I use BT broadband, which I’m quite happy with, especially for their customer service as they have no problem telling me that a fibre is broken or one of the servers is down, unlike Eircom which automatically puts the blame on the customer’s equipment no matter what the fault! I’ve seen someone using Smart Telecom and their uplink is 160kbps from what I recall, which gives roughly a 128kbps throughput. They apparently have the speed of their link tweaked to give an actual data rate of roughly what they advertise, unlike the others which set the physical link to that. However, I’m surprised that they don’t even offer any faster uplink considering that Irish Broadband offers synchronous links (1Mb/1MB, 2Mb/2MB, etc.) and that Smart Telecom use ADSL2 as opposed to regular ADSL by the other providers. Up in my area, the cheapest one can pay for any ADSL service with at least a 256k uplink is ~97 Euro per month (inc. VAT)!! As no ADSL provider here I’m aware of offers anything faster, this is a big issue for businesses here who are interested in Video Conferencing or VoIP services (with several simultaneous calls) unless there is a wireless operator in their location offering a faster uplink. As 128k only effectively works out at around 13KB/sec, chances are that their uplink would get swamped if the user shares out just 10 or so popular songs. This means that whether they share out another 10 songs or even 1,000 songs, I cannot see how this makes them worse off affecting music sales (if downloads do result in lost CD sales) since the uploading speed remains the same. This would be different for someone with a fast 1Mb or faster link. In fact if one shares too many songs with a slow uplink, they would likely cause “less harm” to the music industry since there will be so many incoming connection attempts that either the receiver will get stuck in a very lengthy queue and try elsewhere or their throughput will be slow to the point that their client will get the majority of its download elsewhere.
Again only ISP reselling Eircoms DSL service have limited uploads of 128K, I believe recently Smart Telecom have upped theirs to 256K and IBB offer 1MB/1MB. On the subject of CD costs in Ireland I completely agree, it generally costs between 18e - 22e per CD in Ireland…why the hell would I pay that when I can goto