Since the introduction of the BBC iPlayer and other IP TV services, ISPs have been trying to stop people using the Internet to download resource-hogging multimedia. The most common way that they achieve this is to meter the amount you are using and either charge once your usage has gone beyond a set amount or reduce the data rate to something almost unusable. Both approaches can be cynically viewed as attempts to extract more money from the user but this is what commerce is all about. What can you do about it? You could move to another “uncapped” ISP but even here it isn’t clear that you get what you pay for in the sense that “traffic shaping” can be applied to slow down certain types of internet packets and, more crudely, contention, the number of other users that you end up sharing a connection with, can be so high that all packets are slowed down. A more intelligent solution is to tailor your use to fit the cap.

Make the cap fit
If you are metered per month between given dates then simply keeping a running count of how many bytes have been downloaded provides the information you need to stay within budget.  A simple subtraction gives you how much capacity you have left and a simple division gives how many bytes per day you can afford to use. It’s not perfect but such data can be used to work out if you can risk downloading some software or video without being capped. Additionally, if your network usage suddenly goes up, this could be a timely warning that a virus or other malware is using your bandwidth without your permission or knowledge.