*ALL* ntl Cap Discussion Here Please.

[Ignition]

Originally Posted by Chrysalis

ignition care to name this company? and is it london only.

thanks.

My friend lives in a preety much unpopulated area and only is getting adsl enabled in march, he has a very high need for traffic, he set out his plans to nildram from that start and told them he would be using 100s of gigs a month and this was the reccomended package for him.

He has no ADSL now but has a very high 'need' for traffic sexual frustration?

Check my profile the company is named there. Part of BT's April MaxDSL trials.

[Earwig]

All I ever see when I read these threads are people moaning about the caps and those that seem to defend them.


I to be honest am a Heavy user and can on some days download in excess of 10GB so a 1GB a day cap will obviousley hit someone like me very hard.
Of course I do not download this amount every single day but on more than a few occasions in a month I break the 10GB a day barrier. The point here is that although I don't do it all the time it is nice to be able to if I want to.

How impossible is it for NTL to cater for the Heavy user aswell as the "Average" user??


I also read alot of posts saying that "Oh every I.S.P is going to go hard capping soon"
This is a total load of rubbish. there will always be I.S.P's out there who cater for the heavy user and eventually they wil be the ones who get the customers. All it takes is for people to actually find out what is available on the internet and how to use the internet properly.
Some people may be surprised to hear that the internet comprises of a whole lot more than millions of forums and web pages...

What is going to happen when game delivery such as steam becomes common. I know most games from valve will be delivered via this service in the future. NTL users will simply not be able to use it. Half Life 2 comes in at over 4GB, with NTL that would take 4 days or more to download.....Why should we dip out?
What will happen when video rental via download becomes mainstream? Again NTL users will not be able to take part. There are a couple of these sites already popping up in the states and they are proving pretty popular.

It just seems that the whole future of broadband is about to take off but there is no suitable package available to NTL users to be able to appreciate them. The PC will very soon become the main peice of Home Entertainment kit and will be responsible for movies, music etc.. All streamed from the net.
In fact in my lates Custom PC magazine Hitachi has developed a TV with Braodband connection and a 160GB hard disc to accomadate this forth coming revolution. At the moment it is only available in japan but hopefully we will see things like this soon to. For reasons like this I believe that NOT all I.S.P's are going to go hard capped and MANY will cater for the heavy user becuase the "HEAVY" user will simply be part of a not to distant future. Sadly that future user may not be with NTL??

Just to make this post a little longer I just want to go back to the 100MBIT service that was talked about a while ago. Was the DIRECTOR of NTL not talking about video streaming and movie downloads etc... And that there was need for a 100MB line in the "Not to distant Future".........And then they go and cap their current flagship product at 1GB per day?? Hardly "Future" thinking now is it?

Other I.S.P's seem to offer such a higher cap compared with NTL and I fail to see why they cannot match them? Pkusnet currently limit their flagship product to 75GB per month. 1-8AM does NOT count towards this giving a potential of 275GB per month download...NTL?? 30GB p/m (or 1GB a day)

Ukonline?? 500GB per month...NTL?? 30GB per month (1GB per day)

I find it quite fascinating that the difference between the caps is so huge. Over 200GB more on the smallest one. Forget BT etc.. as they are crap and are just after money.

Why can NTL not cater for people like myself who want the bandwidth? What will happen in the future when people actually USE the internet? Surely NTL will have to change their packages? Hopefully they will not leave it to late becuase Broadband is picking up very quicly and only those that look to what the future holds will still be standing.

[Psychotext]

I couldn't agree more Earwig. Lets not forget NTL's adverts encouraging us to wear out our modems (or at least see if it was possible). Also look at the "Broadband Plus" (http://www.ntlworld.com/broadbandplu...adbandpluscust) offering from NTL which is full of bandwidth hungry things to do on the internet.

I could go on, and on but it's just not worth the effort. I think you said it all, but no doubt you'll get the usual suspects calling you a pirate **** and accusing you of making the service worse for everyone else.

p.s. To all of the "normal" users. Be thankful us superusers are around. Without us pushing for faster and better services since the start, the likelyhood is that you'd all still be on pay-per minute dial-up connections.

[Paul K]

Originally Posted by Earwig

All I ever see when I read these threads are people moaning about the caps and those that seem to defend them.
I to be honest am a Heavy user and can on some days download in excess of 10GB so a 1GB a day cap will obviousley hit someone like me very hard.

10GB in one day? What are you doing to go through that amount of data transfer?

Originally Posted by Psychotext

I could go on, and on but it's just not worth the effort. I think you said it all, but no doubt you'll get the usual suspects calling you a pirate **** and accusing you of making the service worse for everyone else.

Now you know you don't really want to encourage members of the forum to read your post and think of an inteligent, well thought out response do you?

[Ignition]

Originally Posted by Psychotext

p.s. To all of the "normal" users. Be thankful us superusers are around. Without us pushing for faster and better services since the start, the likelyhood is that you'd all still be on pay-per minute dial-up connections.

Push for unmetered dialup was from the Campaign for Unmetered Telecomms, a focus group, they along with some industry managed to get FRIACO out of BT.

If you weren't around now we'd all probably be on much faster and cheaper connections as the average bandwidth usage would be lower. Broadband was kickstarted by limited P2P usage and is now held back by excessive usage, 60+% of internet traffic is P2P now.

'Superusers' are the thing that forces contention down and prices up on the wholesale level on ADSL and to cablecos in terms of hardware and bandwidth provisioning.

Not going to thank 100+GB users for anything thanks, I helped kickstart it all downloading a GB a month from Napster ta. The wholesale abuse of P2P etc by 'Superusers' has just made life harder for light users of it - notice the law suits going out in US to small P2P users, and as the Plus.net example shows are forcing ISPs hands in order to keep their prices half decent.

I'd love it to be different but at the moment pricing, etc, is built on low contention models where bandwidth is scarce. If it weren't for the 'Superusers' using 10s of times more bandwidth than Joe 'Average' whose 'average' is skewed massively by these bods we'd have faster, cheaper connections because higher contention would be doable with no apparent loss of quality of service, especially on the upstream side of things as this is where the biggest difference in relative usage is. In some areas upstream usage is higher than downstream despite the highly asymettrical speeds, simply due to people running servers, be they FTP or P2P, on their connections.

A hell of a lot of capacity increases have been due to nothing more than this P2P / FTP upstream usage. Unlike DSL the access / transport network on cable is inherently asymettrical. Lines had to be drawn somewhere, if heavier users are going to leave ntl I think that'd go down as 'mission accomplished'.

[HD462]

Originally Posted by sav112

If itââ‚ ¬ÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â‚¬Å¾Ã‚¢s 30GB over the month no holds barr and I could download 2-3Gb in one day if I wanted to then itââ‚ ¬ÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â‚¬Å¾Ã‚¢s a great price is it not. I donââ‚Âà ‚¬ÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â‚¬Å¾Ã‚¢t download a lot but I would like the option if once or twice I wanted too.

That's the bugbear, I don't download much either, mainly program, and Windows Updates and such like, but you never know how you usage will change.

If it was 30gb per month, then it wouldn't matter if you used a few gigs in one day, so long as you balanced it out over the month. If it's 1gb per day, then it's going back to the old days of the 2 hour cut-off on dial-up, having to hope your update completes before the 2 hour cut-off appears. Only this time it will be hoping you have enough of your daily allowance left to do any updates / download you need to do.

Same scenario, just modernized for today.

I've been monitoring my use for 28days now, and it's looking like the month will be around 2gb use. But when we get the speed increase we'll probably be online gaming more (2 PCs), so gb used will increase. It would be better if you could play more some days, and less on others if you chose too, so long as your total use is within the limit. It's a bit short-sighted when they advertise broadband for gaming, streaming video, radio, video conferencing etc, then limit your use.

[Doofy]

Originally Posted by Paul

10GB in one day? What are you doing to go through that amount of data transfer?

Now you know you don't really want to encourage members of the forum to read your post and think of an inteligent, well thought out response do you?

grab a couple of films from usenet and go over 10 gig easily.

[Paul K]

Originally Posted by Doofy

grab a couple of films from usenet and go over 10 gig easily.

That would be piracy and illegal, surely no-one here would use their connection in such a way and then complain about being restricted by their ISP in how much they can download each month

[Psychotext]

I probably should have been clearer. I meant early adopters, not excessive users when I said "Super User".
__________________

Originally Posted by Paul

That would be piracy and illegal, surely no-one here would use their connection in such a way and then complain about being restricted by their ISP in how much they can download each month

This has been done to death, there are plenty of threads around here on how you could legally do 10gb a day with ease.

[Stuart]

Originally Posted by Psychotext

I probably should have been clearer. I meant early adopters, not excessive users when I said "Super User".

I am what you could call an "Early adopter". I have been using the Web since 1994 (possibly since 1993) and have been on a broadband connection since 2000. I still don't manage anywhere near 10 gig a day.

[Paul K]

Originally Posted by scastle

I am what you could call an "Early adopter". I have been using the Web since 1994 (possibly since 1993) and have been on a broadband connection since 2000. I still don't manage anywhere near 10 gig a day.

1994? Same as me Anyone remmeber Mosaic?? Spent many a happy hour downloading Nutscrape etc on a hi-speed 28.8 modem Well after I threw out the 9.6 and then my 14.4 modem anyway Been on BB since it arrived in Peterborugh so probably nearly as long as you 10g a day even when I was on 1Mb was never even aspired to let alone reached.

[BIGZIPZ]

An NTL power user service would be fine though, I am prepared to pay a reasonable premium for my 40-50GB a month usage. Apparently we lack choice:

"Yesterday the government highlighted UK broadband as having the best availability of all G7 nations. Sadly, research commissioned by the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) finds it lacking in price and choice"

http://www.ispreview.co.uk/cgi-bin/n...pyFyAkGXavmrGM

[ProfPete]

Originally Posted by Earwig

How impossible is it for NTL to cater for the Heavy user aswell as the "Average" user??


I also read alot of posts saying that "Oh every I.S.P is going to go hard capping soon"
This is a total load of rubbish. there will always be I.S.P's out there who cater for the heavy user and eventually they wil be the ones who get the customers. All it takes is for people to actually find out what is available on the internet and how to use the internet properly.

Sounds like Metered BB to me, and on its way in Q2-3 according to the investor thingie

[ian@huth]

Originally Posted by Psychotext

I probably should have been clearer. I meant early adopters, not excessive users when I said "Super User".

There is quite a lot of difference between early adopters and superusers. I was using networked computers over long distances before most of you were born. I had my first home modem in 1982. The fact that I was one of the first early adapters doesn't mean that I want to download several gig a day. I know quite a lot of users who download as if there was no tomorrow and the vast majority of them are pretty new to the internet. They haven't got tired yet of downloading for all they're worth, copying it all to CD and DVD because they soon fill their hard disks quickly. The thing with them is that they hardly ever listen to, watch or play what they have downloaded. The most they do with it is give copies to friends. I don't know anyone who sells it but no doubt some do. The early adapters that I know have got fed up with constantly downloading and do very little of it.
__________________

Originally Posted by Psychotext

This has been done to death, there are plenty of threads around here on how you could legally do 10gb a day with ease.

No one is doubting that you can download 10Gb a day legally, it's quite east to find that volume of legal downloads. But to do it day in and day out, every day, every week is absolute rubbish.

There is a lot of mention of what you will be able to do on the internet in the future. Many are saying that you won't be able to do these things on a NTL connection. Why not? This isn't the future it is now. Who knows what pricing and usage control there will be in the future? The problem today is that there is a minority of internet users who use the majority of ISPs resources and are not willing to pay the price for what they use. These are the ones who are holding back progress.

[DieDieMyDarling]

It was companies like NTL who told users how much they could download and how fast they could do it. It was the likes of NTL who sold the service based on that very fact, telling people it was unlimited, and they could get as much as they like.

The people holding back NTL are the mangement of NTL themselves, who screwed things up so badly that it'll take years to fix things, and in the meantime they'll slowly fall further and further back, while ADSL takes over the market.