ISP's 3Gb limits = all traffic?

Emm, this may count as silly q of week.

Looking at some of the various ISP packages and the limits they have mentioning "downloads", I suppose that's really _all traffic_ that's going to the end user?

For a 3GB month or 100Mb a day then if you spend a lot of time in various Forums like here or browse a lot of NASA or National Geographic, all those gifs,jpgs,pngs,html whether 1k, 50k or 100k are all going to eat in to that 100Mb before you get onto drivers and virus defs and other uipdates in the 10, 20 MB range, right?

Right.

Even your email counts towards the total.

yes it is all data transferred, in some cases both up and down in others just down. Some don't meter offpeak etc etc.

If by any chance you are looking at Newnet Home Lite then yes both uploads and downloads are counted. I find the 3GB more than adequate unless I run many BT and TBB speedtests as they both use up 16Mb or so at my speed. BBMax is only 4 or 5Mb.

My usage is like yours except for the National Geographic. Most of my browsing has plenty of pics and graphics (decent!), Norton updates frequently, MS plenty, occasional Visual Studio etc downloads.

If you are thinking of joining Newnet the online usage checker is very good, and even if you exceed your allowance during the month you can still buy an extra 10GB for

I too am on the 3GB NewNet Lite package. Normal browsing seems to work out at about 10/12MB per hour [1], so that averages out at 8 to 10 hours per day which I hope helps you work out if it would suit.

[1] NewNet's online capacity stats have a useful daily hour by hour breakdown option.