Bill C I see you have resorted to personal remarks against me as you know I have made valid points.
Contrary to what people might thing a bigger network results on LOWER costs as the cost per user is lower.
1 - Buying bandwidth in larger amounts = more purchasing power so less price paid per mbit.
2 - Having bigger pipes results in less visible contention, eg. try doing 20:1 contention on a 2mbit pipe for 512kbit users, you would be lucky to get 8 on there without seeing issues and thats only 2:1 contention so when you have smaller pipes you are forced to lower contention to maintain qos this means higher cost per user.
3 - Ntl use transperent proxies again reducing costs, most of the isp's I mentioned if not all dont do this so their costs will be higher.
So in short if ntl do all this and they have to cap to make a profit then something is f**ked up somewhere, they are either making a obscene profit for their shareholders (i think some of you posting here own shares
) or their directors need replacing because they should be making a large profit with all the above practices.
I keep saying it again and again, although ntl dont compete with telewest it doesnt mean we cant ask questions why telewest are able to provide so much more then ntl and expect a good answer instead of abusive remarks made against those who dont like it.
The isp's I mentioned do I know if they have issues?, well I read adslguide regurly following the latest adsl news and I know which isp's have problems and which dont, and the ones I mentioned do not have problems related to contention and speed, nildram is the best example of this their customers consist of lots of online gamers and their pings will be very sensitive to contention so I am sure I would know about it if there was any issues there.
Finally why wasnt any of the following idea implemented.
Time of day cap - have cap for peak time usage and then make it unmetered for say 1am to 8am.
Unmetered package - unmetered 24/7 but speeds reduced to 150kbit at peak time.
Sell static ip's and other extras - It is proven on many adsl isp's that people want these things and they can have a high profit margin for isp's and as such subsidise other parts of the operation.
Reintroduce install fee - This free install has gone on for year's now when is it going to come back.
Introduce support tiering - For those who are newbies and will need tech support add £5 to monthly fee and provide 0800 (150) support, the experienced ones of us use premium rate support.
In short there are many sides of the argument, some of you may say you subisidise my bandwidth usage, whilst I could argue I subsidise you having to ring up tech support every day when you get confused as to why your drivers broken etc..