Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?

Thu Oct 4 20:45:10 UTC 2007

On 4-Oct-2007, at 1416, Joe Greco wrote:

> It'd be interesting to know what the average utilization of an  
> unlimited
> US broadband customer was, compared to the average utilization of an
> unlimited AU broadband customer.  It would be interesting, then, to  
> look
> at where the quotas lie on the curve in both the US and AU.

I think the implication here is that there's a smoothing effect that  
comes with large customer bases.

For example, I remember back to when DSL was first rolled out in New  
Zealand. It was priced well beyond the means of any normal  
residential user, and as a result DSL customers tended to be just the  
people who would consume a lot of external bandwidth.

At around the same time, my wife's mother in Ontario, Canada got  
hooked up with a cablemodem on the grounds that unlimited cable  
internet service cost less than a second phone line (she was fed up  
with missing phone calls when she was checking her mail).

She used/uses her computer mainly for e-mail, although she  
occasionally uses a browser. (These days I'm sure legions of  
miscreants are using her computer too, but back then we were pre- 
botnet).

If you have mainly customers like my mother-in-law, with just a few  
heavy users, the cost per user is nice and predictable, and you don't  
need to worry too much about usage caps.

If you have mainly heavy users, the cost per user has the potential  
to be enormous.

It seems like the pertinent question here is: what is stopping DSL  
(or cable) providers in Australia and New Zealand from selling N x  
meg DSL service at low enough prices to avoid the need for a data  
cap? Is it the cost of crossing an ocean which makes the risk of  
unlimited service too great to implement, or something else?

Joe