I wrote something about this on my blog. Please check it out.
http://thetechpirate.wordpress.com/2...09/got-capped/

IMO. Capping of some services was inevitable as services such as Bittorent has risen in popularity.
ISP's can offer faster connections these days, perhaps on Networks which can't fully support the capacity required.
P2P by its nature uses a lot of this capacity. I guess they have a choice to make. Do they allow uncapped P2P speeds for a minority of their members, or do they look after the majority who probably browse the web and view forums such as CD Freaks and cap P2P to insure their whole network doesn't grind to a halt?

in my experience its usually the adsl companies that cap users for heavy downloading, i've seen download rates go way down after heavy usage on certain isp's. I'm on telewest and you might pay through your teeth to get a fast connection but I've been using bittorrent ever since I got broadband (nearly 1.5 yrs) and pretty much used it constantly with dling and uploading and never ever got a warning or got capped. I guess it depends on what you download eh?

I agree with ppoppin. It depends on your ISP if you get capped or not. As far as if they should do it or not, I'm not so sure. If it is having a noticeable negative affect on the ISP's network speeds, then by all means do it. But I wonder if it really does affect it as much as they would have us believe. Perhaps in a large city it is an issue, but in a more rural setting it doesn't matter? I'm on COGECO in the Niagara Peninsula in Canada, and I've learned (from forums) that they throttle torrent speeds in a nearby city, but I live out in the countryside 20 minutes away from said city (very fortunate to have cable!) and have never been throttled myself, having upload speeds around 120kb/s.

no matter how you connect, cable or dsl, the bandwidth is shared at the backbone,
when that saturates then the provider has to "ration" or allocate that bandwidth.

Dont you think its false advertising if they advertise that you get 'unlimited' broadband and then you get capped for downloading too much? It doesn't matter if they say 'fair use' in their T&C's, if they offer 'unlimited' broadband it should be just that 'unlimited' 24/7 and if they can't do that for all their 'unlimited' broadband customers then dont advertise it as that. Considering that every single broadband isp harks on about how they are better than the next isp cos they have 'faster connections', then capping dl speeds is ridiculous and downright dirty IMO

False advertising is right - I found out about my ISP's "throughput cap" the hard way last month - I got cut off for a day. Apparently "unlimited" meant "60GB/month". Bastards.

I also found this out the hard way. I downloaded probably 2TB and uploaded close to 1TB in 2005. I lost my internet for a day and have laid low since.