Pretty much every ISP in the UK has bandwidth caps. The smart people shop with the ISPs that don't.
If people weren't so fucking stupid and actually understood what they were buying instead of being mindless drones maybe we wouldn't have such strict bandwidth caps. I know a few people who are on 5GB a month b/w caps. I told them that was practically nothing and that if they so much as watch any videos or anything on demand (like BBC iPlayer or iTVplayer or 4oD) that if they only watched their soap operas every day on the service that they would run out of bandwidth after less than 2 weeks. They just didn't care. I told them that they would incur a charge if they went over their allowance and they just accepted that they should pay for it if they went over. I couldn't believe it.
People will just side with whichever ISP screams at them the loudest from the TV and just stick with it. When I used to work in a call centre for Freeserve (now Orange) we'd get customers ringing up about general billing stuff, i'd advise them they could get a much cheaper tariff based on their usage but they just wouldn't change, because "it's easier". Idiots.
When we get cable hooked up i'm hoping that I can still get 20mbps. Where I used to live in the same city it was about two miles from the local exchange and we got the full 20mpbs with Virgin, now I live within half a mile from the exchange so I'm hoping nothing changes. If I get the full 20mbps I'll upgrade to the XXL for 54mbps then I'll just have a geekgasm and die if I hit maximum.
Comcast Residential has a bandwith cap, they just wont tell you want it is. From what I have seen it is roughly 150-200 gigs a month. If you go over they will flag your account and you might get contacted about what you are doing. If you ever get said call, just say you watch alot of Fancast (Comcast's frontend for movies/tvshows) and they will usually write it off.
Now if you have a commercial account, even in a residence, well they just dont care.
Some years ago(maybe 2005) we had slow to death internet(256kbs) but it was DSL and it was UNLIMITED. Any how , they said that they will upgrade to 1mb/s which was something heavenly because it was same price for 4x the speed. Then they said it will be a 15GB limit though and a lot of people seriously decided to boycott(we had a monopoly) , 15 GB is really low if you do anything more than email and website browsing , at least 30 or 50. Then we heard that the telecommunication company found out that there was somewhere with 100 homes connected to 1 internet account!!!
I think the number is being highly exaggerated by the people, maybe it was 10 homes. I also wonder why would any one do that , its not like we are in Nigeria, and $100 is not that much to share the expense .
Now we got 4mbs but it goes down to 512kbs I think after 12-15 GB limit, which fairly good and it is unlimited use, but the internet became a lot more demanding with torrents and videos reaching huge sizes like 1 GB.
so that is a little nice story about bandwidth limit.
kunoh wrote:The only thing I play online really is WoW and sometimes a few games of Team Fortress 2. Surprisingly, I really haven't noticed a difference that much. Anyone else care to post their internet speeds and what they play?
If you already have a good connection with low ping, then you won't notice any speed difference. Try to stream videos (preferably not from YouTube) or download some files (from a site that doesn't cap your speeds).
Yeah, download Acrobat Reader from Adobe, or (if you have nVidia graphics) new drivers from nVidia's site. They are two off the top of my head that have great upload speeds. In fact, try download both at the same time.