[Stuart]

Originally Posted by jonifen

I read something in the paper about the new games consoles that are coming out (Xbox 360, PS3 and Nintendo Revolution) and it mentioned about the facilities coming available that will let people download new games from the internet onto the console to play without having to go to a shop that sells them. This will definitely chew up some bandwidth and it'll be a full-speed jobby (i.e. using 100% of your available connection speed). What's gonna happen with this then? For Telewest people, that wont be a problem, but with the caps, it will be. As one company (for when NTL and TW merge), like people above have mentioned, they will need to make an unrestricted connection available OR make downloads from certain websites (like these game downloads for new consoles) exempt from the cap (should the merged company bring caps in for all levels).

They've been talking about doing this for nearly 20 years now.. To a certain extent it already happens (Half Life 2 was available for download via steam for instance), and there were services that did this before, but none have replaced the idea of going to a shop and buying a game.
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Originally Posted by Juan

Does this happen very often though? Once the capacity of a DSLAM gets close to its limit, an additional DSLAM rack is put in the exchange.

Only if there's physical room in the exchange.