from a recent BBC website article:

The BT Broadband Basic service imposes a 1GB limit on how much customerscan download per month.The 1GB cap is the equivalent of 20,000 web pages, 200 MP3 music tracksor 100 large software programs.

As NTK said this week, "...anyone know what the other 640MB on the Photoshop CD is for?"

"This is plenty for half of all broadband users," said Duncan Ingram, Managing Director of BT Openworld.

I assume, at least for now, he means each user and not all 2M UK broadband subscribers combined, a pool which would leave them each with 550 bytes free per month ;-P The definition of "plenty" is an misinformed assumption, backed up by an absence of any evidence. Oh, and don't even attempt to convince me that churned router stats converted to management powerpoint slides are 'evidence'...

Embedded within this page is perhaps a hint of the real reasons for offering such a service ...

"It is pretty generous and makes quite a significant difference to our economies," he told BBC News Online.

The use of the word "pretty" is just plain wrong. The use of the word "generous" beggars belief. The use of a vague third person ("our") is deceitful, unless it means pretty generous to ecomonies of ("our") BT profiteering from leveraging the very low end broadband market into volume charging.

"We are confident it will play a big impact," said Mr Ingram.

At least most of Ingram's quotes made sense under close scutiny, but this can only mean that with further competition in the entire broadbandmarket, BT sees per packet pricing (volume charging) as pretty(attractive) generous to BT coffers. The next step of course, will be targetted to volume charging non-LLU ISPs who use BT's ADSL delivery network. Once this genie is out of the bottle, it will drag 90% of the entire broadband industry into a hamstrung volume charging model, because the on-selling ISPs will have little or no choice in passing on unpredictable BT costs to their customers.

Scare mongering? No. The precedent lies in easy view. Amongst other countries, Australia went through just such a coup in the mid-90s when US peers (C&W, etc), Telstra and Connect.com forced such a charging model.

The impact will be large. Instead of providing pipes for equitable and predictable cost, the more successful a customers usage of a product, the more they are charged. This model stifles online activities, endeavours, business initiatives and innovations. In an environment of increasing international outsourcing, so much for BT helping this country's move into the "smart" information economies.