Is Verizon Considering Metered Billing? > They better not or else

reply to S_engineer

Re: Time to regulate as a utility.....

"I don't file trade or anything like that and my bandwidth use just keeps going up. I could see putting a reasonably high cap on a person..."

You just hit on another point there - on a person. Not a household. Some households have just one computer and one user, some have three computers and five users, or six computers and six users. What's a reasonable cap for a single person is an unreasonable cap for a family of four or five, even just doing normal activities.
--
You're watching Sports Night on CSC so stick around...

So should that family of four or five be charged more money per month than the sole person in a household?

I'm not saying that each household should be treated differently - I'm pointing out that for a product that everyone in a household uses, the amount of bandwidth should be large enough to *compensate* for that - for all tiers. It shouldn't be based on the concept that there's only one user in a household using one computer. It needs to be balanced somehow. I get frustrated when I see people talking about average usage and it's just an average per person usage - not an average *household* usage. Companies can't market high speed internet to *families* and then give them usage that's only equivalent to what the average "person" uses in a given week. And if you look at the commercials for a lot of these companies, they're all about how the *family* can use high speed internet. Kids downloading music and playing games and dad browsing his websites. As much as I hate Comcast, they're the only ones who've gotten even remotely close to a reasonable cap of all the ISPs I've seen doing capping in the U.S. and Canada.

Time Warner's 5-40 gig tiers aren't viable for a family. Period. Not even a family of non-piraters. There are too many legitimate and legal uses for bandwidth. They need to reanalyze just what the average amount of bandwidth *households* consume every month rather than the average amount a single person does.
--
You're watching Sports Night on CSC so stick around...

The ISPs know exactly how much the average household consumes each month. They have no real means of determining usage per individual in a household. There appears to be a semantics issue here. Given your more defined viewpoint, I equate individual to household and vice verse for usage statistics and rhetoric regarding capping/metering.