Australian ISPs charge by the byte or megabyte already!

This is not a new experiment. Just come to the land of sucky internet down under.

Same here in New Zealand. Besides a fixed fee of some $49 per month, I also pay $1 per GB, and that is quite cheap actually. There are other plans that have some amount of free transfer volume for you, and for anything above that you pay between $5 to $20 per GB.

Besides paying for excess bandwidth, with many ISPs you may also opt for throttling when the limit is exceeded.

You can get away with a lot if your customers are used to it. Since in the US the customers are used to unrestricted bandwidth, ISPs may loose customers if they want to introduce it. In other parts of the world, however, this is all very normal already.

I just sent ya'll the link 2 hours ago from Foxnews, who got it from the Associated Press.

Now it's "new" news from Reuters, who posted it yesterday?

Pretty damn sad if you ask me.... ya'll missed it - admit it!

Here in the UK, we've had PAYG broadband for quite a while. Grandaddy of the concept, way back in 2003 [1], was the dear departed Metronet, which at the time was a tiny ISP with a service quality second to none. Sadly, two takeovers later, it is now a sub-brand of BT, and its home-made *x based Redback+Juniper+Cisco-free (?) infrastructure based mostly on standard servers and GPL'd software put together in creative ways is probably (mostly) gone forever.

Encouraging a sensible mix of customers (some low usage, some not so low) by means of sensible PAYG tariffs meant Metronet didn't have to spend the same fortune on bandwith as the other "unlimited" ISPs of the time.

Combine that with a small staff, all of who seemed to actually have a clue, not the usual one clue shared between five hundred employees, it was a very nice experience for their 20 thousand or so customers.

PAYG doesn't guarantee that kind of service but maybe it helps; obscure caps and traffic management don't help anyone much, except maybe the RIAA/MPAA.

[1] http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/i/1027.html

It seems like they are reverting to the dial-up business model. I thinkit is all just a ploy to make mor e money. I can't imagine having to worry about how much money I am spending if I am having a video conference, downloading software, checking e-mail, whatever else. I think the $45 per month that RoadRunner costs now should be fine for Time Warner. Especially as the number of broadband subscribers continues to grow across the US.

I for one hope their experiment fails. Just think about the previous comment by David Austin.

Isn't this going *backwards* in time ???

Didn't we just graduate from a per-usage model (modem over phone) to flat-fee, all-you-can-eat broadband for all ???

WTF ?

Essentially they're saying "here you have your high speed internet connection. Please don't use it to its promised, advertised and much-hyped capacity, since we haven't got the back end infrastructure nor are we willing to invest in it - so we'll just penalize you for doing things online."

Web 2.0, meet ISP 0.1 ....

Nuffin new over here in the Czech Republic either. FUP ("Fair User Policy"...my ass) caps are used for a long long time along with quite expensive flat-rates! In fact right now we have came to a point, when Cable ISPs are slowly disabling 'em again. Quite funny, eh?

as a former Aussie resident, I wish the providers over here were like I'd. At least there, they're honest about limits and caps... Over here in the uk they can say its unlimited, even if its limited at one byte... Fair use my backside.

If they can't provide the bandwidth they advertise and sell, take away their license to sell such services.

Personally I feel the customers of Comcast in particular have a genuine case for a class action lawsuit.

Their actions are tantamount to fraud. It's not the fault of their customers that these cable providers haven't secured the bandwidth necessary to provide the services they're selling. If you've reached your capacity then you can no longer sell your product.

If I run out of hard disks, I can't sell 100,000 more and then tell 200,000 people they're going to have to share them.

Tell me, what would happen if you paid for a hard disk and then found it was less than half the size of the one you ordered? Now tell me what would happen if millions of customers found their hard disks half the size of the product they ordered.

At the very least every customer would be entitled to a full refund, more likely the company that sold the hard disks would be investigated and its owners would probably face criminal charges.

These cable companies have deliberately deceived their customers. If a 3, 6 or 12 mbit internet connection can not be delivered they have no right to sell it.

I don't get my phone company telling me I can no longer use my telephone during the time most people are awake and not working, or that I can only make 3 phone calls during that period.

My satellite provider doesn't cut my available channels by half during primetime, and my gas supplier doesn't cut off my heating when it gets below a certain temperature.

I don't get home and find half a hamburger missing because McDonalds has lots of customers and needed to give half of what I bought to someone else.

So if they can only provide 384 Kbits or less to each customer they told they would provide 3 Mbits to, then they have deliberately mislead the customer into paying for a service they knew they could not deliver. That's called fraud, and on the scale we're talking, the consequences in any other business would mean serious jail time.

Just like somebody mentioned earlier, it was not too long ago when metered connections where offered by most ISPs for dial-up accounts but where dropped due to the popularity of unlimited always on connections.

Back in the days when we had a true free market for ISPs in Canada, it was soo easy to switch to the provider who offered what you wanted at the price you wanted. Free market decided what model best served people's needs. Now that super huge coporations pretty much killed the ma and pa ISPs, we are in situations where these megacorps have monopolies and quasi-monopolies. If you don't like it, well there is not much choice.

I personally would not mind it soo much if they offered unlimited at the current price, and the metered connections at lower cost, but I somehow get the feeling this is not going to happen.

Ironically, there is a lot of people who blame these 5% of users for bandwidth issues rather than blaming their own ISPs. When you purchase unlimited, it means UNLIMITED, not unlimited but with a cap.....They are not doing anything wrong. Besides if 5% of people running at full speed 24/7 represents 50% of bandwidth, well doesent that mean that they oversold their badnwidth? Instead of having a 10=>1 ratio, why not try I dunno 8=>1 or 7=>1 instead? But no, heaven forbid those corporate profits come in first.

Besides if anything like this gets implemented world wide (I know some places already do use this model) it would pretty much kill certain emerging products before they even had chance to start (such as renting videos/movies over the net) and not to mention the negeative effect it would have on gaming online, streaming shows etc etc etc......

Not only as Foo Bar has outlined, but the real selection of available ISPs in NZ is rather anemic (Relatively speaking) since most ISPs are simply reselling DSL services from the primary national supplier, who up until recently has had an anti-competitive relationship with its own ISP service. So at the end of the day, you'll be hard pressed to find much to differentiate most NZ based ISPs. Cable is available through TelstraClear, but its data prices don't really get competitive unless you go for the triple-play option and put all your eggs in the TelstraClear basket.

Oh, don't get me started on anti-competitive behavior from incumbent telcos.

Telstra complain in NZ about the prices, restrictions, etc in place preventing them from competing properly.... Yet in their home land, they do EXACTLY the same thing to other ISPs.

Pot - Kettle - Black.

TB - sitting on a 4.5mbps ADSL 1 link, with no other faster option for a good 400km around (excluding the government offices and 2 or 3 businesses with fibre links).

Hugh McIntyre said:

As for bandwidth metering, it may all depend if it's "only

if you're in the top 5%", or "variable prices for everyone".

No, it will be more like this:

1) You can get so many "free" megs with your subscription.

2) Subscriptions come in sizes of 5ooM, 1G, 2G and 3,245G

3) If you use over that amount, you are charged at 1.25x the cost of the next higher bracket...

4) ...unless you call ahead and request an extension, in which case, the cost is the same as the cost for two brackets higher.

5) You can, if you want, buy "over-run insurance", whereby you pay more per month for the same bracket, but if you use more, and you don't call ahead, you only pay 1.1x the next higher bracket.

6) International bandwidth and local bandwidth are charged seperately, except when they're not.

7) International/local bandwidth splits are another variable in your choice of package.

8) If you over-run, and you didn't call ahead, and you don't have insurance, then local bandwidth comes at 1.23x the cost of the next higher bracket, whereas international is at 1.26x. If you did call ahead, then it's at 1.1x and 1.2x, respectively. If you have insurance, it's at 1.15x and 1.25x.

9) BitTorrent use is charged at 2.5x HTTP use, unless you have the "BitTorrent" add-on package, when it's only charged at 1.9x.

10) Your total BitTorrent usage is capped at 25% of your total package. If you over-run on BT usage, you will be charged at 3x your package. If your BT usage over-runs your total bandwidth, you get charged at 3x the rate for the first half of the higher bracket, after which we will reset your connection,

11) P2P traffic is limited to 50% the normal maximum speed of your line, and is charged at 1,325x the normal cost-per-byte

12) ...and so on...

13) ...and so on...

14) ...and so on...

In other words, your ISP charging plan will look like your long-distance calling plan, only tice as opaque. In the end, you'll pay whatever they charge you, because you won't be able to calculate it for yourself, or dispute anything.

(Look up "Confusopoly" on Wikipedia.)

(I know, that was a lame attempt at parodying a complex pricing structure. My simple, straight-forward brain cannot begin to emulate the sick minds of the people that come up with real-world pricing structures.)

So i would have no idea how much that episode of Trash my Kids download will cost me as i cant know how much it will upload as it down loads.

Some of the recent and upcoming - and legal - innovations for use of our higher speed internet connections include commercial streaming TV - these uses are bandwidth intensive (especially when we want HD!)

Moving to a PAYG basis for broadband seems like a backward move for the entire industry, as these sort of applications become more expensive, less likely to be adopted, and thus do NOT become the "killer applications" users can use to justify their expenditure on the higher speed links.

Sounds lie shooting themselves in the foot to me.

You get a cap of 30GB or whatever a month for X amount, you use more you start paying Y amount per GB downloaded over that CAP. You pay a bigger flat fee the cap rises to a bigger amount. Sorry, I'll shut up now, I seem to be trying bring common sense and IT together, when we all know we're dealing with money grabbing, scumbag Telcos here.

"For broadband, it's completely different. There is NO cost to bring a GB to your home. Theon ly cost is the cost of capacity and maintenance. But once you have a given capacity, whether it's used or not makes no noticeable difference."

I suggest you actually go and lookup what you're talking about, there is a cost per GB, a very real one. BT Central/Other backhaul bandwidth is not free, neither are routers, which have a finite capacity of data they can process, so there is a very real cost per GB of data moved around. BT Central bandwidth is around £180/Mbit from memory, 1Mbit is roughly 310GB transferred at full tilt - therefore 1GB = £0.58p - that's without the cost of routers - We're not talking £40 from PC World here, we're talking £40k+ to terminate a DSL connection, handle the L2TP connections, handle the onwards Internet transit - Then we have the cost of that transit as well.

Fixed cost it is not, do your research.

"you pay an additional cost for each cubic meter."

Many properties in the UK pay fixed water rates for an unmetered supply which is effectively unlimited, until 3 days of dry weather cause panic amongst the water companies and we get prosecuted for using hosepipes! So the water tap analogy for downloading is a good one. I dread to think what corresponding analogy we should use for uploading...

In the dear old days of the burgeoning Internet many now long gone ISPs tried to charge based on usage. Buffet style data plans soon put that to rest.

It is understood that a few heavy users can force an ISP to have to upgrade to continue to provide a high level of service to the rest of it's customers.

Throttling and bill by usage is a stupid idea and smacks of an ISP not wanting to pay for keeping up to date. If you are going to call it unrestricted/unlimited/etc. service then it should be that way. If you think you need caps to keep things in budget don't call it that and/or sell that kind for more money. Those who want it will then pay for it. If you price yourself out of the market maybe you ought not to be in the ISP biz.

Sorry I well and truly call bullshit on that.

The fact is while it may be necessary to throttle bandwidth, it's not just bandwidth hogs that pay the price. And even if it were it would still be fraud.

They have deliberately mislead their customers. They have told them they would get a certain bandwidth, and then proceeded to impose conditions that most customers would find completely unacceptable. In times past this would be called a pig-in-a-poke con.

The hours during which bandwidth is throttled are the hours 99% of customers are awake, not working and want to use their internet service.

It's not the customer's fault that the ISP doesn't have the necessary infrastructure investment to deliver all the services they have sold. And quite frankly ISPs are the last people that should be surprised at the requirements of modern day internet usage.

They are selling their services using the very examples they claim are abusive. They sell using commercials showing streaming TV, online gaming, fast downloads - and then throttle customers that try to use those services.

So like I said, I call bullshit - because these companies are lying about what they can provide to their customers, and they do so because they know their customers would go elsewhere if they told the truth.

This is as fraudulent as using eBay to sell items you have no intention of delivering, or any other con that normally results in criminal investigation.

We're not even talking about something as small as false advertising. They are actually taking money from people without any intention of delivering what they know those people are expecting. They make no attempt to properly inform their customers until their customers have discovered the fraud for themselves.

Then they actually have the gall to say it's the customer's fault for expecting to receive the product they paid for.

Personally, I would welcome this if the pricing was right. Most of the time I'm a lightish net user at home - a few hundred meg a month, rising to a couple of Gb when I'm in the midst of a software upgrade. Why should I subsidise those who regularly download several hundred Gb a month? Why should they slow down _my_ net connection?

In addition, I'd like to see some quality of service variables thrown in. I'd _like_ to be able to pay extra to have my web and other real time traffic prioritised provided I really did see a real world improvement in performance. It makes no sense for bulk uses (FTP, P2P etc) to be operating at the same priority as real time or interactive traffic. An intelligently designed charging model would discourage what appears to be the current prevailing attitude - "my traffic is all important and to hell with everyone else".

Like it or lump it, net capacity is a shared resource and will always have finite capacity. If it only fair that those who use more pay more, and time-critical uses are prioritised over bulk transfers.

As Philip said, you guys have it easy,,, here our DSL prices are insane and of cause the service has its moments when its slower than dial up. To make it even worse, there are many areas where we can not even get DSL

@ Philip where in SA are you? Me in Western Cape