[Horace]

People have enough to worry about without having to watch their and their families bandwidth usage. The moment people start getting put down to 56k(if that is the case) or disconnected they'll leave NTL completely.
Explanation : It's damn easy to go over 30gig usage, a bit of virus infection here, a trojan or two there, spyware, kids downloading on peer to peer networks etc etc and then legitimate usage on top of that. When you have thousands of families who don't even understand the concept of a bit or byte how the hell are you going to get them to monitor their usage especially when you have many families now with networks, wired or wireless(as promoted by NTL ho ho) with PC's in kids bedrooms.
Are NTL losing money on broadband? If not then they should quit being greedy before their Indian tech support gets inundated with lots of zero-tech people complaining that their network sucks because they're getting crappy download speeds. This hasn't been thought through. If NTL can monitor bandwidth or will be able to shortly then they should only target the leeches that are downloading multiple gigs a day and leave everyone else to pay their monthly bills and not have to scream at the kids for using the PC too much. Even if people don't hit the caps, the worry of it is enough for them to stuff the service altogether, hell maybe we might be the first major economy in the world to see a decrease in broadband usage.