I'm from Australia where fixed quotas on wired (typically DSL) are de rigeur [1].
Several years ago the ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) banned the use of the word unlimited on Internet plans unless they were truly unlimited meaning no overage fees and no traffic shaping after hitting a soft cap.
Compare that to the UK where they've de died that unlimited means what 90% of users use, which is as little as 5GB/month!
In the US you typically still have caps (hidden behind terms like "fair use"). So the only difference in Australia is the ISPs are upfront about it.
So in Australia the net effect has been:
1. You buy the plan most suited to your usage. In other words you pay for what you use.
2. You get what you pay for. If you pay for 1TB/month you get 1TB/month.
Both of these situations are much better than say Comcasf or Time Warner really only giving you 250GB/month or UK providers declaring you're a downloaded and moving you to a network that in the evenings is utterly unusable.
The fact is that bandwidth still has a marginal cost so it's not unreasonable to expect users to pay for that. Nor is tiered pricing based on usage a bad thing.
In New York I have one choice for high speed Internet: Time Warner (some areas have Verizon FiOS; not mine). There are two plans for $65 and $99 (iirc).
In Australia I have typically a dozen choices or more ranging from $20 to ยข150+ pe month based on the features I want. How can that possibly be a bad thing?
I live in the US and pay 45$ a month for a 35mbps up/5mbps down on a fiber connection with no cap. The actual cost of me downloading 1TB works out to around 10$, but like most customers I don't break 200GB/month which is a small fraction of my bill, and the company is wise enough to realize overcharging for bandwidth is just going to piss me off.
I don't know the percentage, but more people than live in Australia. I game with people in Australia and even in major city's they don't have reasonably priced high speed internet. Granted, laying undersea cables is expensive but compared to other countries in the reign Australian internet sucks.
PS: I am not saying that people living in the middle of the country need to have high speed internet just that you could wire up the major city's at reasonable cost because that's where most people live. http://www.environment.gov.au/soe/2001/publications/theme-re...
Several years ago the ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) banned the use of the word unlimited on Internet plans unless they were truly unlimited meaning no overage fees and no traffic shaping after hitting a soft cap.
Compare that to the UK where they've de died that unlimited means what 90% of users use, which is as little as 5GB/month!
In the US you typically still have caps (hidden behind terms like "fair use"). So the only difference in Australia is the ISPs are upfront about it.
So in Australia the net effect has been:
1. You buy the plan most suited to your usage. In other words you pay for what you use.
2. You get what you pay for. If you pay for 1TB/month you get 1TB/month.
Both of these situations are much better than say Comcasf or Time Warner really only giving you 250GB/month or UK providers declaring you're a downloaded and moving you to a network that in the evenings is utterly unusable.
The fact is that bandwidth still has a marginal cost so it's not unreasonable to expect users to pay for that. Nor is tiered pricing based on usage a bad thing.
In New York I have one choice for high speed Internet: Time Warner (some areas have Verizon FiOS; not mine). There are two plans for $65 and $99 (iirc).
In Australia I have typically a dozen choices or more ranging from $20 to ยข150+ pe month based on the features I want. How can that possibly be a bad thing?
[1]: http://www.iinet.net.au/broadband/plans.html