Journal hogghogg's Journal: shouldn't we be paying for internet by the megabyte? 2
In the latest in a set of one-sided discussions with customers about how to deal with bandwidth diversity among users, some ISPs are deciding to put a hard limit on total download volume. Isn't a market in bytes the best way to encourage users and the sites from which they download to be conservative in their bandwidth use? In such a system, each megabyte would cost something, perhaps something that is a function of time of day or time of week. Then a user who needs something huge now can pay to have it, a user who is downloading "just because they can" is thrown a disincentive, people who are more clever with compression pay less, and everyone gets a more functional ISP. Of course for a market to really be functional, the consumers would also have to have a good choice of ISPs. I ask Slashdot: what is the best pricing structure for ISPs?
Honest answer? (Score:2)
If the world were full of honest people, paying by the megabyte would be the best way to go.
In the real world, Comcast would wait until you got to 99.9% complete on your 50MB download and then cut you off, forcing you to start all over again.