[Hans Gruber]

Originally Posted by Lee

There seems to be much talk on both threads about the reasons for NTL capping users. So far I havent seen anyone mention what I think is the most obvious reason for capping.

NTL are protecting their interests. Funnily enough, so are BT too. What do they have in common? Well, they both provide telecommunications and/or TV services and it would have a huge impact on both of them if they were to lose that revenue.

So people using VOIP, or watching TV/Films via the internet is gonna hurt NTL hard, especially when they become more mainstream.

VOIP is starting to really take off now. You can buy a phone to put on the wall, plugged into a network socket instead of a NTL Phone point, and get very cheap, if not free, phone calls. No complicated techy stuff to setup.

It will get even more easier I suspect, with wireless VOIP phones so you dont even need the network point.

As bandwidth is getting cheaper (and will continue to do so) its fairly obvious to me that NTL aren't capping people because of the cost of bandwidth, but because of the potential threat to their business of people being able to get their phone & tv from a different source, cheaper.

There is a case going through the courts in the US, where an ISP (who also provided telecoms) was allegedly, corrupting the data packets of VOIP calls to stop people using this technology.

All capping does is hurt the future of the internet - although funnily enough NTL will now benefit from bandwidth hungry applications like online TV by charging for the bandwidth.

Who wants to wager that NTL will bring out their own VOIP/Internet TV service, which doesnt count toward your cap.....

or am I just being cynical?

I'm sure I said that somewhere

It certainly does make sense