[ILUG] Slightly OT. The which ISP Question!

[John Lyons]

On Mon, Feb 20, 2006 at 11:05:17AM +0000, Justin Mason wrote:
> Are capping ISPs taking action to not count the abusive traffic against
> their caps? I doubt it.

 What criteria would they use to mark traffic as "abusive" ? How would
 they do it ? How would they pay for it ? More importantly, would you
 want them to do it ?
 
> For what it's worth, Magnet's 150GB cap sounds pretty reasonable -- but I
> would still go for an uncapped scheme in preference.  This is simply
> because I don't want to support the practice of capping with my customer
> euros, if I'm given a choice.

 Most of the "no cap" service providers run "fair usage" policy (Smart 
 certainly do for instance). If you're using up a 150GB cap on a
 residential package you're generally well outside the realm of "fair 
 usage". ISP's with completely uncapped services usually end up with 
 1% of their customers using 50% of their bandwidth, this simply isn't 
 tenable in the long term. 
 
 The UK has seen a lot of this in the last year or two with originally 
 uncapped services changing over to capped and the influx of heavy 
 traffic shaping measures. 
 
 John