Comments on: Should We Prefer Metered Bandwidth Over “Unlimited”?

By: Pieter

Pieter — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 09:44:00 +0000

Yeah, that’s pretty annoying. It’s not that hard to implement, then why don’t they do it? Perhaps an old-fashioned petition can put them under some pressure, who knows.

By: Mosh

Mosh — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 20:20:11 +0000

Limited is fine – if it’s enough for you – as long as the ISP can tell you how close to your limit you are. BT in the UK advise you to install a network monitor such as the one above which is absolutely useless if:

1) You don’t know on what day they reset your counter to zero
2) You have more than one machine on the network, or dual boot into different OS’s
3) You have visitors who log on once in a while

All of these make it really difficult to keep an accurate tab on things.

My mobile network can tell me to the second how many minutes I have left on my monthly call plan, how many text messages and how much data. I can do this via a web browser on the PC or via my phone. Yet BT can’t provide just one of these pieces of information (download capacity left) to the end user via a similar web page.

Why should we be guessing at information that they have to hand?

By: StationStops

StationStops — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:46:55 +0000

I would love to see a metered plan with pay-per-incident technical support.

The 2 major costs for an ISP is customer support (#1), and capacity/bandwidth.

Skilled users who aren’t downloading torrents all month or spending an 3 hours on the phone with tech support a month asking why NetNanny isnt working or whatever could negotiate a much lower rate for the internet service.

Right now I am financing grandmas and torrent kiddies

By: M1ke

M1ke — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:37:04 +0000

I thought the internet was a series of tubes Definitely not a truck though.

Over in the UK almost all providers offer most of their packages with metered bandwidth and the speed is as fast as your copper can handle. You only get “unlimited” if you pay for the most expensive packages, and whilst these tend to be subject to “fair use” as well its far more lenient than what you might get over there.