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Originally Posted by rmg
Bah, I should have asked for the 'blessed' not to vote 
I take it certain employees get certain privileges?
Fair play to you!
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rmg. |
Some people think that anybody agreeing with what NTL do is a NTL employee. I am not employed by NTL and never have been.
I have though been using computers since before most members were born and connecting to other remote computers long before what you know as the internet evolved. I am a realist and have researched the subject. I know that what some people are asking for is not economically viable in the long term at the prices they are willing to pay.
Broadband in the UK is relatively young and ISPs are fighting for market share. They have to use infrastructure that was never intended for the puposes that we now use it for. Broadband users today have largely grown up with services that didn't need usage restrictions because there were not that many people using them and there was capacity to spare. There are a number of people that have very high usage patterns, much of which is illegal and in contravention of their ISPs terms and conditions, but these have largely been tolerated in order to build up market share and to not give out any suggestion that competitors are offering a less restricted service than they are. There possibly are some customers with very high usage patterns that do nothing illegal and do not contravene any of their ISPs T&Cs but those I would say are very rare. If all broadband customers were to have similar high usage levels then every ISP would have severe service problems and could not continue to operate at present day prices.
Some ISPs have introduced capping as a measure to enable them to continue to offer products at a price that customers are happy with. Others are restricting high usage customers by moving them all onto the same section of their infrastructure which means that they only interfere with one another and do not adversely affect the majority of normal users. The people that say they will move to other ISPs if their service is restricted will be able to do so for a while but common sense dictates that this action will only result in the number of unrestricted ISPs becoming less and less as the very high usage customers are concentrated onto fewer ISPs. There will come a point in the not too distant future when there will be no unrestricted ISPs left and those who want a very high usage level will have to pay the price for it.
Advances in technology and improvements to the infrastructure will result in higher speeds being available and caps moving higher but at the same time new uses for your broadband connection will require more bandwidth than today.
Whilst broadband is marketed as an always on 24/7 service with the capability of moving a certain amount of data per hour it was never intended to be used to its maximum 24/7 at the prices it is marketed at. The price that broadband is today is only possible because of contention. Contention means that the user is sharing a proportion of the infrastructure with others and if they all try to use it to the full at the same time they will only get a small proportion of the advertised maximum speed that they subscribe to. When you look at problems that users post about, poor pings, lagging, slow downloads, slow uploads, etc, those problems are mainly only the result of contention taking affect and will become more commonplace if ISPs don't have prices that enable them to invest in more infrastructure or if they restrict the usage of customers.