[DieDieMyDarling]

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.

A good few people on here would disagree. Some people just couldn't afford to get a higher speed, now they'll be forced to either upgrade to 2mb or look elsewhere, as the cap just isn't good enough for them.

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.

On lower teirs i can understand how a lot of people wouldn't mind, if they're just getting emails etc. My real argument is with the higher teirs, 3mb mainly.

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.

In an earlier post you stated that if these services became more common then the charges would drop, now you're saying they're a stain on the system and costing companies too much money.

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?

I still think they make much more money from the underusers than they lose with the overusers. And in return the overusers keep them ahead of the competition, wanting the fastest speeds possible, and paying enough to keep it viable, so they can use it in advertising, that they are the fastest provider in the UK.

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!

Getting through to Tech Support would be nice, maybe with a premium service they'd HAVE to answer calls faster. But points taken.

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?

I'm still having problems with a lot of newsgroups, i don't use them much myself, mainly because i'm put off by them not working very often. I have problems with email at least once a week, sometimes it's only for a few mins, sometimes it can be all day, sometimes it's a lot more than once a week, and judging by the posts on this forum it's not just me suffering from it.

They're one of the biggest because they aren't just an internet company. They bundle TV, Phone and Internet together. Most people prefer to simplify things by buying all 3 products from the same provider. The only reason i haven't moved to another provider when going through problems with Ntl was it would mean taking my phone to BT. So i stuck with it in hope that they'd sort it out. It's better now, but far from acceptable at times. A lot of people on this board didn't wait as long as me, as can be seen in countless posts.

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.

It makes more sense to do your downloading at night, it doesn't get in the way of what you're doing through the day, browsing, emails etc, and also more people are on the foreign networks at night, so you get more people to share from.
THe thing is though, if that were the case, where the 5% of people overusing the service were crippling it, why have Ntl taken the speeds up so high? Whereas before most people on ntl were downloading at 30k/sec, standard, they'll be able to download at 124k/sec now. They've just put 4 times the strain on the network at any given time. When people were on the 1mb service as the highest teir, it was argued that they were at fault for slowing down other peoples service, downloading at 124k/sec constantly. Now the network is going to be flooded with people using at LEAST 124k/sec, while browsing etc. Is there less people on each UBR now to allow for that, or will people just suffer slow speeds?