[RawAlex]

Sympatico here in Canada has the same sort of thing now, a 16meg "fiber" service... but with a 30gig per month bandwidth limit. A dedicated downloader could blow that off in the first day.

My original though on this story is this: If there is a hand (and somewhat expensive) bandwidth limit, end users might be a little more inclined to either not use P2P, or (almost as good) only keep their P2P clients turned on when they are actively downloading. The less nodes out there, the longer downloads take, the more likely complete files aren't available, etc.

I also think this flies directly in the face of services such as Itunes, Netflix, and similar offering full movie downloads. If you download even a couple of movies a month against say a 30 gig bandwidth limit, it might be enough to push you over the top, making it cost more to download than it would to just rent locally or do a standard netflix in the mail process.

I think some ISPs are realizing that a very few power users are using a lion's share of the network resources, and in some cases, slowing down network performance to do it.

On the other side, the government has been knocking on that other ISP's door trying to figure out about their traffic shaping tools.