I guess your view is different because of difference between pricing of leased lines. If you have a hugely expensive international private line, you have to sell its capacity for prices which make customers unlikely to buy flat-rate. It's not like that in US.
The trend is for flat rate dialup and usage based rates for leased line.
Sorry, this does not correspond to what i've seen. People who buy a T-1 usually have enough traffic to fill it. Faster WWW access encourage faster browsing, that's it.
Having several expensive IPLs that's not what we see either. I wonder if it's more to do with people being more keen to charge per packet if they are paying per packet (either in the obvious metered manner, or if they are using an upstream link which is inevitably going to be flat-topped, which works out much the same as pay per packet). If so this might help explain the difference of views given that I'm in UK which has rather a different connectivity model from continental Europe. As a general point, when providers have cheap / a surfeit of outgoing bandwidth, they are bound to be more concerned about building customer base numerically. When bandwidth is in short supply or expensive, they are going to be concerned more about how much each customer is using. Certainly in the US input cost is less price sensitive to upstream bandwidth costs than in continental Europe (if only as it's a smaller % of total cost). Alex Bligh Xara Networks