I'm more interested in how people are comparing a naturally limited resource, water, with a resource purely limited by investment, bandwidth
Much as I hate to bring inconvenient facts into a discussion like that water supply is naturally limited while bandwidth to a cable node is solely dependent on Virgin Media splitting nodes or sending multiple download streams to a node.
You can't compare bandwidth with water. It's hardly a 'fact'. You get more bandwidth with a couple of line cards, try doing that with water.
Virgin advertise their cable services as unlimited, water companies most certainly don't advertise as being unlimited nor do they suggest ways to use more water to make the most of your service. A ridiculous comparison. If Virgin's service is not unlmited and they cannot handle customers using it in that manner they should not advertise it as such, simple as that.
Call me an idiot by all means but downloading at full pelt for 20 minutes out of 5 hours hardly seems like abuse to me.