Re:Bob Metcalfe is right for once? (Score 2)

There's a slightly different reason for broadband (DSL & cable modem) companies in Australia, Canada, and elsewhere outside of the US to charge by the MB. I've seen estimates that anywhere from 40% to 80% of a non-US country's traffic is coming from outside of that country, though this quantity is declining as internet use grows and the caching companies like Akamai get busy. Since most non-US providers aren't all that big, they're not allowed to peer with US providers and must pay for tranport, which means getting an international leased line.

Now, a 56K line can easily run into the thousands per month as soon as it crosses the US border and there are only a few companies running anything like a T3 or faster, especially when crossing oceans. If your a provider and give an average speed of 500K for a cable modem or DSL connection, that means it takes <1 or only a few dozen users to suck up all of your international bandwidth, which as previously noted is a big part of your traffic.

So the major reason why the international providers are doing bandwidth metering is so they can recoup the costs of delivering all that traffic from US web sites from those users who insist on doing it while discouraging other users from hogging the pipes. There are a number of other schemes being talked about, like separately metering & billing on-net vs. off-net traffic, traffic shaping so that low-latency services like gaming could have guaranteed bandwidth (at a price), etc. but all of these depend on fairly new systems (IP mediation, traffic shaping, and that mythical beast called QOS) that few providers have in place. That's why Excite@Home and other broadband carriers in the US throttle down connections, if they had the infrastructure you can be sure they'd let you get that extra bandwidth for a price.

Most of these broadband companies aren't out to screw the customer (too much), they're just trying to offer services and make a buck, or maybe a billion bucks. However, it's been shown that unless you're Mindspring, you the provider can't make a decent profit off $x/month unlimited consumer access alone, you've got to get into other services. Therefore, the broadband companies think they can say "Hey, we're giving you this much faster connection for some base price, and if you want more than a certain amount of bandwidth we'll charge you for it."

And, finally, if you're a broadband provider who happens to be part of an incumbent carrier (like Telstra Big Pond), you get hamstrung by corporate politics (incumbent carriers can't/won't offer the high bandwidth connections too cheaply because that'll cut into T-carrier revenues), and if you're not careful the government regulators will make your life hell.

Ob-disclaimer: I used to work for Lucent Technologies on internet billing and customer care systems and interacted with most of the major providers at one point or another as a vendor. Your mileage will vary. jonathan