I would not put it as an obscure topic outright, as it concerns almost everybody who uses Internet & Technology, with what we are going to discuss further, people who have high moral values, will feel cheated, those who understand will get relieved, and those who want to argue are most welcome, I can take you to the culprits right away .
The scope of our discussion is the word unlimited, when (all the moralists, this goes for you) ever you hear the word unlimited, what does it make u feel?
Happy? Content? Value for Money? Precisely, most people attach the word unlimited with a happy sequence, never ending happiness. So what happens when the same people who say unlimited, actually mean, limited to a point?
Lets take an example, we goto Rajdhani Thali Restaurant (this is for example purpose only, caution, please do not enact the following sequence) and we start eating an unlimited Thali, for which we are ready to pay a decent amount of money, but, as soon as you eat 30 chapatis the manager says, your unlimited account is over. How would that feel? Specially if you have the capacity to eat 60 chapati’s?
Well, my first instance with unlimited fiasco came when I was a student in Bangalore, a well known telephone company promised unlimited sms’s for a particular sim card plan, well, we were in college, we were jobless, and we decided to see how much does actually unlimited meant.
At a point, we crossed 5000 SMS’s from a particular cell phone in a month, and then! Lo! we were charged 50 Ps. per sms, what is the point?
Nothing is unlimited, other than stealing neta’s pocket holes. In fact, the telephone company had the gall to tell us that we came in high user group. We!, jobless, engineering students, who wanted to expose the companies dirty policies, were penalized. LOL!
I would not blame them.
So, what is happening in India now, that, I had to recall this incident?
February 2009, saw the advent of a new policy by the ISP’s, Internet Service Providers. I will now outline the policy in points below, as each company has its own policy and implementation rules. As usual, there is no standard formula.
Also, the system which they are trying to ape from the west is apparently badly aped, and we don’t even match the aping standards.

1. Under the guise of Broadband Fair Usage, our ISP’s will now restrict all the unlimited accounts at a certain point. This will be known as the Fair Usage Policy (FUP)

2. The various ways in which companies will restrict their accounts are to be read in the fine print under the Unlimited word, which will be followed by FUP.

3. Through its FUP, Airtel, for instance, has “defined fair usage levels for unlimited data transfer plans” and “on reaching the fair usage level, the plan speed would be rationalized by up to 50% for the rest of the monthly billing cycle”. I will come back to this point again, as I have more to speak on this.

4. For Tata, after the billing cycle is over, it informs subscribers that the predefined limit has been hit and they must move to a higher plan or the service would be terminated.

5. BSNL, the government owned ISP has not declared any FUP as yet, but it does not have a high speed unlimited as yet which is affordable to the common man, so we shall not be discussing that.

6. They want to restrict all the Bit Torrent traffic, which can be detrimental to Linux users, as they cant download the distro’s.

This policy is coming into effect slowly but steadily by almost all the ISP’s so either we accept it or demand the reason.

Now, I will proceed to give the arguments given by the companies who want to implement the detrimental FUP.
Most of the companies, have the same parrot like arguments which are unimaginative and profiteering in nature, I find a grain of truth in all of them, but I am opposed to certain practices which might be followed if we are not alert.
Consider this to be my two bits for Jaago Grahak Andolan.
The best and the most hard hitting argument which an ISP can give is uneven distribution of bandwidth. There are people and there are people, the companies say, under the FUP, they want to protect the decent guys from the b/w hoggers. As 99% of people who use Internet, dont misuse it to an extent wherein the company has to take an action.
Lets take another e.g., you know a certain guy in the building who has 2 good robust PC’s at home, and knows enough Technology, by which he uses the same account to download movies, porn, music day and night, there by hogging all the b/w, thus your connection is perpetually slow and you hate your ISP. Now when the FUP is implemented, and the guys wings are cut, you will be the happiest guy, as you have a decent connection now.
The second reason might make the likes of Shah Rukh Khan Happy with a capital H, as, the ISP’s proclaim that by FUP, they will be able to control the piracy makers, as they are the basic source of trouble, first use too much b/w and then cut back on sales of original DVD’s for music/movies etc. KUDOS for this thought!
Atleast, there are some ways by which the companies think of giving good service, third and the most widely used argument by the ISP’s is that they are just aping the west as usual, saying its an international trend, but I know of at least 1 company in UK which does NOT implement FUP.
They throw around heavyweight names like AT&T, Verizon, BT, Vodafone, Orange, but one thing which I would like to remind our desi ISP’s is that these guys give amazing speeds. Which you guys can not match up in the next 5 years, apart from Reliance, who is coming up with some very decent speeds, and neither did these guys actually read the fine print for FUP, which, in some countries and by some companies, the limit for download is as high as 50GB, not 5 or 10, we are talking of good 50GB high speed Internet, which I think would satisfy any decent user (we are trying to stop the indecent ones only remember??).
Now, the issues I feel would be raised by any level headed guy towards these companies,
1. Would you like to be held on ransom by some XYZ company and be forced to move to a higher cost plan?
2. Does everybody know, that the government subscribed broadband connection is only called broadband if and only if the connection speed is 256 Kbps? So now the point no. 3 which i mentioned earlier comes into picture, if you are in a basic 256 Kbps unlimited plan and you cross the FUP, and your ISP decides to halve your speed, would you technically still be a Broadband user? although you are still paying for a Broadband connection?

I agree the cap is a good idea, but it should be implemented intelligently, and not in a regressive way, because, I too want the value for MY money, and I don’t like Forced Usage Policy!

Also, if you are not selling unlimited, then why boast about it?? Implement the Australian Policy, I think even those villagers have more sense of fairness, we pray our Internet does not go our politics way.