[erol]

reply continued

This is simply due to people who use their connection all the time queueing up the downloads on the peer to peer. Therefore it's safe to assume that at least 50% of the usage in peak times is due to said users, so your arguments about them not causing congestion over what would be seen is nonsense.

Usage past 100% of capcity cause congestion. Every user using the net (ignoring differnet service levels) at these times is causing as much congestion as the next user. No more no less. Even if 50% of peak time usage is P2P, so what? So we ban P2P and peak time usage drops to 30%. So the ISP says hey we are only getting 30% usage during peak times. We need to load more users onto this network. They keep going until peak time usage approaches 80% again. So what do you do then, ban the next single application that generates the most usage ? and the next and then next until we have 1000:1 contention ratios and dirt cheap connections that can only be used for sending a couple of emails a day, because all other usage has been baaned as 'selfish abuse' by the likes of you.

It does cost companies more as they have to provide over and above expected bandwidth requirements due to these users, though of course your Gran should pay just as much for this as Mr Warez Monkey.

Does your Gran go into 'all you can eat for £20' restuarants and say she only wants one slice of toast and 'moans' about all the selfish greedy pigs that are forcing the price of her toast upto £20? There are low price services designed for low usage users. Use those. Even ignoring all that, if the cost of provision of the service is the same for your Gran as for mr Heavy users (and it IS possible to use the internet a lot without being MR Warez) then yes I am afraid she should have to pay the same. If there is a social inclusion issue there, then the government can and will force some subsisdising for those that need it, but for all I know your gran may be the queen, so I see no need to susbsidise her connection at the expense of anyone else.

If people want connections to use uncontended they can bloody well pay for what they are using. Compare the cost difference between 5:1 contended service and 20:1 and try telling me people using their connections 1:1 shouldn't pay more. They should pay more, both for the data transfer and a higher proportion of the fixed costs.

here I am just going to refer you to a peice I wrote for the 'Anticap lot'
http://www.anticap.co.uk/mythbusters.php

And no this is nothing to do with my internet service, I always get the bandwidth I pay for, and I want it to stay that way. Those people using the bandwidth 24/7 are slowing down the progress towards higher speed connections now.

No, exactly the opposite. Those people that use the internet a lot are _driving_ progress and the ever expanding nature of the internet. Without them what would be the point in increasing capacity at all?

Have you not thought that a good reason for not providing higher speed services is that as soon as you do warez monkeys start leeching 20, 40, 50GB a day on them, messing up contention and indeed costing money due to large use of transit bandwidth, and forcing of upgrades well before expected?

Yeah that is a great reason to not provide higher speed services, beacause if you do people might use it! A great reason if you are a telco or cable co maybe. What about people that might want to use it to have 'live in house' links to university (beacuse they are perhaps disabled) or to monitor their house or kids remotely or any other number of legitimate and empowering possibilites. Are they too to be branded 'selfish ****' ?

If we want faster and more competitively priced connections for all of us those patterns of use absolutely must be addressed.

Sure if what you want is cheaper internet access (via higher contention ratios) then go to a service provider that offers such. Don't insist that we all have to have. When the 'moores law' type price curve that exists for moving data around finally levels off, then maybe it will be time to look at restricting usage. to do so before then is to waste the potential of these wonderous new technolgies and their abilty to empwer and change peoples lives for the better.

bredbandsbolaget.se addresses it with traffic shaping but their network is under the cosh quite badly at peak times - this cannot be allowed to happen with cable as it would result in packet loss and other issues up to and including modems falling offline.

Ahh bredandsbolaget. These are the people that are sucsessfuly offering 10mbs symetrical uncapped connections into peoples homes at about 20euros per month are they not? And you are using them as an argument for why NTL, offering capped 600k/128k BB at (what is it now £25pm?) should start restricting people usage and charging by the MB ? Hmmm

This is ok though, I'm sure the people wouldn't mind this so long as Mr Warez Monkey down the road can leech his 1.5 Terabytes of warez a month and send his 750GB out (assuming 5Mbit / 2.5Mbit connection, won't happen for a while though ).

Here we go again. Anyone who use the internet a lot is Mr Warez. Hmm. If you have a problem with P2P then campaign against P2P. It is not P2P that cause congestion but usage. Remove P2P and there wil _still_ be usage. Restrict usage and the internet will never 'grow', not to the 5/2.5 that you think is way off, or to the symetrical 10mbs that bred???? (if you think I am gonna spell that!) are providing _today_ in Sweeden at less than NTLs 600k service.

I would quite like to see 2 things you hate, capping of usage, tiered depending on how much you pay, followed by x pence per gig after this is exceeded.

And you are welcome to them, just do not force them on _everyone_. There are ISPs that offer these or better still move to Oz the land of perfect BB (NOT!)

I know you'll absolutely disagree but please no more horrible analogies

I'll try.