"If you recall, last year a Belgian activist got everybody riled up with an incorrect rumor that Canadian phone companies Telus and Bell Canada were planning to start charging customers extra to access certain websites. That never happened (so far), but one Dutch ISP appears to be taking us one step closer to this possible future. Dutch broadband provider UPC says they're going to start crippling bandwidth used by certain protocols and high-bandwidth HTTP traffic from noon to midnight. The rhetoric being used by the ISP should sound familiar:
UPC claims that the system, which will run from noon to midnight and will cut users' bandwidth by two thirds when accessing bandwidth-intensive services, will enable it to solve network problems and provide customers with faster access...."We want to prevent the excessive internet usage by a very low number of customers - approximately one per cent - causing congestion for the other 99 per cent," the spokeswoman said.
So to manage one percent of their user base, the ISP is employing an approach that all but cripples all users broadband connections for twelve hours a day. It sounds like UPC needs to find another line of business to be in if they can't find more subtle ways of managing network capacity."
That sums it up nicely