What makes it worse, is that there are villians out there – spammers, fraudsters, fishers, and other miscreants who have the ability to take over the consumer’s computer, and to use their bandwidth for whatever purpose they want, often attacking other computers, spreading the virus or worm that keep on coming around regardless of the vast amount of resources now being devoted to Internet security all over the world. Metered Internet would further exacerbate the security problem, by making bandwidth dear, and whether the miscreant’s motivation is to avoid their own charges or to create a huge bill for a victim out of plain spite, the results are the same.

The people, by and large, want a flat rate. They want to know what their Internet bill is going to be, month in and month out, and avoid unpleasant surprises. The vast majority of users do not spend the majority of their time or their bandwidth on video, though that may change.

There are technical solutions, such as multicast and P2P, which can do much to alleviate network congestion. Yet P2P, as much as it solves many of the problems with network congestion, angers content creators because they are left without the ability to control the content’s time-shifting. I don’t know of anyone who wouldn’t rather download a video and watch it at their own convenience, than have some sort of streamed video, with its skipping and other defects due to codec inefficiency and network congestion. I am not ashamed to say I seek out the bootleg copies of TV shows to download and watch, not so much as that I need to escape the commercials (which the ‘pirate’ recomposers remove) as I am the assurance of high quality video, ease of access in the future, and portability (can’t use Hulu on an airplane!). What the media needs to do is to produce videos which are downloadable, storable, and not be so concerned with their ability to control the viewers experience, as they do with streaming content. Sure, some people will remove the ads and trade video collections, but a fast and easy way of obtaining ‘legitimate’ TV episodes will be sufficient for the majority of the population to suffer the ads for the sake of the show. Of course, if there was less repetition of the same ads, saturating the TV for weeks, those people who do take it upon themselves to excise such things as those sickening ‘free credit report dot com’ ads (the whole concept is a scam, but I don’t want to get into that here).

Metered Internet will be the death of the Internet. Metered content kept the proprietary, pre-Internet online services from achieving all that the technology promised. Let’s not return to those dark days.

re: “Even the biggest ISPs pay $30 per Mbps per month, at minimum”

You are -way- -way- off on your pricing. Bigger ISPs and carriers are the ones charging this amount but even a quick scan of open list pricing shows examples such as Cogent selling < $5 per Mbps per month. Hint: you’ll recall that Sprint yanked their peering connection to them recently. Yes, bandwidth costs might be -thought- to be predicated on OPEX/CAPEX for the upstream but more importantly they require cooperative pricing levels and charging what the market will bear.

Many of the posters above also forget that bandwidth costs money. A LOT of money anyplace outside the center of a major city. Even the biggest ISPs pay $30 per Mbps per month, at minimum, to get bandwidth to their hubs in your neighborhood. If you don’t want it to be metered, you’d better expect it to be throttled, because ISPs are not charities.

Under a connection and usage metering system, I might pay $5/month for my connection (even if I never use it) and then $X per GB of usage. If I use 100GB this month, I’d pay $100X+$5. If I go on vacation and do not use it, I pay $5. The “free allocation” model might toss in a YGB allocation for the that $5 (but X times Y must be less then $5) and if I do not use my YGB allocation, my next month’s usage should be reduced by my under usage [ie: The under usage is rolled over].

But a position that tries to put forward that bandwidth is free just doesn’t hold water.

Its worth considering that the problem is predominately a regulatory one. US broadband service depends upon competition to regulate price. I dont know about you but I have a choice Comcast, RCN and Verizon FIOS. Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but FIOS has not resulted in any cost reduction. Perhaps instead of blaming Comcast considering that everyone else pretty much takes the same money, you should question the effectiveness of the current regulatory environment.

But its easier to blame large and successful corporations.

Nice rant, but none of this has anything to do with metered billing. The fact is metered billing is a money grab, an attempt to stifle iptv. It’s as simple as that. The cable co’s just want another way to increase their bottom line. It’s a bad idea all the way around I hope it dies.