Some good/fair points made to my comments above, time, as pip says will prove one way or another, but i can guarantee you something, they will never back down off the "heavy downloaders are evil" soap box, just wont happen, regardless of the results.
But for the record, and i don't think ISP's are solely to blame for this, there has been a major underestimation on the loadings being placed by every man and his dog trying to stream stuff, remember downloaders can run their file grabbing in quiet hours, we all have for a long time now, but the internet has no "quiet period" as such, just as streaming stuff is always going to be tied to regular sort of hours, with the evenings getting hammered compared to say 2am through 5am GMT
Ignitionnet, heavy users will always be heavy users i agree, but as you said the general usage is up hugely, and it's not down to increased activity from heavy users or increased copyright infringement
(i am getting a little p****d off with the constant banging on about that - they need to go after those downloading, duplicating and selling said material, thats where the loss of money is coming from !.... although i can see why, couple of years ago, i could buy 2 pretty new films at the bootsale for about 5 or 6 quid, if they didnt work you took em back and they swapped them no questions asked, no replies like "oh sorry sir you bought that over a week ago, and you don't have your receipt so we cant help you"
that you get from shops that charge you 5 times as much !)
Anyway.... as you will i am sure agree, the heavier users, yes i would fall into that group i guess, are also those paying the considerably higher premiums for the higher speeds and bandwidth, i know i have been since i switched up to cable broadband directly from dial-up to 10meg ! which if i remember correctly was the fastest at the time available to me, i then went to the 20, and subsequently the 50 ... and will probably go to the 100 if and when it's available subject to a couple of concerns.
..... so i don't want to hear about a bunch of freeloaders on heavily subsidised tariffs banging on about equality of service, or people preaching that the service for said groups is being affected by the heavier users.... if the heavier users didnt pay the inflated prices for the top tier services, the lower tiers would not be half as cheap! and if they were not as cheap there would not be as many users in total and the congestion would be reduced
.... you get (
or should get) what you pay for !