Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?

2007/10/4, David E. Smith <dave@mvn.net>:

I imagine the cost of backhauling traffic a few thousand miles in underseas cables would add to the cost of running an ISP in, say, Australia, especially since many sites the end-users will want to see are still hosted in the US.

In Europe, the only ISPs where i've seen bandwith quotas was some cables operators, while in Canada bandwith quotas seem to be still in place at many ISPs. I'm not an expert at all, but it seems that in Europe, even far from the US-hosted websites, the bandwith cost may be cheaper. -- Vassili Tchersky