Steam update getting killed by internet cap stops gaming

A friend of mine had the bad luck yesterday (Sunday, 14 March 2010) that his monthly international internet banwidth usage cap was used up while the Steam game client was doing updates. Steam was refusing to start properly because it wanted to finish the update. This meant that he could not play any games in Steam. No software is made to handle partial updates like this and be happy about it. Either it is a matter of being offline or a matter of being online and not some inbetween state. The matter was resolved by him having to take his PC to me to use my internet connection for teh remaining 2MB. Telkom used to throttle the international internet traffic down to about 800 bytes persecond, but not anymore.