http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/ ... and-636937

Let's hope it spreads to Europe

too bloody right
you pay for a connection at a given speed then i want that connection at that speed
not some a-hole at an ISP dictating want i maybe allowed or what i can maybe achieve with this 'upto' bollocks

if the infrastructure cant handle the load then they will have to invest in the infrastructure so it can handle the load
that is the ISP and Telecom's industry problem not mine. all i require is the speed that i have paid for nothing more nothing less …

Generally speaking, that is exactly what you get. Any misunderstanding is down to bad advertising and lack of information, or inflated expectations.

If you pay about £5 a month, you can get an ADSL line with a contention ratio of maybe 250:1 and a speed of "up to" 8 or 24Megs. The actual speed depends on your distance from the exchange, and will usually be very much lower. In many cases a reliable connection will be technically impossible. The 250:1 contention ration means speeds could legitimately drop to barely dialup speeds at peak times, so often traffic shaping is used so that browsing speeds are unaffected by heavy file sharers.

If you pay about £1000 a month plus £10,000 installation costs (depending very much on where you live), you can get a fast leased line with zero contention. It costs that much, because someone has to lay the fibre which involves digging up roads and bribing council officials.

For varying amounts in between those extremes, you can pay for lower contention. Basically, the only reason you can get cheap broadband is because you're sharing the bandwidth with other people. The more you share, the cheaper it is at the expense of slower peak-time speeds.

If someone would just shell out a few hundred billion pounds, then we could all have fibre to the door. Unfortunately, nobody wants to pay for it.

It started in Europe, the ISPs aren't allowed to throttle or generally shape traffic here. If they offer "flatrate", it has to be exactly that - although an exception was made for 3G, there "flaterate" only applies to the first 5GB, after that, they can throttle the connection to GPRS speeds.

As these things go, that's , at least it's clearly set out