So have a peak rate and an off-peak rate. That's exactly what my ISP (Andrews and Arnold[0]) does. I pay for a specific number of 'units' which are consumed fa

So have a peak rate and an off-peak rate. That's exactly what my ISP (Andrews and Arnold[0]) does. I pay for a specific number of 'units' which are consumed faster at peak times (09:00-18:00) than at all other times. A&A's policy[1] is to never be the bottleneck in the network and they also kick up a stink with their transit providers (mainly BT) when they detect a problem (which is very often, as they monitor their network's health closely). They even publish statistics[2] on dropped packets classified by their uplink - for instance over the last 28 days they have a 98.48% success rate at a 1-second granularity one of BT's backhauls, and 100% on TalkTalk's backhaul. They do work out to be more expensive than other ISPs (I pay ~£33 a month for a 40mbit FTTC connection with 4 units) but you pay for a good service and competence. [0] http://aaisp.net.uk/ http://aaisp.net.uk/ [1] http://aaisp.net.uk/broadband-speed.html http://aaisp.net.uk/broadband-speed.html [2] http://clueless.aa.net.uk/linkreport.cgi http://clueless.aa.net.uk/linkreport.cgi