I read an article on Slashdot the other day and was surprised to find that most people seem to prefer bandwidth caps over throttling. Of course everyone prefers neither, but if asked to choose one over the other most people seem to prefer capping.

Maybe I am being dense here, but I don't think people or the bandwidth providers get it. The pipe is only so fat, and can only provide so much bandwidth regardless of caps. If you have a 250 gig cap and everyone jumps on at the same time to download a 1 gig file you have a problem. With no throttling in place, everyone will experience a very slow download as if they are being throttled. This results in a poor user experience regardless of the cap size and does absolutely nothing to guarentee any kind of bandwidth to anyone.

I propose no caps and throttling based on usage.  Users that have utilized the most bandwidth for the month get throttled first. If the pipe isn't under anykind of stress and there is ample bandwidth to go around then no one is throttled and everyone gets full bandwidth. As soon as stress is placed on the network where there isn't enough bendwidth to go around, you throttle users based on bandwidth usage using a sliding scale that has a maximum throttle amount.

What do you preffer? Take the poll