Sometimes yes, sometimes no.

When you go down in density, your fixed cost per customer really escalates and you simply can't afford to provision as much as you'd like to. When you leave glass as a transport mechanism, scaling isn't easy. When you don't have a wireline to the customer prem, scaling isn't easy.

You might have a licensed backhaul going 10 - 20 miles to feed a remote cluster of customers (be it wireless, copper, coax, or glass as the last mile). Those are more or less limited to about 1.5 gb/s. Spectrum availability can reduce that. You can sometimes stack them, but again, spectrum availability would be king in that decision.

You might have fixed wireless as the last mile. We're starting to see platforms capable of multi-hundred megabit per customer with a sector capacity of low gigabits, but again, spectrum availability comes into play here. Those solutions require line of sight (or close to it) and only go a few miles. The systems that can penetrate foliage really cut your per-sector capacity to around 100 megabit, shared amongst all customers. Those are simply limitations of physics.

When you don't have the benefits of scale, the only viable path forward in a managed setting is usage-based billing, with some amount of included data.

-----
Mike Hammett
Intelligent Computing Solutions
http://www.ics-il.com

Midwest-IX
http://www.midwest-ix.com

From: "Mark Tinka" <mark@tinka.africa>
To: "Mike Hammett" <nanog@ics-il.net>
Cc: nanog@nanog.org, "Josh Luthman" <josh@imaginenetworksllc.com>
Sent: Tuesday, June 20, 2023 12:44:54 AM
Subject: Re: FCC Chair Rosenworcel Proposes to Investigate Impact of Data Caps

On 6/19/23 14:56, Mike Hammett wrote:

You're assuming that an uncapped service is viable to offer. In many areas, it is. In many areas, it is not.

It is viable for mobile services, even though I think mobile operators have taken the model a little too far.

But for fixed line services, it is mainly used to print free money, or limit investment in the network. I'm okay with either model an operator chooses to take, because until someone else comes along to break capped services on fixed line, there isn't much anyone can do about it.

Mark.