uploading is rarely done just overnight. Can think of at least 2 people I know who are respectively uploading 24x7 on emule to improve their credits and seeding torrents 24x7. 1 person using 1/15th-ish of an upstream that should hold 250+ people. On 3Mbit they can munch 1/10th of a downstream expected to hold several hundred happily.