[orangebird]

Originally Posted by dr wadd

With the cable companies, considering that they do have an effective local monopoly (and please, I`m not going to go into why for some people other providers are not an option again) they have a responsibility to look at more that simple profits. They are operating in a business where the terms of their operating licence mean that the competition they face is substantially reduced. If they are going to get those perks then they need to be balanced with a little bit more consideration towards the customer.
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But this amounts to the ISPs just sticking their heads in the sand. Bandwidth requirements are only going to increase in time, the ISPs need to deal with that. They cannot act like some form of neo-Luddite, stuck with the attitudes that they had in the days of dial-up and ignore the ramifications that broadband has on people's behaviour when it comes to using the internet. There will come a time when even "normal" internet use will fall into the ISPs definition of heavy usage, and by adopting this backward looking policy there will come a time when they simply collapse. Arguments that it will cost x amount of money to upgrade the network simply aren`t sustainable, sooner or later it will have to be done just to service the "normal" customers. Taking this approach of attempting to constrain behaviour will simply mean that those narrow-minded ISPs are going to get seriously bitten at some point in the near future.
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It is a question based on experience, and given the responses that you post to this board you could be the poster-child for this question.

It must be the company I keep on here.