it attracts them but in my opiniopn its pretty hard to max out download 24/7/365

would needs tons of storage space and either be deleting what you download quickly or moving it to other storage media, not to mention must be downloading a fair bit of trash to fill the pipe.

Most people who would just download stuff they interested in wont be maxing out that bandwidth consistently.

However I agree with ignition that upstream will remain a problem, and its good VM recognised that 10 to 18 didnt fit.

what happens if you dont like going out to watch stuff?

The problem is people want content fast and they want it in their rooms. This is incompatible with the industry who wants staggered release dates with cinemas been head of the queue. Regional release dates are a huge cause of piracy. Although I dont think we should be going off topic here, this is about isp capacity not piracy policing, as revk at aaisp said, isp's aren't resposible for what their customers do.

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

.. as speeds go up, its harder to sustain full throttle for long periods of time...

True but I suspect as speeds go up that supports higher quality video downloads. A full bluray rip is huge 25GB(? - I've never checked) against a Divx avi of maybe 700MB as sold at car boots on CD.

I guess even Linux ISOs are now full fat DVDs with a library of applications included.

Anyhow like I said earlier it doesn't take much effort to seed all day.

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

what happens if you dont like going out to watch stuff?

Then you see a doctor for treatment for either the GAD or agoraphobia.

Those things aside if a person is so determined to have content on their terms and their timescale they're unlikely to be bothered about paying for it.

Plan B is increase the bandwidth available per modem on the service group, either by reducing the number of modems in the service group via a logical or physical split or increasing spectral efficiency or number of channels.

VM are doing all of these, including on the upstream where a programme is in place to move upstreams from 16QAM to 64QAM - an increase in spectral efficiency of 50% - and 3 channel bonding.

I wonder whether Plan C might be for Virgin Media to make an "excessive data usage charge" for the heaviest 5% (say) of their downloaders, to encourage them to move ISP?

IMO there is no chance they will do this. Charging for excess usage couldn't be advertided as unlimited and and they have done everything possible to continue doing that including stopping sending disconnection threat letters to the heaviest users and emasculating the STM.