North American Network Operators Group
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Re: An Attempt at Economically Rational Pricing: Time Warner Trial

  • From: Scott McGrath
  • Date: Mon Jan 21 21:43:50 2008

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)