I am confused about something - the furor over usage-based billing for internet bandwidth. Businesses and consumers rarely get anything in unlimited quantities for a set price. Sure, you can go eat at a buffet / all-you-can-eat restaurant, but even there, you are limited to one meal, one person. Why should the Telcos have to give you unlimited access to their bandwidth for a fixed price? With the trends in technology, cloud included, traffic is forecasted to rise exponentially. Why should the Telco's have to bear the brunt of managing the provisioning of services for unlimited use by their competitors?

Or, to put it another way, I think that grocery stores should have to sell me unlimited supplies of milk for my household for $10 per month. Forever.

From another perspective, I expect that people who are light users of the internet will not be happy to pay a blended rate that covers an overage user, including those who are uber-users. I recognize that Telcos currently offer a few plans to take this into account, but under the scenario where unlimited bandwidth is mandated, those options may cease to exist.

Ubiquitous computing, cloud computing, and access to all should be possible without companies being forced to offer unlimited bandwidth for a set price. On the other hand, the set price in Canada seems to be unusually high!!

Cheryl

I think the big issue is the mixed messages. On one hand, the telcos are ripping us off with low bandwidth caps and throttled speeds for too much money. On the other, they're touting the benefits of TV and movies over the Internet, which gobble a ton of bandwidth and can't be throttled if you want decent quality. Those items are NOT compatible!

And it's even worse for mobile users (especially roaming). The only vendor that seems to comprehend the concept of economical usage is RIM, who compresses traffic and allows users of its Blackberry Internet Service to filter their email (to prevent high-volume mailing lists from being sent to the device, for example) and to specify that the phone only download message headers by default; users can opt to receive the entire message later if they want to. This makes a huge difference is costs!

I think Usage Based Billing would not be the big deal it is if the cost were actually in line with the actual price of transferring the bandwidth.

For example, I'll be generous and say 10 cents per gigabyte. So, so heavy usage at 200GB per month would come to $20. However, the price the big ISPs are charging is significantly higher.

Add to the fact that with richer media content, we're dealing with far bigger files. For example, I recently purchased a video game online that led to an 8GB download.

And it is detrimental to cloud adoption, see for example this story about the massive bill journalist Matthew Ingram ended up thanks to storing his photo library on Amazon's cloud: What Happens When the Cloud Meets a Bandwidth Cap