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To add a little weight to the argument, many households have more than one computer and small home networks are very straight forward to set up these days, so it should come as no surprise that the one internet connection may be used by one or more PC’s. As the available connection speed has grown, so too has the rich variety of content available and the associated size of the files we download. It is true that there are some selfish individuals who do not play fair; they are permanently logged on to a peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing network such as Kazaa or eDonkey and it has probably been this behaviour which has led to many of the internet service providers capping in the first place.
An always-on Internet connection isn’t a license to download constantly and some of us are mature enough to use the service responsibly. I tend to kick off my larger downloads overnight and avoid the peak times as you are vying for bandwidth with other users then anyway. On average I’d say with 3 PC’s in the house we download anything from 20 to 80 gigabytes a month which I think is quite reasonable use of a 2MB ADSL connection.
The way people utilise their internet connection is going to fluctuate, and the 30GB cap or whatever it happens to be is still none the less, a very real psychological barrier. I can remember a time back in the early 90’s where with metered internet access, you would have to keep an eye on how long you had been online. The same is true with the download limit only you think twice before downloading a large file. How much have I used up this month? Will I exceed my download limit?
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