Re: Anonymous Coward
Sure, that argument holds when you have one choice of supplier for data transit (like any ISP that operates over BT lines), especially when (like BT do) they charge an obscene amount for bandwidth.
ISPs like Plus.net are required to pay an order of magnitude higher costs for the bandwidth used by their customers, where as Be have their own 'nationwide' (London, Cardiff, Birmingham..) network, connecting up the various MANs, which have multiple gigabit connections. All their traffic then peers through LINX, typically through Deutsche Telecom or Level 3.
All of which is a HELL of a lot cheaper than paying BT £3/GB. If your bandwidth doesn't cost much, you don't really mind how much of it your customers use. Bulldog managed to provide this sort of service for a long while, until Cable & Wireless got bored of running a consumer ISP,
A nice 'killer app' would be IPTV providing various sky channels - sky sports without any sky bumpf, or without the ridiculously expensive and difficult to provide Sky HD (try getting Sky HD in a flat prewired for Sky SD)