Why? Bandwidth costs money. Why should a light user pay the same as a heavy user? It doesn't happen with anything else, such as electricity or phone calls.

Not really. BT can still offer cheaper capped packages, also fair usage can impact policies even if you stay within your cap. For example if you do all your browsing in the peak period so while within your cap you could hit a fair usage cap. BT can now offer cheaper packages with varying levels of caps as well as an Unlimited cap. Then there are speed and latency features that they can charge for as well. So gamers could be on a capped service with low ping delay and low contention and still pay less than an uncapped user.

I pay 39€ a montb for flat rate teleohone and internet. I don't think they offer anything other than flatrate these days over here. And all new connections, where you rake an internet package are pure VOIP connections, you actually have to fight to get a telephone line nowadays.

I'll be interested to see if more ISP's ditching FUP's will have an impact on those ISP's that didn't have the policies in the first place.
I'm with Zen Internet and there has never been a fair usage policy, just a data cap. If the big competition all drop their usage policies then it eliminates a point of differentiation between providers.

We are still tied to a land line before we can get broadband.

Am with plusnet and since they moved from a data cap to unlimited, my PS3 gaming has suffered horrendous lag - sometimes to the point of it being unplayable. I'd rather have max service and a data cap than bandwidth throttling and "unlimited".

The solution may be to split the networks into two one for gamers and the other for non gamers. So gamers get the performance that they need and they are not get impacted by the rest of us.

I've never experienced problems with online gaming in the past, there has never been any throttling or caps here.

That might be down to the fact that the telcos there have made the investment to have a decent internet backbone.

Yes, I think that is the problem. If the telcos and ISPs have done their part, then there shouldn't be any need for throttling, data caps or poor response times.

If I can rent a server for a tenner a month with unlimited bandwidth, why should I have a cap on my home line?

Because not all bandwidth costs the same. And there are a lot more people connecting to (say) BT's network than your rented server.

All the ISPs could given everyone unlimited connections. Right Now. There's enough 'dark fiber' up the pipe to do it. But the cost for them would be astronomical because (say) when you search for something on Google, you're not just using bandwidth on your ISP. You're using international links and possibly even transatlantic ones, all of which are owned by separate companies and all of which want paying for the traffic they allow onto their wires/satellite links.

With modern user requirements, there's not an awful lot of what's asked for that can be cached close to the consumer. As a result, it's hard for the ISP's to minimise their costs. So the end result is throttling. Not because they can't handle the traffic we ask for but because if they did and charged us what they are charging us now, we'd refuse to pay for it and they'd go bust. The economics are simple : people want the internet cheap. And if you buy cheap, you often get a compromised product.

This (obviously) won't last forever, as interlinks improve and the investment required to add bandwidth reduces. But right now, you can't expect to connect to any server, anywhere in the world, as often as you like, and not pay the actual price that costs. So if you want unlimited internet, you generally have to pay extra for it and there are valid reasons why this is.

Jon

But, this seems to be a British problem. ISPs in many other countries don't seem to have the same problems. Germany has a similar number of DSL customers, but over a.larger area and they don't need to throttle or cap.

It's partly because the UK is an island. Cables across water (even only the channel) cost an awful lot more to lay than cables over land (and high speed sat links even more so). Thus a higher price must be charged on the traffic down them to produce a profitable return on investment.

It's also of course cultural. The ISPs datacap because it ensures their profits and, so far, British consumers haven't made much of a fuss about it. That probably is changing over time.

That ignores the fact that the UK is also the main connection between the US and Europe so would probably quash that idea. The fact is that BT runs an antiquated backbone and even has BT has ridiculously short investment criteria that they have no incentives to invest. Many other countries are more than capable of creating enough capacity even though they have a lower population density like Sweden and yet they can offer higher speeds. It is purely down to the lack of investment, BT are far more interested in investing overseas than here.

The Netherlands (and probably many other countries now) also has a lot of connectivity to the Americas and Asia, which don't touch the UK. The next time I'm in France I'll do a tracert to America and see where it goes via. I only have access to UK endpoints at the moment, so I can't test.