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Imagine subscribing to Sky or a similar Cable TV provider. Imagine paying a montly flat fee for those extra channels you wanted. Imagine then, having only been given a limited number of hours for watching those channels per month. Once you’ve reached the limit, your provider will start charging you extra on an hourly rate. You have the choice of turning off you television set, or cough up the money when you get the bill at the end of the month. This analogy is exactly similar to “broadband capping”.If you haven’t got broadband at home yet, chances are, you will do very very soon. Prices have come down a lot since it was first introduced a few years ago. Fortunately, speeds have gone up and up and up. You’ve had a taste for the speed at work or at a friend’s place. So you start looking at prices and special deals by Internet Service Providers, more often than enough, that’s when you get caught.

Take Freedom2Surf for example; their latest offering is an 8Mb connection for a measly £12.99 per month including a one off £49 activation fee. While that seems like an incredibly good deal, you need to be aware that they impose a cap at 0.5Gb. Yes, that’s a puny 500Mb download limit. Once you’ve reached the limit, it’s £1.50 per gigabyte.
“But how small is 500Mb? Surely I don’t use that much per month?”, I hear you ask. If you are not sure how big 500Mb really is, take for example, the Firefox web browser. The PC version is roughly 10Mb in size. Download this 50 times, and you’ve reached your limit for the month.

In reality, you probably won’t be reaching the cap if you just use the Internet for checking your email and some general web surfing. However, thousands of people use it for a whole lot of other purposes like listening to music, watching streamed videos and playing Internet games. I have a friend who is working on her PhD and transfers a huge amount of data between her home PC and the one she uses at the university campus. I also have another friend who is a graphic designer and does a lot of his work from home. These are the kinds of activities that require slightly more than a mere 500Mb per month. Nowadays we also have flatmates who chip in together to get broadband at home. If there were four of them, each will only get 100Mb, and who’s keeping count?

The main reason why most of us switched to broadband was to not worry about phone bills. You just pay a fixed monthly fee and get on with it. When broadband was first introduced in the UK back in 2000, there was no such thing as capping. If you ask me, this is a step backwards. Why do they impose capping in the first place? Different providers give different reasons. Some say to deter users from downloading pirated materials. Some say they’re doing this to be fair to “light users”.

So if you’re looking for “unlimited Internet”, be sure to read the fine print.

For more information on broadband capping in the UK, please visit the AntiCap UK website.