Hong Chen writes:
I think that metered pricing will come sometime, if not in the near future.
I seriously doubt it. We live in a market driven world. The market doesn't want it. People would rather pay a higher fixed price.
There are various technologies and applications being introduced which allow a dial up user to nail up a port for many many hours (such as PointCast, and many new business plans I have seen).
So? In the long run ALL users will have dedicated lines (cable modems, ADSL, something) and their machines will be exchanging bits with other machines all day and all night. Its what the net is for. You are blaming people for using it as it was designed. Raw bandwidth is inherently cheap. Undersea lines are even fairly cheap, except nasty government price fixing keeps them expensive. Switching equipment is expensive right now but Moore's Law takes care of that over the years. In the long run (ten years) everyone in developed countries will be on the net at all times. No one is going to want metered service -- it will be too much bother -- and so long as the customers pay enough on average to cover use there is no problem. We could introduce metering now for the short run, but I'd say its smarter for people to let the ISPs charging $15 a month to just go out of business, and let the ones charging a reasonable market rate to survive. If the customers demand low usage plans or the like people will start providing it. In short, let the market do its thing. Perry