I'd rather keep paying more for unmetered service rather than pay by the byte. I can host a popular site for a couple months, download a few cds, upgrade all of my machines, without having to worry about explaining to my wife why my monthly bill has doubled or tripled.

For $850 a month, I have an unmetered T1. Though I usually only use 15-20 gigabytes a month, on some months I can quadruple that. But I'm talking about using T3 connections to serve a building or an area.

Basically, with metered service, first I'd become paranoid about usage, then increasingly unhappy as time passed. I'd be very unsatisfied with myself as I turned away projects like gnuarch because I didn't know how much it would cost me to host them. Then, I'd become infuriated at you for charging me for bandwidth that I didn't want in the first place -- spams, web based ads, so forth and so on. As for turning away projects - you wouldn't have to. You can set a limit of how much you want to pay and buy bandwidth up to that limit. Also,

James, the market fluctuates as the supply/demand goes up and down. As for spam, etc., nobody said that you had to download it from your ISP's mailserver. However, I do see your point. To be perfectly honest with you, thats not one of the concerns that our current customers have.

I could just imagine saying to myself "I just downloaded the new Debian CD. My bastard of a provider just charged me five bucks"

That may be true - but also think about all the time that your *not* paying for the connection while your at work or out doing something else.

Though I pay a lot now, I know that whether I'm using 20 gigs a month, 80, or 400, the bill will remain the same predictable amount.

I agree with you that knowing what your bill is, is very nice. However, if you had a T3 plugged into your apartment building for mass consumption, that would be nicer, wouldn't it? :)

Now, if you want to sell me a T1 with a /28 for $600 a month (not including local loop) , and then each month offer me a $570 rebate for the bandwidth that I don't use -- well, now we can talk!

If we had facilities where you are, then i'm sure it wouldn't be a problem - but we wouldn't have to give you a rebate, as we wouldn't charge it to you in the first place :) -- Jonathan -- Jonathan M. Slivko Network Operations Center Invisible Hand Networks, Inc. help@invisiblehand.net 1-866-MERKATO (USA) 1-812-355-5908 (Intl) <http://www.invisiblehand.net>