If the cheap flatrate broadband were to go away and be replaced by a metered one, we as an industry need to figure out how to do billing in a customer-friendly manner. We do not have much experience with this in many markets.
Us Aussies have PLENTY of experience and are willing to travel and consult at quite reasonable rates - especially to Europe :-) User pays is the reality here in Australia primarily because the cost of getting one gigabyte of data to a customers house is at least AU$1GB (excluding the actual cost of running your own network or the wholesale cost of a DSL port or helpdesk etc). It does also mean that we can afford to build networks and local loops with no congestion and no slow down during peak periods. Customers here expect high performance all the time and we (at least) try and deliver it to them. MMC -- Matthew Moyle-Croft - Internode/Agile - Networks Level 5, 150 Grenfell Street, Adelaide, SA 5000 Australia Email: mmc@internode.com.au <mailto:mmc@internode.com.au> Web: http://www.on.net Direct: +61-8-8228-2909 Mobile: +61-419-900-366 Reception: +61-8-8228-2999 Fax: +61-8-8235-6909 "The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones" - John Maynard Keynes