Ok, well I'm generally relaxed about the proposed caps, for reasons mentioned earlier. But many people are up in arms about them. So how can NTL - or any other ISP for that matter, square the circle?
Well, I was thinking about how mobile phone companies do it. They manage to get along with a huge variety of customers, varying from ones who rarely if ever use their phones, to those who have them welded to their ears.
When I got my first brick-sized mobile, back in about 96 or so, it was with one2one (now T-Mobile for you youngsters), and they had free unlimited weekend calls to other one2one users. It didn't last long though - people were buying 2 one2one phones and using them as permanently connected baby monitors!
So now, you sign up to one of several options, either pay as you go where you pay nothing per month but pay for each call, or contract where you buy x minutes free per month. And the more you pay, the more free minutes you get.
And to me it seems like mobile operators and ISPs are in similar positions; they both only have x amount of bandwidth; and both need pricing plans to suit differing usage.
So if we look at how that might work for BB, I can foresee ISPs eventually following something similar. Just using notional figures, you could have:
1 Mbs
pay as you go: £5 per Gig downloaded
5 Gigs per month: £15, with further Gigs £1.50 each
30 Gigs per month: £25, with further Gigs £1 each
etc etc
2 Mbs
As above but price = x1.5
5 Mbs
As 1 Mbs but price = x3.5
etc etc etc
And who knows, maybe one day I'd be able to port my email address
pleasedontsendmeanyspam@ntlworld.com to wanadoo .....
Any views ??