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What Kind of Alternate Business Models Could ISPs Use?
esocid writes "After reading multiple stories over the past few months about the practices of ISPs within and outside of the US I have started to actually contemplate the benefits of the pay-per-use broadband service. Monopolistic practices have strangled broadband to the throttled money-draining cesspool that it is today. Would a pay-per-use option, or some other strategy, be better than the flat fee offered by companies today? When you think about it you are paying for an XMbps connection, when in actuality you get an 65-85%XMbps connection that you may or may not use all of the time. In addition to that, speaking as a Comcast customer, you get a throttled connection that limits your usage of certain protocols. Essentially you pay about $60-70 for a connection that you only squeeze maybe $35-45 worth of usage out of it. If a pay-per-usage option were implemented, how do you think the best way to charge for it would be? Is there some other scheme that would deliver customers the kind of QOS and value they seek?"
I'm sure there are several alternate business models that ISps could employ that would result in fairer, more even-handed access and pricing.
However, this is not in the ISPs best interests. The ISPs interests are best served by the current business model...the promise-you-x-amount-of-bandwidth-but-give-you-only-0.4x business model.
Don't expect change anytime soon.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
I want to know where the April Fools articles are. So far, everything is boringly normal. Give me some funny shit! Microsoft debugs Vista, "Best Windows yet!" crows Richard Stallman. Bush finds exit strategy for Iraq. Catholic priest shoves fingers up own ass for a change.
Where's the A material? Even Poniez is looking good at this point.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I think that even in a pay-as-you-go type solution, a certain base threshold of traffic would have to be free, and the customer would pay on top of that. Otherwise, the user is penalized for visiting a site that rams heavy multimedia ads down their throats or for downloading spam to be filtered.
Another idea may be a price ramp: if I usually only use 5% of my connection, the cost for a spike in my usage should be low. Similarly, if I'm a heavy user than my spikes (higher, more frequent) would carry a heftier price tag. In other words, occasional spikes should be discounted while habitually heavy users would have to pay more to accommodate their persistent digital lifestyles.
Finally, I would only consider such a scheme if my account were discounted for every second of downtime during each billing cycle, whether it affected me directly or not. If have to pay for what I use, they have to pay for what they don't deliver.
These stories are free but worth money.
in terms of $ per megabyte broadband is the best deal going. taking into account the throttling and limited upstream pipes...it's still a screaming deal. go price T1's, or try to live with satellite broadband, dialup, or 3G. all these alternatives have profound limitations.
Be careful what you wish for. What about people like me who run remote web servers? What makes you think the ISP's won't charge us an arm and a leg for the extra bandwidth that we use under this new pricing scheme?
A flat rate may be the more economic solution for some of us.
that they would charge the current $60-$70 for low bandwidth customers who don't mind the throttling, and those of us who have 2-4 torrents going at a time are gonna pay double, or more; and the only one that wins is the provider. I seriously doubt this would produce cost savings for any consumers.
--You can sleep when you're dead--
honestly, internet access is very nearly a commodity, why not bill it as such?
Assuming all my ports are equal, and I can xfer upstream and down at whatever the physical rate of the device is:
bill me by the megabit-hour. Just like txu bills me by the kWatt-hour. I can use whatever I want, but pay accordingly.
Alternately, bill me at the end of the month for gigs xferred, which is already done for hosting in some cases.
In Soviet Russia jokes are formulaic and decidedly non-humorous.
This question is not nearly as theoretical as the question suggests: there are many countries where various forms of metered or tiered access are the norm. You just have to look at what these countries offer (and how consumers react) to get an idea of what works and what doesn't.
Here's an example: Videotron cable internet (Montreal, Canada)*. They have packages that run from $30/month to $80/month, depending what you want. They all have usage limits (2 GB/month to 100 GB/month), and charge a fee per additional GB beyond this basic usage.**
Does it "work"? Of course. Customers buy the package they want. If they are routinely going over their monthly limit, they either cut back on usage or upgrade their package. Yes, it is slightly more complicated for the customer than just having a single "unlimited!" package, but then again it's also more honest. In fact the unlimited packages have hidden terms and limits, which makes them more complicated... or at least more annoying.
I'm a heavy internet user (as most Slashdotters probably are). I don't mind paying a premium to get the speeds and usage limits I need: as long as that service level is actually delivered! This isn't rocket science: just provide a variety of packages and let the customers pick. Importantly, price the packages so that you won't go out of business if a sizeable percent of your customers actually use the service you sold them.
[*] Note that I was a Videotron customer when I lived in Montreal. I'm not endorsing their service; merely using them as an example.
[**] Note also that if you really want unlimited usage, you can upgrade to business class service. Again, you pay a premium if you want that level of service, which is fine.
If you're getting charged because you're using more, you're exactly the kind of person that is overusing current resources. Switch ISPs, go to a hosting company, or find another way. You're making the experience less for the rest of us that only moderately use our connection and raising our rates. The low-use users are subsidizing you.
I know I'm risking what little karma I have as a new poster but this question seems bizarre. Throttled connection speed is primarily a US problem and has a lot to do with the telecoms not keeping their promise to Congress to create a fiber optic network across the nation. Now they're reaping what they've sown and are trying to create an excuse to pass the buck to their customers rather than fulfilling their obligations.
I could see a tiered system for connection speed that billed based on KB transfered being reasonable if the telecoms were doing everything in their power to meet increasing capacity demands but they're not.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
How about they give you what they promise, set their price against what they actually think it costs and let competition work its magic. Promising what they don't deliver fscks up Adam Smith's invisible hand.
Shh.
CmTaco: We need an April Fools theme for this year.
CbNeal: Let's be subtle. If we don't do anything, the joke's on everyone who likes pink ponies. I hate pink ponies.
CmTaco: Ingenious. I like it.
CbNeal: Bwuahahahahahaha
CmTaco: Bwuahahahahahaha
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Well I think ISPs should use the "Turn them upside down, shake them, and keep whatever falls out of their pockets" business model. Because I don't wear pants.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
No, the low-use users are simply not using all that they paid for, and Comcast takes advantage of that fact.
The crux of the problem is that if an ISP says they are providing a "3MiB/s-down with 300kb/s-up" connection, that is what they should be delivering. You can't sell something as one thing and then not deliver it - this is called fraud.
If they can't deliver at the speed they sell it as, then they shouldn't be allowed sell it as the higher speed.
The fact is that they want to be able to promise one thing and then reneg on the delivering the goods. Why do we let them get away with this?
Graham
There's your business model.
I'm dead serious. Telecoms is a "natural monopoly". (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly) A monopoly is not something you build a business around, it's something you regulate. Thus, it is best funded by a regulatory regime AKA, a government.
And, for the practical example. I'm in Taiwan where the telecom is state owned. I am using the state owned telecom DSL service at 8M/640K for about thirty bucks a month although we just got a slight reduction in fees this month. Yeah, imagine that, a reduction. We have no throttling and the service, which I've had for about five years at that level is excellent.
Sure, there's a monthly fee for use, but the service is provided by a government monopoly which is obviously derivative of taxes.
Have a two level plan. Users would pay for however many gigabytes of high speed service at the wanted, which would be ultra-fast, 10Mbit at least, preferably higher.
They'd also have access to a baseline service in unlimited amount, but highly throttled...512Kbit say. Plenty useable for basic stuff, even MMOs and the like, but not for mass pirating. The user could toggle between the modes so as not to waste high-speed bandwidth checking e-mail or whatever.
TODO: Something witty here...
I prefer flat rate. Considering that the cell phone companies are now offering flat rate pricing like the old wired telcos did, I think I'm in the majority here.
I want to know how much my bill is going to be, and I don't want to have to meter myself. I don't want to have to ask "can I afford to log into slashdot today? Can I afford to download that new distro today?"
And I don't see how "pay per view" is going to stop the ISPs from throttling; if their pipes get full they're going to turn your data flow down to keep someone else from getting completely locked out; perhaps someone else that's even more lucrative than you.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
The issue is primarily one of convenience and plant cost. To get you 10Mb/s is mostly capital costs, so you pay a fixed rate. Overselling is done because average users don't saturate their channels. Businesses, otoh, do and they pay for the luxury. Pay per bit service would be difficult to structure without a fixed cost. Once you cover billing, tech support, and plant, you're up to nearly what everyone is already paying. Adding per-bit charges will only make it more expensive. Sure, you can pay more for a guarantee but the value of that guarantee is far less to the consumer than to the operator. And if you put your guaranteeds on the same line as your basic oversold, you're going to have to actively sort them out.
BTW - how much data does $35 buy you? Maybe you're getting $100 worth of data for the $70 you pay Comcast, and you just don't realize it. I would venture to guess that if you divided the entire data stream by the revenue, most slashdotters are getting more bits per dollar than the overall system average. Even if you just camp on the throttled ports, you may still be getting more bits than a dollar of Comcast plant depreciation.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
My ISP does partly that right now (I'm not in the US though). I pay something like 35$ a month, I get 20 gigs at 7mb, with an explicit warning that since its a shared cable, during peek hour I may go down. When it is not peek hour, I cap out my 7mb if the place I'm connected to can output it (which obviously makes sense), during peek hour the worse I've seen (from a reliable server... let say downloading something from java.sun.com) its like 350kbyte/s. If I go over my 20 gig, like 1 cents per megabyte.).
If thats not good enough, they have other plans that go as high as 100 gigs per month or more speed as high as 50 megabit/s (the upload speed is shit on that one though!).
If I think my current speed isn't fast enough, I can up my service to the next step up in speed for 48 hours for 3 to 5$, depending on the difference between the services (to up my 7mb to a 10mb its 3$ for 48 hours).
Its definately not perfect, and that ISP has its own problems with throttling and such, but its still a start in term of flexibility, and its much easier for the ISP to deliver this than something rediculous like "UNLIMITED DOWNLOAD AT 20MB speeds, all the time!". Its definately more honest, at least, and considering the reliability of my connection, they obviously CAN deliver.
One major problem is: How would I know that I'd been charged fairly?
In my experience, when I get details of my net usage, there's a lot of stuff there that I can neither control nor account for. Thus, most browsers honor a page's request to refresh it every N minutes, and don't give me a way to turn it off. Any browser that's running can be using bandwidth without most users being aware of the fact. This is especially true for pages that include advertising.
For a while, I had a smartphone with wireless net access. Even when I didn't use it, it ran up packet charges. When I asked, I was simply told that the networking software sends packets on its own. "That's how it works." It's not obvious how a customer can challenge something like this, except via extremely expensive lawsuits.
And what about that advertising? I didn't want it, but it comes "free" with the content that I wanted. Would I be charged for downloading the ads? Of course, I would; what a silly question. Even (or especially) the flash ads. Yeah, I have flashblock installed, but not all browsers honor it, and not all users are aware that it's possible, so this is a potential source of large charges by the ISP.
But the fundamental question is: When my ISP tells me I used X gigabytes last month, how do I know they're not just making up a number? What tools are available that will tell a customer exactly how many bytes of bandwidth they actually used? And if this number differs from the ISP's number, would the accounting tools' data stand up in court?
Unless you can answer this, a pay-per-byte scheme is merely an way for an ISP to charge customers whatever they like, and the customers have no recourse other than to terminate the service entirely.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Here's a truly alternate business model: screw the incumbent telecom carriers. Nationalize the grid that was built out with the help of public funds, and where the public has seen close to no returns. Turn everyone into a CLEC. Everyone plugs into an existing grid that is officially tax-payer funded with zero restrictions on what passes through. All the intelligence - traffic shaping, filtering, content - will be at the edges. Carriers compete based on service, what kind of pipe they can put into the home/condo/dorm and how much traffic they can exchange with the national grid.
Far-fetched? Not really. It's similar to what's going on with the electric grid already. Considering how much the economy is impacted if/when major trunks or local exchange points go down, the internet is also a similarly critical infrastructure. I don't see why lessons learned from the electric grid can't be applied to solving the mess that is the telecom industry.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
'And that, of course, is why most Slashdotters don't want pay-as-you go pricing: They'd be at the top of the usage list and so would pay accordingly.'
You make it sound as if it is some sort of crime to actually use the connection we pay for. We already pay a fair rate for the bandwidth we use. If you don't want to pay the price of your connection because you fail to fully utilize it you should downgrade.
I am myself in favor of a "you only get charged for what you actually get".
High-end commercial bandwidth is sold on a 95th percentile basis. The way it works is this: every 5 minutes they measure how many bits you sent and received in the preceeding 5 minutes. At the end of the month they throw the top 5% of the samples away. The next highest sample is your 95th percentile usage.
Are you still in favor of that payment model if I tell you that commercial bandwidth today costs between $20/megabit and $300/megabit with the average price around $100/megabit? In other words, you can have your 15-meg FiOS line, but if you nail it at 15 megs for more than 36 hours in a month, you'd pay $1500.
Still sound like such a good deal?
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Why screw around with all the 'consumer' level stuff and the headaches that go with it?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
All I want from any ISP is the honest truth of 1) what the maximum throughput from my house to the first hop is and 2) what the minimum guaranteed rate is when things get congested locally. In effect I want to know how shitty things will be when everyone in the neighborhood is on and how great they'll be when people aren't. Don't nickle and dime us because we're using more bandwidth, just make sure we know how much it'll be throttled when your pipes can't handle it.
"No, the low-use users are simply not permitted to use all that they paid for, and Comcast takes advantage of that fact."
Fixed that for you.
It's exactly this kind of thinking that the ISPs use to justify filtering p2p and whatnot, and it's completely wrong. You pay for a speed of X, then X is the amount of bandwidth you should be allowed to use. If you're not, that's fine, but doesn't change the fact that those that do are perfectly within their rights to do so. If your ISP doesn't want you to use the bandwidth, they shouldn't be selling it to you. What you use it *for* is irrelevant, they shouldn't even *know* what you do on the interwebs, that's your problem, the RI/MPAA's, and the law enforcement's if it comes to that. Not theirs.
Nobody expects the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal.
Hey. What most private customers dont seem to realise is that bandwidth is very expensive. Some expects DEDICATED bandwidth from your ISP. That's entirely unrealistic. Maybe it's time to start charging private customers by the 95th percentile? if they want dedicated.. Private internet connection is not dedicated and will never be if customers expects prices to go down. It would increase tenfold if you were to pay the actual prices isp's pay for peering , transit et al.
In general, it seems like the point of "package deals" is to screw the customer. If I buy X amount of bandwidth or cell phone minutes per month and don't use them all, I wasted money. If I use any more than that, they charge me a hefty premium.
On the other hand, consumers should see "unlimited" as a good thing only if they expect to use more than the average person, whose usage the price reflects. If I think I will eat $15 worth of food and the buffet costs $10, it's a good deal for me.
In short: "pay for what you use" is obviously fair. Package deals are an attempt to screw the customer; "unlimited" deals are an attempt to screw the provider. (Who, of course, has already calculated the average use and determined that the house will win.)
The problem with pay-as-you-go being optional is that the people who use less will opt for it, while others will go with the unmetered plan. This gives no upside for the ISP. Either one or make the pay-as-you-go a premium rate, in which case it won't be cheap anyway (like prepaid phones). Also, there is the whole measuring infrastructure that adds to the things they need to do and will mess up on.
The bottom line is there needs to be more competition, and better infrastructure. The infrastructure needs to be public property and cable companies should be able to compete over shared cables.
I am not satisfied with my cable service or their internet service, but I have no alternative.
Sorry, but people cost money. Lots of money. That's why tech support sucks. Think about it, a good tech support person who knows his/her stuff will run you $80k+ per year including overhead if you live outside of a major metro area. So for 80k you're going to be in for about $20 for each 1/2 hour help desk call. If you price your service competitively, the low end will be $20/month baseline charge and 80% of your customers will never use more (my unlimited 768k at home is $17.99, fwiw). Since your help desk probably shouldn't be more than 5% of your operating costs due to the cost of plant, bandwidth, capital, etc., you've got one help desk call per user every 20 months at break even. That's mighty low usage.
Don't even get me started on custom programming. Eveything seems easy until you have to amortize a team of $100k-200k/yr developers over a bunch of $20-$40/mo service contracts.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I don't know about your provider, but mine only offers the option to downgrade the bandwidth. If I could downgrade the amount of data transfered per month, it might work for me. Unfortunately, that isn't an option.
It isn't a crime to use the connection, but there is no option for the guy who wants a fast connection but only uses it to for playing games and watching youtube videos, as opposed to say bittorrent.
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Parent speaketh the truth here.
I pay Verizon $99/month for a 20/5 MBit FiOS business connection with essentially no limits. Sure it's about double what I might pay for a residential account with limits and dynamic addressing, but it's still an incredibly good deal compared to other business ISP services. I have a client with a T1 from AT&T; it costs about four times what Verizon's charging me and has about one-fourth the upstream bandwidth.
Maybe, maybe not. I bet the porn/music/pirate software downloaders use way more than that average Slashdotter.. Oops, wait, did I just describe the average Slashdotter? I thought they all bought indie music on CDs, used open-source, and wrote code all day?
Nevermind... the parent was right. Slashdotters would be the major bandwidth users.
Unfortunately, I can't seem to come up with a good car analogy for this.. Hrm..
At any rate, my point is this. If you're going to advertise the connection as 3 Mbps, or 10 Mbps, or even "Up to" XX Mbps, then I should be allowed to use it. I am, after all, paying for it.
That said, let's look at the pay for play model. Once upon a time, the industry decides to move to a pay for play model. So, the masses move to this new model and continue using the Internet as they always have. The "normal" users are happy to see their $60-70 per month bill drop to $45-50. The "barely use it" crew drops down to $20 per month, the base fee that covers the first few gigs of transfer per month. And then there's the hard-core crowd. The jump from $60-70 per month to well over $100 a month. And, after realizing it's costing them an arm and a leg, they either find a new provider, or curb their habits.
The problem is, the ISP suddenly realizes, to their horror, that profits have gone down! Well then, time to increase the rates we charge customers. And over the course of the next few months, or even the next year or two, the normal crowd returns to $60-70 per month and the hardcore crowd gets totally screwed and starts to diminish. The only ones really saving here are the "barely use it" crowd that really doesn't need the connection in the first place. And, the normal users end up getting royally shafted when they suddenly get infected, or have to download SP12 for Vista..
So be careful what you ask for. Per-bps payments are great... For the ISP.
XenoPhage
Technological Musings
Maybe he's a news anchor.
I like how ye use the term "only" when talking about over $1000 a year for a net connection.
Although I am well-paid I still prefer the $15 a month service.
Of course that service doesn't do much good if Comcast decides to block Bittorrent or Itunes.com, and therefore I think Comcast should be disallowed from doing that. If Comcast feels their pipes are full, let them add a higher tier, collect more money, and use that money to invest in more bandwidth. (That may mean every house has two cables running into it; oh well.)
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
If they throttle you, and CLEARLY tell you so before you buy, then that's fine. I wouldn't buy a service from them if I had a choice, but it's fine. What I have a problem with is selling you bandwidth and not delivering. And resorting to the "you're degrading other people's service" bullshit. You use what you pay for, it's that simple, and if it hurts others then it's the bloody ISP's fault for making promises they can't keep. Not yours.
Nobody expects the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal.
The premise of the question is wrong. There doesn't HAVE to be a business model at all for ISP:s. Currently, no matter what connection you have, what you pay for is NOT for your big fat pipe, it is for the ISP to run the billing. It costs ISP:s a lot more to employ accountants, collect user data, keep customer databases, marketing and send bills than it costs them to deliver traffic. A tiered internet, or a pay-per-megabit system would just add to the overhead as ISP:s would need to employ more accountants and implement more monitoring systems to track exactly how many megabits their users transfer.
Kind of similar to how Nike shoes doesn't cost many Euros to produce using the Chinese child labour they employ, but are marked up hundredfold. But the case with ISP:s is even more egregious because they are all 100% government sponsored institutions. Governments either built all the infrastructure or heavily subsidized telecom companies to do it. The net is public property and companies really have no moral rights to charge money for it.
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If you wanted a car analogy, I bet there's one in people complaining that their car doesn't complete trips in the least possible time given the distance (55mph should do 550 miles in ten hours exactly, never mind red lights, gas stops, bathroom breaks, etc.).
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
Since Comcast is finding it necessary to throttle connections, that indicates they are running out of bandwidth. i.e. They need to lay more cables but lack the money to do so. Therefore:
Rather than throttle P2P, youtube.com, or itunes.com, Comcast should identify their customers who download tons of information, impose a limit on those people, and then tell them, "If you go over 100 gigabytes, you will need to pay $100 a month to gain unlimited downloads." i.e. a Tier system:
$15 == 20 gig
$30 == 50 gig
$45 == 100 gig
$100 == unlimted
The more you desire to download, the more you will have to pay. Vice-versa, the less you download (me), the less you have to pay. That is entirely fair to charge customers based upon actual usage.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
Or pocket the money and not lay any new cables anyway, which is the most likely thing to happen.
The problem with these companies is that the infrastructure should be publicly owned. Then if Comcast doesn't want to provide the service you want, you can fire them and hire someone who will.
The problem comes from municipality granted monopolies for payola from the companies who want the monopolies. The municipality gets a chunk of money that it can spend on something other than the service, and the company gets to wield monopolistic power and get away with providing an inferior service with no fear of the consequences of doing so.
-- Terry
Come on, what is wrong with a lot of you?!? Sure, at this point in time a minority of users might be using the majority of the pipes. "Tax the heavy downloaders!" you say. Have you forgotten that Microsoft (X-BOX Live and Marketplace), Sony, Apple (HD movies), Joost, Tivo, Netflix, Amazon, etc. etc., all want to push more and more bandwidth intensive apps and uses?? Sure, Joe average may only use 5GB now with occasional YouTube videos. Maybe $15/mo would be good for him. But if the big players have their way, and they will, Joe will be watching, buying, and streaming HD video and games in the near future. 5GB ain't gonna cut it. The ISP's would love to knock everyone up to a "high tier" service that's $100/mo, but that sucks if that's the entry point just because the ISPs have milked this cash cow as long as they could.
ISPs creating tiered service levels is only them trying to prevent the inevitable - that they are being pushed into only providing an on-ramp to the Internet, and that's all. We're in the middle of a revolution in how content will be delivered, this crazy notion of tiered service levels is only going to mess that up. Of course, it will be steamrolled by innovation in the field.
It's like a small town experiencing a population growth, and wanting to turn Main St. into a toll road to discourage new citizens. Tiered pricing isn't designed to make things more fair; it's designed to discourage those at the top end and make those at the bottom end feel like they're getting a good deal.
We're already seeing mobile phone service becoming a commodity, with carriers offering true unlimited service after years of nickel and diming you for each partial minute you use. Are the cell carriers going to start complaining that everyone is actually talking constantly 24/7 and using up their lines? No, they'll build out more infrastructure to meet the demand. Why would the ISPs go the opposite route??
What about a car that has a speedometer which goes up to 75 mph, but really alternates between 120 mph for 2 minutes and 30 mph for 8 minutes throughout your trip, so that the effective MAX speed is 48 mph?
Highway travel (analogous with video streaming/downloading) would be downright impossible because the minimum speed would be insufficient for that route.
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No, you broke it again- my parents are on Comcast and it suits them fine. They don't bittorrent, they don't download much of anything- they send email and read some websites and very rarely watch something on youtube. They're use very little bandwidth and Comcast does not interfere with anything they do.
Username taken, please choose another one.
What about the option of borrowing wireless from a neighbor? I am a light browser who would be more than willing to go without Internet at home (with knowledge that I can go to a coffee shoppe if I *really* need something online). However, my neighbor pays for his access and doesn't mind that I utilize the connection a little bit at night or on the weekend. And the price is *much* more reasonable than paying Comcast $30-50 per month for "premium access".
Which -- I think is the entire point. $50 per month is TOO MUCH for somebody who absolutely positively could live without the service... and there is no $10 per month option for somebody who is only interested in downloading 20% of the amount of digital information as the guy who wants to run BitTorrent while he sleeps.
I would gladly give Comcast $10 per month for the amount of home internet use that I do. And if I get a "Error: Usage exceeded" during the 3rd week of the billing cycle -- then I would consider upgrading. But with only the "overpriced" option to choose from, I choose not to subscribe.
And frankly, this suits Comcast just fine, because there are plenty of people who are completely willing to pay for the $50 price point so that they can continue to run their business.
As an example: some people "need" internet so they can work from home 2-3 days per month. If they save 2 hours of commute time by connecting from home - guess what? The $50 connection paid for itself - because their time is probably more valuable to them then the cost and convenience of the connection.
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ISPs went long way from leasing lines from the "common carriers" and utilizing publicly available infrasturture in order to build the Internet to the point in time today, where they themselves are part of the public infrastructure, and they themselves are in many cases owners of the physical links that connect places. In the same time they went from lucrative business models to minimal margin (or even below margin in certain cases), while offering ever greater bandwith and for lower price. Now, that multitude of options, combind with the shere geograpy gives historically quite diverse ZOO of ISPs with different business models, different technologies, different business practices. But what's the result of all of it? Clearly, result is that only the strongest will survive. ALL business models have already been tried by at least some ISPs, and if the survived, the model survived. If they failed, model failed with the ISP. It's that simple. And today we can only see that only the biggest companies can offer a lot of bandwith, for acceptable price, with poor or bad customer service. But then again, the same can be said for almost any utility company. In essence, I just proved that "offering Internet" today has glamour of "offering Electricity" or "offering gas". And while we can understand "pay per use" with gas and electricity I would warn anyone against favoring "pay per use" in Internet. Internet became popular JUST BECAUSE it had different pricing model, where one could surf the content next door or accross the globe for the same price. Where one could just use it moderately, or heavily, and still pay the same (if it's the same speed). Internet is a reality. It can be crushed only if it's taken over by (geographic-wise) monopolies. Only then they could choose whatever business model, pump the price and get away with it. And we had that in times of old TELCO's. Never forget that TELCOs were the last to start their own IP routers.
It's not a problem of cables, it's all about pricing.
Go out and find out how much it costs to buy, say, 100 megabits of real, honest, unlimitted, *guaranteed* bandwidth. Divide that by 17, and look at just how much you would have to charge users taking up a full 6 megabits just to break even. Then factor in the cost of your network and maintaining it.
Whether their business practices are honest or not (often, they're not, as they don't tell you what they're going to do) is irrelevant. People who think that it's their right to max out a multi-megabit connection for the cost of a couple of lunches need to wake up and join reality.
If broadband companies don't limit user's use, then there are only three eventualities: Either service will suck for everyone, everyone's prices will rise greatly, or prices will rise for those who use the most. There's no other way for the company to stay in business without something subsidizing them. When you look at countries with ultra-cheap broadband prices, they're subsidized.
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
"The more you desire to download, the more you will have to pay." That's fair so long as they advertise that fact. But no, they'll lose business when everyone else is offering "unlimited".
If ISPs started to meter total usage, then Ad-blockers, Flash-blockers, and anti-ad Host files would become standard installations in every user's browser.
-Users would think twice before clicking on those "marginally interesting news links".
-They would stop using YouTube to watch those bandwidth-hogging "cat on the ceiling fan" videos.
-They would stop editing files remotely on Google docs and start to edit files locally again (in word?).
-They would stop clicking on Google ads since it would be an unnecessary waste of costly bandwidth.
-Google, and all advertisers, would be "fenced off" from the "internet eyeballs" and would start to die off as ad revenues plummeted. (You can't click on an ad you don't see.)
-Millions of news & information websites (that depend on advertising) would also start to suffocate - the smaller ones closing shop first.
-Also, the quality of authored pages would take a severe hit as web site owners cut back on those 'costly' writers (similar to what's happening to newspapers now).
-The whole ecosystem would start to suffer greatly as people held back on internet usage in general (similar to the recession now as people hold back on spending, or driving less due to the high price of gas).
It would be a downward spiral that would be extremely hard to pull out of. Even if ISPs saw the error of their ways and restored flat-rate pricing, users by then would be so used to all their great ad/flash/host blockers that they would have no (individual) incentive to remove them from their browsers. Think about it, if you had the ability to remove commercials from tv, would you ever turn commercials back on again? The record industry has already crossed the line of pushing up p2p usage to the point where those users will never return as customers.
The whole net currently depends on people seeing ads. Most people today have no incentive to install ad blockers since their 'flat' internet-fee covers all the additional bandwidth. The free flow of information and the quality of the net we enjoy today is fueled by this advertising; which, in turn is fueled by users' ability to freely travel the net without an odometer counting each byte transferred.
Metered usage would be the end of the net as we know it today.