Yeah this is ridiculous. If we're going to usher into the digital download age and drop the plastic discs, this has to stop! Let's make our own internet!

Glad to see Verizon isn't looking to cap my Fios. They specifically advertise it as great for online video and games, so I would be pretty upset if they started crippling these very services.

That's a great idea! Who's with us? We'll use cans connected by string, and we can tap out the bits. If you hear a sort of "thunk" sound, that's an "ack". And if I hit the can with something metallic, that's a "ping," so try to respond quickly, I'll be timing it with a stopwatch. Make sure to keep your strings taut, or the whole network could go down!

On a more serious note, a city-wide wireless mesh network could be nice... if everyone was computer-savvy and if software was super optimized to reduce the unnecessary load on each node.

If this becomes widespread I'll just cancel my broadband and revert back to the life I lived the last time I ditched gaming and the internet for a couple of years. Really, it was a pretty good time and it wouldn't make me sad to do it again.

I'd have a hell of a lot more money.

Scary. I have no idea how much i use per month - i'm going to test this from today. I don't think it's that much... though i could be wrong, i don't think i use 100 GB.

[edit]

Does anyone know of a good, free monitoring programme? The ones i'm finding are pretty bad on the working and interface side of things. OS is windows 2k or Vista.

I am only half way through one cup of coffee so far this morning. So I am going to assume sarcasm.

I think about this month alone I have downloaded 3 gigantic clients for betas and countless patches.

I'm a big fan of NetMeter. Picking the correct interface to minotor can be a bit tricky (in my experience), but the latest version has simplified things by introducing MAC addresses for devices.

Many of the cable companies already have hidden bandwidth caps in place that if you breach you'll get a letter, or your service will just be plain cut-off. Or the other nice trick they are doing lately is the bandwidth throttling.

At least with this plan everything will be out in the open, no hidden BS like they are doing these days.

As far as the "fair share" comment, what do you mean by share? People pay for a service advertised as an unlimited internet connection. There is nothing to share, it is unlimited. They can use as much or as little as they want.

Wonder if Verizon does this with their fiber connections?

My fair share when I'm paying for unlimited Internet access is bloody well whatever I want it to be. To offer unlimited service but then call me a bandwidth hog because I choose to use it as I see fit is textbook hypocrisy on the ISP's part.

These companies have network capacity coming out their wazoos. They just want to use things like P2P as an excuse to extract more money for less service and to restrict competition from competing content. It's the same principals that are at odds in the current roaring debate in Canada about Bell imposing packet shaping on 3rd parties. They continually claim that P2P and other "bandwidth hog" users are choking their network yet they always refuse to provide any proof of it. I don't believe for a second that they have to implement these overages in order to remain profitable and even if they did, they maybe should have considered the future implications of offering unlimited access before they started doing so. It's certainly their right to go "We didn't plan this properly and now you have to pay more for less", I just don't see why as consumers, this is our problem.

I'm with a small Canadian DSL ISP that has barely 30,000 customers and they continue to offer an unlimited plan and are very profitable. When a small outfit like this can make money off unlimited, those who largely control the network certainly can.

Even ISPs that aren't capped can be real pains in the arse about "fair use". My old ISP (Tiscali UK) used to email me warning me about it when I downloaded 4gb of XBL demos in a day, despite their heavily advertised "no limits" promise. They threatened to put me on a limited bandwidth "heavy user" connection.

I switched to Sky broadband, who told me that I would have to be downloading 24 hours a day on 4 machines before it bothered them, and they seem to be true to their word. However, like most UK ISPs, I get nowhere near the "up to" speed.

My last job was at a DSL provider. Shortly after they were bought by a larger DSL provider, which was shortly before I left, they introduced a plan to eventually cap bandwidth at 5 GB per month.

Unlimited bandwidth that companies offer just because they know their customers will probably never actually use that much is going to be a thing of the past, and soon.

On the other hand it does give me some hope for the US economy since the US might be only place on earth left without any limits and thus will have a competitive advantage (assuming big business and paid for politicians don't screw this up too). This might have been the long term plan from the beginning as the internet is first and foremost America's network. The majority of english net traffic comes from the US so American backbones aren't paying the overseas cost in pulling the data especially for things like video. The US still has more local/regional competition in broadband than most countries and is more tightly integrated into economy/work/everyday life so it'll be harder to pull this off (I hope) in America.

Most places with extreme speed used for piracy 24/7 i.e. sweden, japan still don't rely on it as much as americans do in my limited opinion

EDIT: and yeah I checked Cox, I had used them for years before I moved, no complaints. They still don't have any caps but its nice to know that if you are hardcore enough to relocate then there are still some options

Thanks, Xan. I'll look into using that one!

I'm finding that it's a nice little program. Didn't find anything tricky about it, but then again the only NIC I have in my system currently is the one integrated into the motherboard, which the program set up automatically.

So far I've used 80Mb in two days. Granted I just quit WoW, haven't really run Ventrilo, and have been playing SP games mostly, so that might not be indicative of my normal bandwidth habits.