We just got done
saying that one possible future of U.S. cable broadband can be seen on display in Canada. Canadian cable operator Rogers not only offers different tiers for usage (as U.S. providers do), but they recently started charging users between $1.25-$5 per gigabyte for going over their 60GB monthly caps. Canadian Grandma, on her "eXtreme!" ultra-lite 2Mbps downstream tier, enjoys paying $5.00 per additional GB.
Gizmodo notes that at least one American broadband provider already does this. Bend, Oregon based BendBroadband (just one review in our database) offers some nice speeds (8-16Mbps down, 1-1.5Mbps up) but some not so nice caps (10-50GB monthly), and charges $1.50 per additional gigabyte consumed. It looks like modem rental will cost you an additional $10, and at least one tier has to pay $2.95 extra for anti-virus protection delivered for free on higher tiers.
ISP execs from nearly a dozen providers have told us they know it will be hard to sell U.S. consumers on straight per-byte-billing, but it's very possible they could have better luck with
low caps and overage charges, particularly if they continue to be successful convincing the public that there's a
looming bandwidth apocalypse. We were the first to
break the news that Time Warner Cable was already considering imposing monthly caps between 5 and 40GB, likely with overages.