Perhaps more annoying than the "up to" marketing qualification is the promise of "unlimited" service that quite obviously has very real limits. The use of traffic shaping to control user bandwidth consumption catches the eye of the UK's Guardian, which offers a piece on the various capping and throttling solutions being applied across the pond:

"PlusNet provided Guardian Technology with data for the average usage of each 10% of its customers in December, as well as each percentile of the top tenth - - The top 1% each used an average of 120.94GB, nearly double the 66.03GB used by the next percentile. The average customer used 6.19GB, although removing the heaviest 10% of users cuts that to 2.35GB. PlusNet caters for heavy users with what could be called a "time-capped" account: it allows users to download 20GB per month between 4pm and midnight, and any amount outside those times. It doesn't use the word "unlimited": "We think unlimited broadband is a complete myth," says Armstrong. "You can only do it by lying to your customers, as the economics don't work."

The piece is an interesting read on making limits easy to understand for users, the first step clearly being to never advertise "unlimited" service if you have no intention of providing it. The variety of solutions is interesting; one provider doesn't subtract from a user's cap total, provided they're downloading the ISPs video content.