[obvious]

Originally Posted by ian@huth

It is very easy to quote what is possible on a connection but it is impossible to know what usage there is on every UBR unless you work for NTL and are privy to those stats.

not sure what your point is.

The main fault with your argument though is that you have no control or comeback against anything that NTL say or do.

Not true. To say I have no comeback against anything ntl do is ludicrous. If ntl break their side of a contract I could take the matter to court.

Check DOCSDIAG as much as you like but that does not prove anything other than what was happening at a specific moment in time.

*If* docsdiag is still working then it would be a simple matter to run a series of snapshots over time to establish an overall picture of usage patterns.

If NTL were to contact you

1 'if'

and tell you to modify your usage

followed by an 'and'

and you didn't

followed by another

so they followed up with removing your service you will have to look for another ISP. There is nothing at all that you could do about it.

Of course there is. I'd seriously consider taking them to court for breach of contract. My argument being that my internet usage did not affect the service for other customers (I'm on a particularly quiet UBR)

Tell us how you could defend use of say 50Gb per month and keep your connection if NTL decided they no longer wanted you as a customer.

see above.

People mention illegal activity because that is the primary reason for caps being introduced.

That might be one of the reasons they mention it but I still dont know why they get worked up over it. Incidentally and AFAIK the reason caps were introduced is because somebody got the decimal point in the wrong place when calculating the percentage of 'bandwidth abuse'. They cocked up big time.

It is quite easy for NTL to identify users who download more than 1Gb per day and for them to discover what they are downloading no matter how you change things to try to hide what you are doing.

Not true. NTL cant currently tell what you are downloading. At best they can tell what sort of thing you are downloading. If they were to interrogate data at the packet level and decide what is fit and unfit then they would be seen as a 'content provider' rather than a 'service provider' and could well be held liable for any illegal content that was transferred through their system.

In any case it is a trivial matter for customers to use a service such as Secure Tunnel to mask the type of data they are downloading.