Come on t'internets, do keep up

So bandwidth seems to cost around £1/GB at the moment. When you're doing things like downloading video or even streaming it, or in a media-rich world such as Second Life, it's very easy to use up your ISP's allocation, and the ones that offer some insane amount actually lose money before you hit that threshold. Then when you think that for every GB you download you pay £1, that can actually become expensive very quickly.

Others, such as Pipex Homecall, boldly offer "Unlimited downloads" and market it bigtime, and then sneak a clause in the fine print (locked in the basement of the company headquarters inside a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'beware of the leopard') saying "Actually, you can download unlimited so long as you keep to our Fair Use Policy of 1GB/week". Well um, that's not unlimited then, is it? In fact 1GB/week is extremely limited for Broadband, you can use it up in about an hour of downloading. This kind of misleading advertising needs to stop.

The availability of bandwidth (i.e. amount transferrable) simply does not match - anywhere near - the speed of the connections available or the requirements of today's media-rich internet services. And it's only going to get worse - pretty soon. Those of us pushing the boundaries may only be a minority now, but in the world of computing and the internet, things change very very quickly.

What about all this talk of 24Mb broadband? You'd use up your allocation on some ISPs within about 5 minutes!

Somebody start a revolt. I'm revolting enough already.