Comment Re:can be done (Score 1) 200
You pay a monthly fee if the fibre runs past your house. If you want to connect the fibre to your home, you pay a one-time connection charge, followed by a higher monthly fee plus a charge per bit for incoming and outgoing data
Fuck no.
People that are not using the service should not have to pay for it just because someone decided to run a line past their house. That would just encourage the planners to run dark fiber everywhere and collect fees for years before people decide to connect.
There's little reason to charge by the bit or have data caps like most ISP's do. It's not a finite resource like water is. The major cost is last mile, once you have that in place it is a minor cost to upgrade your backbone to support extra usage. The last thing parents need is a huge bill because their kids watched a ton of 1080p youtube videos last month, downloaded a lot of games off steam, or whatever else. The penalty would either be so small that it would be meaningless to have at all or big enough that it would cause massive bills by surprise like cell phone service and smartphone app pricing have done in the past.