Holy cr@pola, I'm on dialup and MY monthy download (well, that of the flat as a whole) is approximately 700 MB. Not all files you understand, but we get through a heck of a lot of browsing, not to mention lots of software downloads (no, NOT warez!).
When I'm browsing, I often just turn "download new images" off altogether (single click operation) and just get Opera to show the pictures I want to see (right click,"show picture")... I've set opera up to store 4 GB of internet cache and to load it's images form there, so all I need is the HTML for the page, which is seldom more than 20 KB. Speeds up browsing no end on dialup (as well as opera eing bollocks-fast as it is), and the pics cming down don't interupt your downloading bandwidth. Oh yeah... NO BANNER ADS. Even better with the "refuse pop-up windows" option turned on.
I guess you could call us "heavy users" of the net, but DSL at 1GB a month...?!
Thankfully the ISP's in the UK don't see DSL in this way yet... hopefully I'll get DSL before they start imposing badwidth restrictions.
If I get rich enough, I'll lease my own 2 Mbit line...
Tell me... does this bandwidth include spam? Advertising? If so, your spammers are now not only costing you time, they're costing you money too.
It seems to me the ISP's want DSL users to use it JUST LIKE DIALUP, despite advertising it as "fast downloads with so and so's DSL!", "get music faster, get broadband!" etc etc. With websites getting bigger all the time (larger pictures, streaming content, blah blah), web pages are getting to the point where 1 GB will get you a months browsing of the web for about 4 hours a day. I've come across pages that were over 2 megs in size (such as alot of the stuff submitted to
DeviantArt), sorry but no way are you gonna catch me using an ISP that charges me a premium for visiting "too many" sites.
Bastards.