Tech
James Chamier, who was one of the first triallists of ntl cable modem services back in 1999, offers his view on ntl's 1GB/day download cap.
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NTL, the communications company, have this weekend proved they are not very good at communications. I have been a broadband customer since the service was in 'trial' in the Guildford area in 1999. This was before NTL launched their unmetered dial up service 'ntlworld' and long before ADSL had been released.
Last Friday (7th Feb) NTL updated their Acceptable Use Policy. They added a statement describing the amount of network bandwith they feel acceptable. Instead of looking around the world at other ISPs they decided to put a daily figure of 1 gigabyte. No mention was given of what happens if you exceed this amount.
This caused a storm of protest on the (recently purchased by NTL) nthellworld.com discussion forum.
I have determined, from reading between the lines, that NTL do not have in mind a hard limit. They are averaging across a month. However they haven't stated it!
As DigitalSpy has reported in the past, this isn't the first time NTL have had problems with an update to the Acceptable Use Policy involving servers. This annoyed a lot of techincal users but the average home user wouldn't have really noticed.
This update has stirred a lot of emotions and NTL need to clarify issues quickly. They need to find a good analogy and I think the best is the car. We don't build roads in the country for everyone who owns a car to do 70mph at the same time, people accept a level of congesion and limitation. Broadband is the same.
NTL state in their update (http://www.ntlworld.com/service_update.html) that their competitor BT's ADSL product is similarly limited.
It is very interesting to note that although NTL have a lot of subscribers, they employ methods of bandwidth conservation such as the hated "proxy" servers. The ISP Pipex with their home user ADSL service do not use proxy servers and have no download limits.
NTL may find they lose a lot of customers over this, and those customers will be very difficult to get back.
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NTL, the communications company, have this weekend proved they are not very good at communications. I have been a broadband customer since the service was in 'trial' in the Guildford area in 1999. This was before NTL launched their unmetered dial up service 'ntlworld' and long before ADSL had been released.
Last Friday (7th Feb) NTL updated their Acceptable Use Policy. They added a statement describing the amount of network bandwith they feel acceptable. Instead of looking around the world at other ISPs they decided to put a daily figure of 1 gigabyte. No mention was given of what happens if you exceed this amount.
This caused a storm of protest on the (recently purchased by NTL) nthellworld.com discussion forum.
I have determined, from reading between the lines, that NTL do not have in mind a hard limit. They are averaging across a month. However they haven't stated it!
As DigitalSpy has reported in the past, this isn't the first time NTL have had problems with an update to the Acceptable Use Policy involving servers. This annoyed a lot of techincal users but the average home user wouldn't have really noticed.
This update has stirred a lot of emotions and NTL need to clarify issues quickly. They need to find a good analogy and I think the best is the car. We don't build roads in the country for everyone who owns a car to do 70mph at the same time, people accept a level of congesion and limitation. Broadband is the same.
NTL state in their update (http://www.ntlworld.com/service_update.html) that their competitor BT's ADSL product is similarly limited.
It is very interesting to note that although NTL have a lot of subscribers, they employ methods of bandwidth conservation such as the hated "proxy" servers. The ISP Pipex with their home user ADSL service do not use proxy servers and have no download limits.
NTL may find they lose a lot of customers over this, and those customers will be very difficult to get back.
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