[Ignition]

Originally Posted by JamieLee2k

If you are paying for it you should be able to use the internet any time you want, without NTL or other ******s looking over your back at what you are downloading and how much you are downloading, it's all about money at the end of the day

That's an excellent idea, as ntl operate at a nominal 20:1 contention ratio maybe all users should be hard capped so they get what they pay for and no more. Hit 1.5GB a day on 3M 1GB/day 2M and your service disappears for the rest of the day.
Thanks for that suggestion.
P.S. you don't need an apostrophe ' to pluralise.

Originally Posted by patchwork

If they are stuggling now due to 5% of the users downloading 10GB then we are probably looking at a company on the slope to bankrupcy.

Damn, in that case I suppose pretty much every other ISP in the world is on the way to bankruptcy as well, infact any ISP that has ever taken action against heavy users or applied caps to their service. As they won't upgrade to accomodate a tiny % of the userbase wanting to download like hell must be on the brink.

Originally Posted by patchwork

2 Movies @ 1.5Gb each
3 Episodes of eastenders = 2GB
2 games, lets say they use 1GB between them

This totals 6GB, and that's just a few hours of light entertainment in the evening.

Blimey... find me a family that actually does that. Find me a couple of online games that use 500MB each over the course of an evening.

If this is daily use it's insane. I think most people still generally use the TV, tend to catch up with EastEnders on the omnibus edition or the other BBC channels, and tend to download the odd movie now and then rather than making it a daily occurance.

I could quite happily say 'What if I want to download the entire games ISO section of nforce.nl' doesn't make it 'typical' usage...

Originally Posted by patchwork

I can get uncapped high speed ADSL, a phone line (with better night time rates) and a better TV package for less than NTL are charging me, and I won't have big brother analyzing every byte I choose to download, or telling me when I can and cannot use the service I pay top money for.

NOW we're getting somewhere. Considering that you can get better phone and TV deals than ntl are offering just why are you with them? Run, run away! It's consumer choice, it's great, you don't like a service you take your business elsewhere... or complain about it on a forum. Wonder which is the most constructive?

Originally Posted by patchwork

I must also point out that since my upgrade to 3Mb my connection hasn't been too good at all, I'm not getting full bandwidth speeds when I want them and its also disconnected half a dozen times, even those cheapo ADSL services do better than that LOL.

Sorry to hear that you can't get full speeds all the time. Your disconnects are in no way related to the upgrade, and imply a fault causing the slow speeds rather than anything else. Of course it could be a side effect that would be a hell of a lot worse if services were all uncapped. It's called contention. You can't expect full speeds all the time, especially on uncapped deals and I pity the support department of an unlimited 8Mbit ISP with you as a customer. BT right now are warning ISPs taking part in their 8Mbit trial to advise customers to expect throughput as low as 2Mbit/s at peak times.

You'd love the super Japanese deals, where you don't see much over 20Mbps ever on a 100Mbit line, and going outside of Japan you see a couple of Mbit or so (though this is the part that people like to forget when worshipping Japan, Korea, etc).

Originally Posted by Little Devil

Why have any cap, after all, we allready have one of the slowest services in the world.
Just look at south Korea 20M service no cap, Japan 50M service no cap. Why do people put up with this BS, this is a competative market, where even BT are now running trials on an 8M service.
If no one bought into a capped rate service, how long would it last?

Why have any cap? Well, I'm going to be as blunt as I can and frankly don't really care who I offend.

As a general guide we can fit maybe 1200 users onto a uBR card before we start seeing capacity issues. Sometimes a lot, lot, less, but 1200 modems is about as high as we can normally go.

I have been speaking to a friend with an ISP whose tiers are 10Mbit/1Mbit and 5.5Mbit/640kbit. Running these bandwidths they can fit up to 2000 modems onto a single card and still provide a good service.

Bluntly speaking if there weren't so many people caning their bandwidth, meanwhile demanding that they never see their speed drop below the maximum our speeds would be faster, as the speeds could be higher, prices lower. Those bitching about the speeds while saying they'd rather have 1Mbit uncapped than 3Mbit capped are shooting themselves in the arse, along with those of us who would rather have burst speed than download slowly but constantly.

Yes, South Korea has 100Mbit services, although the bit you don't think about is that once you leave the major cities you are faced with paying about £20 for 1.5Mbit, still cheaper than here but not much. Japan have 100Mbit, however you'll never get near 100Mbit inside Japan (it's that big UK swearword contention wooooo), and once you leave Japan and go to the USA, Europe, etc most Japanese see closer to 2 - 3Mbit of throughput. Their bottleneck is in their transit links rather than the access networks.

BT's 8Mbit trials aren't running just yet, and the ADSL2+ trial is for employees only. See above for BT's warnings regarding performance degredation.

People are buying into capped rate services, simply because they offer them a better deal than the more 'communist' type services where everyone pays the same regardless of whether they want to download 1GB/month or 1000GB/month. It means better deals for them as they don't have to subsidise other people's usage. Can you blame Granny who checks her mail once a day for wanting to spend £17 a month rather than going unlimited and having to pay an extra 6 quid?

Originally Posted by stuG

If you cap the upload only ... (which ignition said affects some parts of the network currently and ideally), you would really be getting at the people that really affect the network

Sorry dude that used to be the case but after the increases in download making the ratio of download to upload 10:1 there's more capacity for downloading to affect the local networks than uploading.