Digital Home Thoughts: Bandwidth Caps Force In-House Bandwidth Cops?

"I have three teenage daughters who also download music, TV shows and so on. I figured someone had just gone a little overboard, and since it was close to the end of the month, I thought it wasn't anything to be worried about. The next day, however, I went online and checked my usage (Rogers has an online tool that shows daily usage), and it said that I had used 121 GB more than my allotted amount for the month. In other words, I had used more than 100 GB in less than two days."

The basic premise of this story is that, as bandwidth caps become more common, home owners with multiple Internet users will have to become "bandwidth cops" to ensure that the shared resource (GB transferred per month) doesn't get used up too quickly. It's not a role that most people will be comfortable in; technical limits of most home users will be the primary barrier. Expecting users to be able to log data transfers on a per-computer basis is simply beyond the skills of an average user. I will point out, however, that this guy's problem ended up being the old "my kid was using a file sharing service to grab TV shows and I didn't realize it". Not educating your kids on the legal/moral ramifications of content theft is up to you, the parent. No ISP is going to do that for you!