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CRTC Approves Usage Based Billing In Canada
qvatch writes with this from CBC News: "The CRTC has approved Bell Canada's request to bill Internet customers, both retail and wholesale, based on how much they download each month. The plan, known as usage-based billing, will apply to people who buy their Internet connection from Bell, or from smaller service providers that rent lines from the company, such as Teksavvy or Acanac. ... Customers using the fastest connections of five megabits per second, for example, will have a monthly allotment of 60 gigabytes, beyond which Bell will charge $1.12 per GB to a maximum of $22.50. If a customer uses more than 300 GB a month, Bell will also be able to implement an additional charge of 75 cents per gigabyte."
A friend works at a local ISP and he tells me that 0.1% of the customers use as much bandwidth as I do. That's a very tiny percentage.
Ever heard of TV streaming? It's here, and it's cool. You don't have to be a techno-nerd to use a lot of bandwidth. I've got netflix streaming, and it chews up about 900 megabytes/hour. Even "Grandma" might want when her son buys her a cheap streaming device for Christmas. This internet thing isn't going away, and bandwith usage will only increase rather quickly. Your 30 gigabytes/month will look like 640k of memory in about 10 years.
Bandwidth is a finite resource, even if we don't believe it.
Bandwidth is an ever expanding resource. It's finite in the same sense that processing power is finite. Someday the increase will be over, but that's unlikely to happen for quite some time.
AccountKiller
Bandwidth is an ever-expanding resource, but someone has to pay for the expansion, and the extra operating costs.
Once upon a time, flat rate pricing was economically viable, in densely populated nations at any rate. Perhaps it will be again one day, if the cost of bandwidth falls enough. Right now, I don't believe it is.
Come back when you can understand concepts such as broadcast and point-to-point