A member of Plusnet staff has kindly informed why they are capping and traffic shaping:
http://bbs.adslguide.org.uk/showthre...Number=1963724
Quote:
At peak time usage on our network gets to about 95% of total central pipe capacity. That's everything, but allowing a certain level of traffic shaping.
Now if we remove the traffic shaping overall usage increases towards 98-99%.
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http://bbs.adslguide.org.uk/showthre...Number=1963705
Quote:
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Then next month we'll start the process again, and the next month and the next. So we are effectively managing that level of unsustainability from the network, ensure a high quality of service. Without that huge chunk of traffic going to a small number it's there for everyone, more traffic for everyone means that less need for shaping.
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Essentially if what that dude says is true they're going to be emailing the top 0.1% of their users each month and asking them to either slow down, move to another ISP or face strict 30:1 contention with all the other users (note this is exactly 30:1, not the 30:1 you would usually see where a large number of users are on a pipe much bigger than any of theirs so statistical contention looks after things, but only enough bandwidth to give exactly 30:1 and the user base won't be very large, and this is gathering the heaviest users together. If there's 30 of them all they get is 2Mbit between them.)