I think a rate limited plan would appeal to most customers as it would
give them a fixed monthly budget item. But I am pretty sure this will
not happen in the US based on experiences with the broadband by cell
providers who prefer a 'bill-by-byte' method with no mechanism to stop
loss in the event of a runaway process or compromised host It seems
the market has lost it's taste for a known revenue stream with known
costs and profits in exchange for a Vegas go for broke growth at all
costs mentality. And too often the vendor does go broke it seems the
market has lost a degree of rationality to the point where ISP are
'firing' customers who are using 'too many' resources instead of trying
to help them fix their issue or if they really are using all those bits
finding a mutually beneficial method of profiting from them.
Mark Foster wrote:
The big advanatge of these plans is that the cost is fixed
even if I've used up all my alotted transfer.
This is the success of systems that implement rate limiting (not
additional charging) once a specified ceiling has been reached.
It provides some fiscal security that you're not going to blow out
your upper limit. (I've seen some horrendous bills in the face of
'overage' caused by virus/drone infections, spammers hitting
mailservers run on SME broadband links, etc etc.)
Both .nz and .au have implemented this. No reason that .us can't do
the same?
Heck were I in the USA and I had to choose between 'flat rate' and
some figure in the vicinity of 10-15GB/month then 'rate limiting'
(especially then including the option to buy more bandwidth as a
one-off), the latter would win hands down. Flat rate (in my world)
often includes port-based and/or time based throughput limiting that's
designed to prevent the ISP from being ground to a halt by P2P during
peak hours, etc....
I'd rather have a (reasonable) monthly limit for an affordable price,
thanks.
Mark. (In .nz)
