Comcast/etc....meter it YES

[Patrick Miller]

I am all for Metered pricing. I always avoided unlimited dialup accounts. I
used the 200 hour accounts more than I would ever need, but those that
abused paid for the extra lines needed.  Give me the fast connection. Let me
do with it what I want. Don't say I get x bandwidth and try an find tricky
ways to get us to fit in your parameters. I am paying for x bandwidth let me
do with it what I want and pay for the extra data. Just don't nickel and
dime me  for $50/ month  I should be getting a size able chunk of gigs 30
sounds good. If I use that many every month I would be using more than I am
paying for, but on average if I use more than that I will be abusing the
system and pay for it. Less than that and you know you have room to grow.
Its the law of averages. For the average user --- on my cell phone I get
more minutes than I will use, but I know I have a buffer.

Perhaps a good level is 10 gigs.. I haven not seen a chart of average usage
for a cable or dsl node.

More at end....

Bradley Miller wrote:

What about metered pricing though?  Every other commodity is priced that
way.  We buy a gallon of gas, get water based on so many thousand gallons
and electriciy is by the kilowatt/hour.   Why not bandwidth?   Would your
download habits change?  If the price was right I could see a minimum
connect charge (say $15/month) and then a $??/gig transfer fee.  Will
people yell?  Yes -- they are to used to the "give me all I can get"
mentality.  The Internet "metality" is free, but somewhere along the line
someone forgot to mention that the infrastructure has to be paid for
somehow.   We'd all love a 6 lane highway from KC to St. Louis, but once we
realize who's paying for it . . . 

The new 3G wireless phones are on the brink of coming out -- but how do you
price them?  Do you think they're honestly going to let someone tie a cell
and bandwidth to be "Mr. MP3 Jukebox" for 1/2 the country?   

-- Bradley Miller

> 
> Personally, I think they should have metered bandwidth with pricepoints for
> different levels of data connections.  I'm not saying have a
> "20gig/$50/month" limit, more like a window for download speeds.  If you
> have one PC, do you need more than 400K/sec?   A tiered pricing structure
> would give people the best of both worlds.

Yes and no. You should probably pay a little more for a faster connection,
but probably not. If they have a faster connection they will enjoy the
connection more, and thus reach the limit faster. 

Someone with a 384 connection who downloads the full pipe all the time is
probably causing more problems than someone who bursts upto 4 megs a few
times a month but avereges 128k/month.