Using up 10x more electricity or water has very real, physical costs which are proportional to the amount consumed.
Using 10x more data has only very tiny additional costs to the bandwidth provider. A few seconds of research can easily confirm this. Asserting that the levels of bandwidth charges we're seeing right now are "fair" is hilariously wrong.
Just out of curiosity, what sort of calculations went into your result of "tiny additional costs"?
The reason that I ask is that bandwidth is finite and shared by all of the provider's customers. If one person consumes a lot of bandwidth, it will be to the detriment of the provider's other customers if the sum of all requested bandwidth is greater than the finite available bandwidth. Customers will eventually notice this, and the provider will lose those customers.
How did you account for this in your estimate?
You'd also be right if the typical overage fees were within an order of magnitude of what it actually costs the provider to ship those extra bits over the wire. Or even two orders of magnitude. But from the figures I read (costs to the provider of circa a penny per megabyte or well under that), we're getting jobbed.
Don't you find it a bit silly to constantly advertise "4G" networks and their supposedly blazing speeds, and in the same breath set up data plans which will only allow you to use your phone at full speed for circa 1 minute per month? Do the math yourself.
I agree that current data costs are astronomical due to an oligopoly situation (no real competition).
On the one hand, I understand that a plan that gives everyone a free lunch can lead to overconsumption by a few, and once they use up the pipe that they share with me, my performance suffers. On the other hand, I wouldn’t want to have to think before opening every YouTube video, “hmm, is this going to put me over the limit?”
We don't by and large pay for metered roads or sidewalks or bike paths, for example. There are plenty of other unmetered public services -- and whether you like that or not, there's no inherent reason bandwidth couldn't be one of them.
Case in point: text messages. There are still many wireless plans that put a limit on the number of text messages that can be sent and crossing that limit brings about fees to the user far in excess of the costs of sending the text (10 to 15 cents per text would not be uncommon).
Maybe at one point a decade ago those costs made sense (less bandwidth overall, more infrastructure needed, early adopter tax, etc.) but now we're trapped in a legacy rate structure for text messaging that simply won't go away.
It's hard to predict the future, but I feel pretty secure in saying that the data caps we see today are going to seem laughably small a decade from now and I don't want the teleco's to "text messaging rate" my bandwidth from here on out. I think it hurts the industry as a whole and US competitiveness.
I'm cool with that. The real cost of bandwidth is far far far far below what I COULD use over my current equipment and connection vs the fee I pay my end of line provider.
Eventually we'll all be paying metered fees, broadband or wireless. It's really the only fair way, the same as we pay for water or electricity. Data is just another pipe/wire.