ISP bandwidth restrictions must go

This post was written a couple of weeks ago, I just forgot to post it.

You have gone: 0.6MB over your limit. The highest level of restrictions will now apply to your connection. Large file downloads, through Usenet, peer-to-peer and other file sharing applications will be blocked until the end of the current billing month. Don't worry, you still get broadband speeds for most activities such as browsing, emails and gaming.

My arse do I get broadband speeds for "browsing and emails"; it took me just over 10 minutes to load the bloody page up so I can write this thing.

With the state of the Internet at the moment, high throttling bandwidths and massive download speeds, we shouldn't be restricted to such a mediocre limit. This is what I would call "webified bureaucracy" by the ISP's. There's no need to limit how much we use on this insignificant limit.

I'm not sure how things work over in the US and other countries, but here we have "network contention", where a set of about 50 houses get a huge chunk of bandwidth to use. This is then shared between them, but offer speeds to each house to a fair percentage - around 6-8MB speeds, which isn't bad. If someone is downloading a huge file, that house will use their portion of bandwidth without affecting anyone else on the wire (in theory; rarely not the case).

But to limit someone to 10GB in a month is ridiculous. Comcast offer 25x this, and they kicked off a massive furore over it. If you were a business user who swapped documents, presentations and PDF files over email with your work, maybe used remote desktop to work from home, you'd most likely use up your portion of bandwidth within the space of a week or two.

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