North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Pay-As-You-Use High-Speed Internet?

  • From: Jonathan M. Slivko
  • Date: Fri May 14 18:56:01 2004 
James,


I'd rather keep paying more for unmetered service rather than pay by the
byte. I can host a popular site for a couple months, download a few cds,
upgrade all of my machines, without having to worry about explaining to
my wife why my monthly bill has doubled or tripled.

For $850 a month, I have an unmetered T1. Though I usually only use
15-20 gigabytes a month, on some months I can quadruple that.

But I'm talking about using T3 connections to serve a building or an area.

Basically, with metered service, first I'd become paranoid about usage,
then increasingly unhappy as time passed. I'd be very unsatisfied with
myself as I turned away projects like gnuarch because I didn't know how
much it would cost me to host them. Then, I'd become infuriated at you
for charging me for bandwidth that I didn't want in the first place --
spams, web based ads, so forth and so on.
As for turning away projects - you wouldn't have to. You can set a limit of how much you want to pay and buy bandwidth up to that limit. Also, the market fluctuates as the supply/demand goes up and down.

As for spam, etc., nobody said that you had to download it from your ISP's mailserver. However, I do see your point. To be perfectly honest with you, thats not one of the concerns that our current customers have.
I could just imagine saying to myself "I just downloaded the new Debian
CD. My bastard of a provider just charged me five bucks"
That may be true - but also think about all the time that your *not* paying for the connection while your at work or out doing something else.
Though I pay a lot now, I know that whether I'm using 20 gigs a month,
80, or 400, the bill will remain the same predictable amount.
I agree with you that knowing what your bill is, is very nice. However, if you had a T3 plugged into your apartment building for mass consumption, that would be nicer, wouldn't it? :)


Now, if you want to sell me a T1 with a /28 for $600 a month (not
including local loop) , and then each month offer me a $570 rebate for the bandwidth that I don't use -- well, now we can talk!

If we had facilities where you are, then i'm sure it wouldn't be a problem - but we wouldn't have to give you a rebate, as we wouldn't charge it to you in the first place :)

-- Jonathan

--
Jonathan M. Slivko
Network Operations Center
Invisible Hand Networks, Inc.
[email protected]
1-866-MERKATO (USA)
1-812-355-5908 (Intl)
<http://www.invisiblehand.net>