"You mean like water, where you pay for what you use?"
I don't know about where you live but in most communities in my area it is an unmetered water system. Everyone uses as much water as they want, within the limits of their little 3/4" pipe going into their homes and are billed collectively. If you want a bigger pipe, you pay a higher percentage of the collective cost of the system. It works quite well for the most part. I don't see why it would be so different for data. If you are only going to check email, a dial up or extremely slow connection will do, if your going to watch a video stream sometimes and maybe download some data (but never at the same time) a medium speed connection will do, if you want to be able to watch one or two video streams while downloading data you'll need a higher speed plan. Each progression will cost you more, this has worked out quite well up till now. The reason it is falling apart now is, for the most part, the service providers have been pocketing all of money from their customers. Putting little to none of it back into their infrastructure like most businesses do, even when the government gave them billions for infrastructure improvement, they turned around and pocketed most of it, or used it to build their cell networks.