Flat rate DSL doomed ? [BBC]

chill

BBC Reports:

The days of paying a flat rate for broadband access may soon be gone - we could be charged according to what we download, to ease congestion online and share bandwidth more fairly....
Between 60 and 80% of bandwidth is being eaten up by a fraction of customers - who are mainly engaged in peer-to-peer activity - and, according to the industry, the rest are penalised because of the heavy users sharing the network.



http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3109146.stm

Icehouse

Why anyone would have dsl/wideband and not use it's capacity beats me - it's hardly cheap anywhere if it's not used correctly!
Me, I have my laptop downloading music and movies all night almost every night.

MrPinK

Originally posted by Icehouse
Why anyone would have dsl/wideband and not use it's capacity beats me

Because it's a contended service. If everyone uses it to capacity then we'd all only get speeds of 1.3Kb/s

Richard Dower

I agree with this...let the Warez monkies pay for the videos and music they download. They are stealing it so why not have the ISP's make them pay through the nose for screwing up everyone else's connection!

The point of DSL is speed and fast downloads, it's not intended for twerps who leave the connection on 24/7 and are engaging in illegal activity.

Supercell

Originally posted by Richard Dower
The point of DSL is speed and fast downloads, it's not intended for twerps who leave the connection on 24/7 and are engaging in illegal activity.

I guess us "twerps" with dsl enabled routers better unplug them every few hours then.

Richard Dower

Originally posted by Longfield
I guess us "twerps" with dsl enabled routers better unplug them every few hours then.

Indeed...stop hogging the lines and let's us light/moderate users enjoy the freedom of a fast 20meg download.

blorg

People. Get things in perspective. ‘Excessive use’ in the UK is generally defined as over 30gb/month (and that is, as far as I am aware, on the cheapest packages). This is a lot of data, even for heavy users – and quite a contrast to the situation here in Ireland where (“apart from Netsource” – and note I’m using quotes) we have max 5gb caps.

So this BBC article is probably talking about the absolute maniacs, and saying that instead of ‘unlimited broadband’ we are looking at 30gb/month caps. Well, I can live with that. This is BT and NTL policy – quote from the BT Openworld FAQ:

Q: I frequently download lots of music tracks and movies - can BT Broadband support this type of use?

A: The BT Broadband service is designed to allow users the capability of downloading up to about 1Gb of data per day, or approximately 10,000 images, 650 30 second videos or 200 music tracks. However, to preserve download speeds for a majority of customers, BT reserves the right to control or restrict very heavy usage of the service.

So while I do think 'I have my laptop downloading music and movies all night almost every night' is excessive, so is calling anyone who actually uses the potential of broadband beyond ‘not having to wait for web pages’ a warez monkey. For example, I subscribed to www.emusic.com after I got my DSL, and while I certainly don't have it hammering away 24/7, I'm sure that I'm well over the very low caps specified by the non-Netsource ISPs (and at the same time well below 30gb/month).

Broadband is about new possibilities that weren't available before on dial-up, not just what you had before but a shorter wait on web pages (not that broadband is making much of a difference to boards.ie... sorry, sorry :-)).

I don't think a metered service (e.g. per mb/gb) is an inherently bad thing, if the charges were reasonable, say if it meant that the average broadband subscriber would pay say €20/month. However what’s the likelihood of this in Ireland?