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Benjamin A'Lee wrote: > But an acceptable use policy is a limit. If there's an acceptable use policy, > it's not unlimited so they shouldn't be claiming it is. I ran our AUP team for a while [1] and the majority of our work was originally nothing to do with bandwidth in the sense being discussed here. We did close accounts of abusers who would dump a single porn AVI on their webspace and then spam it to newsgroups creating sometimes over 1Gb of traffic per day, but we were not concerned with bandwidth of legitimate paying customers. In that case we were more concerned with the 'stolen' bandwidth crippling the web server so that the websites of legitimate users ran very slowly, again protecting legitimate users. The bulk of the work was dealing with spammers, hackers, etc. 'Acts' of abuse rather than volume if I can use that distinction. A properly defined and administered AUP in my view has every right to be there. It is not limiting legitimate users in any way, rather it is protecting them from the abuses of other users, spamming, threats, libel, hacking, criminal activity, and the somewhat woolly catch-all 'may not use this account to annoy other users' [and THAT needs a good team to ensure it is administered properly] etc. The limits being discussed here target *all* users, legitimate and otherwise. Having said all that, the bandwidth cap that eventually did come was placed in the AUP. Simply because it was deemed 'an unacceptable use of the service to download too much'. I didn't and still do not see AUP as having any business dealing with user bandwidth other than deliberate abuses as mentioned above. It should be plainly stated in the Terms and Conditions, not hidden away in a sub-clause such as the AUP. Unlimited is probably a thinly disguised 'we don't have anything in our Ts & Cs about it' which is not even close to the same thing. Kind regards, Julian [1] Technically I set it up since before I took over the 'team' was one bloke who left. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html