NTL agreement goes for sale on Ebay

FIRST, A FEW CANADIAN readers have their say. If the providers ration broadband in North America, can this be a creeping trend over here, we wonder, as the ISPs rationalise as if there's no tomorrow? [Let's hope there is a tomorrow, Ed.]

Hey Mike

I can't believe the amount of flap this is getting on all the British sites I read for the ol' IT news. I mean seriously. This is like the guy who shows up to an all-you-can-eat buffet for $10 and then gets offended when they ask him to lay off after his14th plate of lobster. Normally I'm the last person to come charging to the defense of the various ISPs, but since I've been around in the industry (and at one point was involved in a start up co-location company) I can tell you that just because they are ISPs doesn't mean they get their bandwidth for free either.

They have fixed costs, and variable costs based on how much traffic outside their own networks they generate, just like anyone else. If every single one of their customers had run their 1Mb connections full-bore 24/7 they'd have been dead meat months ago. I mean, let's do the math here. Rough numbers, 50 of these guys going hell-bent-for-leather on a 1Mb connection 24/7 will saturate a T3 line.

T3's fully saturated cost about $20000 US a month to maintain. If the costs are even close to the same over in the UK there, that means if those 50 people aren't paying $400 a month each, the ISP isn't even breaking even on the bandwidth costs, to say nothing of the fixed infrastructure costs. Fortunately that probably hasn't been the case for them yet, but NTL's probably instituting this because they notice their own bandwidth costs are starting to creep up into the red zone...

And besides, 1 GB a day is amazingly generous by North American standards. If any of the broadband providers in Canada handed us a 1 GB/day cap, I'd be dancing in the streets. The caps we get are between 6-8 GB a month, depending on the ISP (either the telco, or the cable company). I have an expensive (compared to the basic home package) SOHO business connection at home and I only get 6GB down and 2GB up per month.

Hell, at the office, we have a Ubiquity connection from Telus (that's a fancy product name for a 10 Mbit burstable fibre connection) that costs us $3000 CDN a month, and even on that we only get the first 150GB free, and then $6 afterward. I had to install net filtering on eDonkey and Kazaa and all that after a few of the programmers managed to generate us a $10,000 overcharge in 2 months. Management was a little...miffed.

To see how it is in my neck of the woods for home service, check here:

Telus

And here's the package I'm using, which is marginally better than DSL:

Shaw Cable

And you'll note if you compare, these sites ALL claim it's unlimited. What they mean by that is unlimited connect time, not traffic.

So, in my not so humble opinion, this is a lot of screaming about nothing, in a reasonable world. The real problem as I can see it is that NTL's marketroids didn't think this through when the services were first announced and sold, so now you got a bunch of people inside the company yelling "Look at these connections! If everyone does this, this is going to bankrupt us! We need to do something" (and they're right, it probably would) vs a small yet vocal crowd of people who want to run the system to the edge because their contract says they're allowed to, and to hell with everyone else, even if they degrade everyone else's service and force the ISP down in a few months.

Just my 0.02 CDN

Barclay McInnes
Email address supplied

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That's nothing. Here in Canada, if you're using Bell Sympatico DSL at home, you're limited to 10GB a month. Oh, and this is the aggregate total of both uploads and downloads. For every gig you go over, you have to fork over $7.95CAD. This has of course, limited my downloads significantly. No longer can I keep p2p clients running 24/7, but I also have to deal with Sympatico's bandwidth monitor site that's always 48 hours behind. So if this 1GB/day limit by NTL does get applied, you'll know some pity for us Sympatico users.

Name, email address supplied

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