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Why Not To Meter Internet Access
A reader writes: "Many experts, especially pundit Bob Metcalfe, have argued that Internet access should be metered so that light users don't have to subsidize flat rates for heavier users. John Levine, author, expert and sewer commissioner, argues that this idea of metering the Internet flies in the face of 100 years of history."
You pay a flat rate to be able to be online 24/7 if you so wish. There's no logic in charging per megabyte to lower the rate for the casual user. Besides, many Ethernet networks are switched these days, so every user has a nominal capacity no matter how much/little bandwith he uses.
Local phone companies don't charge metered rates for phone access, why should internet access companies? I'm a real light phone user, but I don't complain about paying $30/mo because someone else is on the phone 24/7 tying up more phone bandwidth.
--Mike
The cost of letter-delivery used to be calculated according to the distance the letter was going to go. One of the first things that Babagge did (way before he designed the difference engine) was point out that it cost more to do the calculation than it did to deliver the letter. Hence the flat rate stamp was born.
I would have thought that the same sort of thing is probably true for Internet access - especially since sending data down a wire is just as expensive as not sending data down the same wire, once the wire has been laid.
One of the biggest problems with metered billing is what do you do when someone decides to rack up your bill? Let's say I'm some script kiddie whose on an unmetered line (say at college.) Let's say I do a ping with 10K packet size to your home DSL address at the default frequency of once a second for a month. By my math, that adds up to almost 25GB of traffic. One ping a second won't even get noticed by 99% of DSL users, until they get that $200 dollar ISP bill.
That's one of the big problems with metered billing. It's one thing when a script kiddie gets upset at you and floods you with traffic for a few hours. It's a whole different story if you get a huge bill from your ISP because of it.
If everyone goes to metered billing you will see all sorts of abuses as crackers try to set up servers on other peoples machines to avoid paying the bills for their traffic. Add that up to the aforementioned harrasment traffic jacking up peoples bills. Plus the dishonest users who blame their traffic spikes on "hackers".
I just don't see it being worth the headache for an ISP to charge by the byte. You can bet that any user that is hit by the above problems is going to run screaming to the nearest flat rate ISP. Besides, the rates are metered to a certain extent. Dialup access is not the same cost as OC-3 by a long shot. So all the dialup users are in the same cost pool. So what? They are in a different cost pool from the DSL users, who are in a different pool from the T3 users, etc.