An Attempt at Economically Rational Pricing: Time Warner Trial

Mark Foster blakjak at blakjak.net
Mon Jan 21 00:04:13 UTC 2008


>
> 	The big advanatge of these plans is that the cost is fixed
> 	even if I've used up all my alotted transfer.
>

This is the success of systems that implement rate limiting (not 
additional charging) once a specified ceiling has been reached.

It provides some fiscal security that you're not going to blow out your 
upper limit.  (I've seen some horrendous bills in the face of 'overage' 
caused by virus/drone infections, spammers hitting mailservers run on 
SME broadband links, etc etc.)

Both .nz and .au have implemented this.  No reason that .us can't do the 
same?

Heck were I in the USA and I had to choose between 'flat rate' and some 
figure in the vicinity of 10-15GB/month then 'rate limiting' (especially 
then including the option to buy more bandwidth as a one-off), the latter 
would win hands down.  Flat rate (in my world) often includes port-based 
and/or time based throughput limiting that's designed to prevent the ISP 
from being ground to a halt by P2P during peak hours, etc....

I'd rather have a (reasonable) monthly limit for an affordable price, 
thanks.

Mark. (In .nz)





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