There has been a growing trend over the last year or so of ISPs moving away from "all you can eat" broadband for £17 a month. Even though the initial uptake by customers, for such a good deal, was huge with the likes of Tiscali quickly becoming the biggest ISP in the country, I don’t think they took customers wants into consideration - we all know it was about the profit margin anyway, right? So now as customer complaints soar, the ISPs have to act or else lose their customers to competitors. The old, cheap, uncapped* [sic] packages couldn’t handle the huge volumes of bandwidth even the most average users are consuming. With the likes of Youtube, BBCi and 4oD/4 online - and the likes of Skype calls, online gaming and radio - the ISPs can’t handle the strain on their networks. And as storage space increases on PCs and restrictions become lifted, people are downloading bigger files than ever before - and bandwidth just can’t keep up.

So their solution is to price their broadband packages with clear monthly limits imposed, which makes so much more sense than the old method. What we get, as long as everybody plays by the rules, is a stable network that can be priced according to usage. The basic surfer can get by with a 4Gb limit, even consuming Youtube videos, once in a while. And if you spend a lot of your time downloading huge files, surfing, engaging in new media then your service can have a higher limit.

So why has it all started to happen now? Well I can see two reasons - the biggest of these is just the huge amount of demand a normal user has for the internet nowadays, as mentioned above. However the second reason I call the virus effect. If you think of tech know-how as being the virus, and the people being how the virus travels, the effect goes like this: Technical knowledge starts fairly thin, just between the geeks. They know the network is unstable and will crumble under pressure. The only people that also know this are other geeks. And they complain about the problems, without actually being heard. However, as the general knowledge about the internet and bandwidth increases (making the virus more potent) and as usage increases (easing transport) there will be a certain point - like a flash point - where everyone becomes tuned into the problem. The virus goes beyond the geek, because most people can now understand the bandwidth issues and get the new concepts. And add to this communication between family members / friends and the like, the problem becomes even easier to realise. You can normally see this in the "wild" when news stories start covering things as news that a "geek" has been aware of for months or even years. Producers and researchers are becoming tuned into the problems, because more people are talking about it and are interested in it, making it news. So the infection is accelerated. I think that’s what we’re seeing and why bandwidth problems, uncapped service and new pricing structures are being studied by ISPs.