Quote:
Originally Posted by BlackEleven
It actually sounds pretty fair to me, as long as the caps are set at reasonable levels. Who uses over 40GB/month without a massive amount of downloading anyway? Why not have the people that use the infrastructure the most pay for it the most? And I say that has a medium to heavy user. I'd way rather have that than getting certain traffic throttled. If they give people a few months of continued unlimited usage and a way to track the amount they downloaded each month, they'll know which plan it the right one for them.
Even on the miniumum plan they propose (5GB per mont) you're not going to hit the limit from popups or ads alone. I'd suggest you install adblock anyway, so you don't have to be annoyed by them in the first place, bandwidth concerns aside.
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It does sound kind of fair in theory. However, consider this:
Supposedly an hour long episode of a high definition television show offered by CBS, for example, could eat up to one 1 GB. Downloading a Netflix DVD-quality movie can be up to 5GB. There are a lot of services out there whose business model depends on the availability of a lot of bandwidth. Think Skype, Vonage, iTunes movies rentals, youtube, etc.
As time goes on, the things you do online are only going to use more bandwidth and there will be companies offering online services. Metering your internet use would be okay in my books iff (<-- notice the extra f) the ISPs offer reasonable caps and fair prices, just as you said. I'm afraid this could become an easy cash grab with bandwidth prices approaching the stupid rates we pay for mobile internet service from cell phone providers.