Fierce Wireless asks a number of vendors who make a living off of billing systems their thoughts on metered billing in the wireless space, and unsurprisingly is told by each one that a shift to metered billing is "inevitable" in wireless. The article is full of the kind of talking points we're used to from an industry that desperately wants to foist higher per megabyte fees on consumers. All major talking points are represented, from the "inevitability" of higher prices and the idea that consumers using your product is a bad thing, to the idea that heavy users "subsidize" lighter users:

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"I think that it is inevitable for the industry to move toward this, otherwise the business model is not sustainable," said Rafi Kretchmer product marketing manager for revenue management at billing systems vendor Amdocs. He noted that low-volume data users are essentially subsidizing heavy data customers. "In order to address this conflict, they realize that to not leave money on the table, they must differentiate the pricing."

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Ignoring for a moment that the wireless sector is already metered (which the article tries to for some reason), this idea that a shift from flat-rate to metered billing is inevitable because of either capacity or financial reasons is one of the broadband industry's favorite, repeated mantras. Unfortunately, it's also not true. Harold Feld found himself annoyed by the Fierce Wireless report and offered up a counterpoint of his own, with points usually not brought up in trade magazine reports that are frequently busy telling carriers what they want to hear, but not necessarily telling the truth:

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The cost structure of building and maintaining the network is marked by high fixed cost and low marginal cost. That is to say, the vast majority of cost comes from building the network itself, regardless of how many customers use it. Once the network is built, the actual marginal cost of each customer is fairly low. Even an intense user does not “consume” very much of the network resources (the supposed “bandwidth hog” is a problem only because network capacity is ridiculously oversold). The argument that the majority of subscribers subsidizes the few “bandwidth hogs” is simply rubbish. The question is simply how obscenely high a rate of return can the network operator squeeze out of each customer.

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And in wireless, the rate of return is rather obscene, when you figure Verizon recently decided that caps as low as 25 MB make sense in 2010. Of course all the talk about protecting the poor, "subsidizing" light users in nonsense. If you examine Verizon Wireless's plan the ideal carrier pricing model isn't about pure pay-per-use, it's all about relentlessly pushing all users toward higher prices no matter how much they use. Not too surprisingly, ISPs, ISP investors, and the billing and support companies who'll make a killing off of these reality-challenged pricing models think that's just a peachy idea...