[ILUG] Slightly OT. The which ISP Question!

[Justin Mason]

John Lyons writes:
> 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 ?

That hasn't exactly made the case for capping *easier*, you know.

If an ISP allows third parties to increase a customer's bills without
their consent, then the customer is getting screwed.   Just because an ISP
doesn't have a way to measure the abusive traffic, doesn't mean that it's
therefore OK to let the customer pay for it, as a result!

> > 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. 

Well, to be honest I'd consider traffic shaping -- especially of
high-bandwidth-use protocols like filesharing -- more acceptable than
capping.

--j.