Because at a guess TW didn't offer the same headline speed of 20mb or whatever?
I'm in two minds about this whole thing, on the one hand I can see exactly where the ISP's are coming from - to get customers they have to advertise high speeds, however they cannot cope with the way some customers are using those speeds, which is in a manner for which a business level (leased line) service would be more appropriate.
From the customers point of view it's very confusing as to what is actually the better value for money - the "up to" 24mb ADSL product that might only be physically capable of giving them 2mb, the "up to" 20mb product that can give that 20mb all the time if you're the only user, but for cost and minimum service level reasons ends up being slower at peak times.
I think it's going to take a whole new pricing structure for the ISP's and customers to get what they actually think they are paying for - something along the ines of what some ADSL companies are already doing - giving you the choice of different speed and bandwidth packages and then billing accordingly.
I've said it before repeatedly, I'm personally pretty happy with the speed dropping to Xmb from Ymb once I use ZGB of bandwidth during certain times, as long as X is high enough that my connection is still usable for "normal" use* (and 5mb is plenty even for someone using IPlayer etc).
Net neutrality is a slightly more complicated things, I can see why an ISP might want to say give priority to HTTP, VOIP and similar data at the expense of torrents and the like, but can see that it could cause problems if the isp misreads your voice traffic (or games) as torrent stuff and puts it in the "drop first" category.
Biohazard, there is no extortion you are free to change ISP, hell the chance in T&C lets anyone pull out even if they are still under their initial contract. As for the person you talked to on the phone, whilst she probably shouldn't have said you were talking rubbish it's not generally their job to know everything ever said by their boss (especially if it was said recently and not yet filtered down as policy) - do you know the ins and outs of every thing your CEO has talked about in regards to your job?
It's fairly true that often the people on the phones in any company are among the last to know what's going on, as they tend to be low down in the company pecking order, and often employed by a third party/only trained in the area that they specifically need to know.
If anyone really wants to get out of this "up to" and "STM" lark they do have the option (generally) of business broadband, but that does tend to cost rather more than bog standard stack it high, sell it cheap commodity broadband (which is what we've got used to over the past couple of years).
*I and most people who have had broadband for more than a few years have probably seen our connections increase in overal speed (regardless of the "up to" part) by anything up to 40x times, and seen it get considerably cheaper in real terms - I think I was paying either £35 or £50 for 512k when I first got NTL, i'm now paying £37 (less really as it's a package) for 20mb that even with the new STM averages at about 13mb over the day.
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I firmly belive that they changed the goal posts.
