Dear Mark, ----- Original Message ----- From: "Mark Newton" <newton@internode.com.au>
Do you think Australian ISPs haven't tried to offer US-style flat-rate services? Of course they have. And they get destroyed in the marketplace.
Here's the thing that metering gives you: it stratifies the marketplace. It gives you two classes of customer.
One class is customers who know they can live painlessly within the boundaries of whatever quotas you're offering. They don't complain, they just pay their flat monthly bill every month and get on with their lives.
The other class is customers who do so much P2P that the imposition of quotas is a painful and unwelcome experience. They whinge and bitch loudly about how awful their ISP is, and migrate en-masse towards whichever ISPs are providing "unlimited" services. The only people who truly care about "unlimited" are the ones who know they can't live within any limits.
That means "unlimited" ISPs almost exclusively attract the most voracious, least profitable, noisiest, most difficult to support, loudest complaining customers. And the metered ISPs cater for normal folks who aren't like that.
I can't agree with your definition of users. In community that has been also in a bit isolated (czech republic), there has been monopoly for cables/lines to Western europe till end of the 2K. Then after deliberalisation (and later sale of state owned ILEC) many new players entered the market and prices felt down. So it seems like Australia is somewhere in our trace. In meantime, some companies tried to start metered services. Some failed, some survived. But no one from surviving based his metering on payments on gigabytes. Most of them are working to soft limits and aggregation. Just because there is a problem that user cannot understand what is he consuming. You can meter water or minutes consumed on telephone. But if you are tuning up your favorite newschannel over Internet, do you know how many MB you are transferring each minute? Other problem is unsolicited traffic. Most of "plain users" have their PCs not well secured. And worms and botnets can create same traffic as P2P. Same situation for application that are making money over your business (i.e. Joost or Skype). You can argue that people cannot understand eletricity consumption and they are paying for usage, but - someone has to fire a coal or broke uranium atoms to develop elettricity. Are ISPs developping Mbytes or are they paying to Yahoo!, Google or other ICP? For me, raising this discussion from ISP community will lead to discussion on net neutrality from other (unwanted) side. May AT&T pay to Yahoo! or Google for data that they are selling to their customers? Regards Michal P.S: To not be completelly off-topic. For last two weeks I've been visiting New Zealand (nomadic access). And last few days I'm in Australia. Let me tell you that it is unblievable that these two countries are on the same submarine cable systems. NZ looks from nomadic perspective as US or NL, but I've been more lucky to get connectivity in Beijing that in Melbourne neighborhood :-(