said by SuperWISP:The FCC is poised to make metering inevitable by imposing "network neutrality" rules which prevent ISPs from shaping traffic and holding back bandwidth hogs. The only way for ISPs to prevent users from consuming more than they are paying for under such a regime -- and meet payroll-- will be to deter them with higher bills.
I disagree with this.
From the standpoint of the network operator, the issue of concern isn't total metered throughput at any given node, it's capacity-hogging at a given node, isn't it? So how's metered billing going to help?
I could run something file-sharing app configured to limit its bandwidth to low levels 24/7/365 and trade many many gigabytes of data and it wouldn't cause my operator any issues at all; OTOH, a guy who runs the same app wide open during peak hours just a couple hours a day could be trading a lot less packets than I do overall, but he could be the one degrading service for the other users sharing his upstream node(s).
I don't see how charging by the byte is going to fix the problem and make the network work better for all users, which is what ISPs are saying is their goal in introducing per-byte billing schemes.
And this being the case, it seems pretty clear to me that calls for metered billing are just a money grab.
Capping users based on some metric getting at the percentage of time they are using really high levels of capacity would seem to make more sense, or even just managing total bandwidth on some sort of equitable, protocol-agnostic basis.
And there is nothing about these sorts of approaches that violates network neutrality principles as far as I can see.
