1) You pay $40/month for an unlimited 10Mbps connection, but can only get 10Mbps at 2-4am in the morning. Other times, because of high network usage, you get an unstable connection that goes 3-5Mbps, or even slower during peak times.
2) You pay $40/month for a 10Mbps connection with a 100GB limit. Most of the time, your connection speed is around 10Mbps, but you just need to watch how much you download. There is a tool provided for you by the ISP to check your usage, updated daily.
I would much, MUCH rather go for the second option.
Speak for yourself. I would much rather have the first option.
I would much rather have an Internet plan where I pay $40/month and I know it's going to cost me $40/mo.
My Internet usage is variable; I rarely hit a particular 'average' - I've used as much as 300GB to as little as 10GB in a month.
That's one problem.
Another problem is that the caps are low and overage prices are exhorbitant. $1.00 (or more) per GB is just highway robbery, especially since bandwidth costs the ISPs about $0.02 at max per GB. The only reason one would be able to charge that much per GB is because the ISPs are either defacto monopolies or oligopolies - $0.10/GB would be reasonable AND would provide a 500% profit at least.
A third problem is that I just don't trust my ISP to measure bandwidth effectively. Since the measurement happens on their end, they could be inaccurate and I'd just not know.
There's no reason ISPs can't offer a "unlimited speed but per/GB" vs "limited speed during peak hours but unlimited GB" plan, using QoS policies for the former and latter. So that people CAN make that choice as you suggested.
Because I'm going to be honest - I just spent 6 months in New Zealand. I found it a very hard adjustment and moved back to the states - one of the reasons I did so was because I don't think the Internet has affected the culture of New Zealand the way it has the culture of the United States.
New Zealand has pretty much always had UBB from the beginning, and there's no Internet plan that doesn't have UBB in the country.
So people use the Internet sparingly; they associate use of the Internet with cost and do not wish to incur that cost themselves, nor do they want to impose that cost upon their friends.
In the long run, it ends up that people don't use the Internet socially. It's less often in New Zealand that people organize social gatherings on the Internet, it's hard to find businesses, services, events, etc. on the Internet - in short, the entire country pretty much feels like you're living in the mid 1990s, where Internet is *there* but nobody really considers it central to the way they organize their lives. It's a culture shock that was just a huge problem for me; and I think it's actually retarded New Zealand's cultural growth. Now, there were other reasons I moved back, but that was a big one.
So I think there are some serious social problems associated with UBB.
