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A comment on Talk of an Internet Fast Lane Is Already Hurting Some Startups. Parent comment

Re:Talk of an Internet Fast Lane Is Already Hurting Some Sta... by gnoway on Wednesday May 07, 2014 @08:17AM (#7709703)
Who knows how well it would go over? I would be pleased to pay a metered rate, provided that the metering was standardized and easy to understand - like the electrical meter outside my home - and the pricing was fair. I would also expect there to be no speed tiers; everyone using a service gets the same nominal speed. I would not be interested in purchasing e.g. bandwidth blocks with f-you overage fees like what we used to have (still have? I don't do mobile data) with mobile carriers. That, I agree, would not go over well.

I think that the real problem is not perceived acceptance by customers, but that moving to metered billing makes the service look more like a utility. If I were running an ISP I would want to do everything I could to keep people from equating my service with water or electricity.

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Re:Talk of an Internet Fast Lane Is Already Hurting Some Sta... by YokoZar on Wednesday May 07, 2014 @04:34PM (#7712494)
There's an efficiency argument against metering. Bandwidth is "free" unless service is near capacity, so introducing pricing that discourages use during that off-peak period can create needless problems. So maybe you only want peak-period pricing (kind of like how some cell providers give free minutes on nights and weekends).
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Re:Talk of an Internet Fast Lane Is Already Hurting Some Sta... by otterley on Wednesday May 07, 2014 @05:55PM (#7712866)
This is already done at commercial providers. Those of us who operate networks are pretty well used to paying monthly rates based on 95th-percentile bandwidth utilization.
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