You can do that if you want. There are tons of services that charge you per byte.

They cost more, and people hate them. But if that's important to you, go for it.

It isn't impossible, just too costly to the typical residential customer who expects to pay <<$100/mo.

..? By the point ISP customers receive internet they have either already paid for the service, paid a deposit, or agreed to pay for it the following month like other utilities. In all of these cases by the time the user makes use of their service they have already agreed to pay for the internet service which includes data, hardware, and other infrastructure fees.

>The ISP spends $X to build and maintain infrastructure for Y Gbps internet.

EXACTLY. You are proving my point! The customer of the ISP has already paid for that. It doesn't cost the ISP any more money if I make use of my service by sending data to netflix, reddit, or whoever! If I watch netflix 12 hours a day it costs the ISP exactly $0 extra dollars. Asking me to pay more money or be throttled is ridiculous.

Hell, if you have one of the largest ISPs they pay nothing for any amount of data transfer over their networks anyway so your argument is even weaker lol.

I don't think this is universally true. I have a gigabit line via a residential ISP ($60/mo) in Europe and it will max out 24/7 without throttling.

What I don't have is access to the same support and service guarantees that would be included in a business plan.

This isn't true in reality. For example, it's significantly more expensive to deliver video traffic from say, my computer to yours, than it would be to deliver from Netflix to your computer.

Okay, so the ISP expects that people won't use what they're sold. That sounds like their problem and their bad planning.

Because you keep paying for it. It's not like you're going to not pay for internet, and you probably don't have many alternative options.

Why? It seems to me that metered internet could work just fine, if the prices are at least somewhat connected with reality (meaning cents per gigabyte at most, with a base cost not more than about $20/month). The form of metering we currently have in the US is usually punitive overage charges for data in excess of some unrealistically low monthly quota, and is applied on top of $60+/month subscription fees. That's obviously bad for internet content providers (since their whole point is to deter further usage), but I think reasonable prices are possible.

But don't people already pay more for higher bandwidth connections?

> If I offer companies the option of paying more for the faster network, why is that a problem?

If the company in question is a customer of the ISP, there is no problem. The problem I mentioned was when you, as a company, have to pay money not just to your own ISP, but to your customer's ISP, just to give them their data.

If you don't have a SLA, you're not paying for X/s. The cheap consumer plans only advertise the speed as a potential maximum with no guarantee. Moreover, they explicitly state that overuse will result in slower speeds.

So if you want X/s, then you'll need a stricter contract, and will have to pay a lot more than what you're doing now. Or, the ISP can request that upstream services subsidize the bandwidth for downstream customers and that way you won't have to pay more.

I really just want my ISP to be like my datacenter: 95%ile bandwidth billing. Nothing else. No services. No filtering. No "speed boosts." Just a connection to other networks.

> I pay for what I use.

Unless you have a metered services, you are not paying for what you use in that sense. You pay for access, sure, but not for what you use.

> My electricity provider does not charge differently for setting up and maintaining the connection based on what I do with the electricity, they just charge me for what I use. Why should an ISP be treated differently?

The issue is not metered billing. I think most people would be OK with it; it'll suck for some but an honest effort to keep the 95% of usage at normal would go a long way, I thinks.

The issue is when you're being billed differently for what you consume, not how much. Would you be OK with electricity used by an LED bulb from company X was metered at 2 times that of company Y which is 2 times that of an incandescent? _That's_ the issue, not metered billing.

Why should those who download tens or hundreds of TBs subsidize the rest of the people?

End-user equipment, underground cables, and ISP's routers ports are the same regardless on the bandwidth. Construction work is expensive, you need American people to lay cables in American soil, can't outsource to India.

Compared to these costs, bandwidth is borderline free, even in the long run.

100% of the time ? not going to happen

So let's say I'm an ISP and I bring a fiber to your home, and gives you a gigabit ethernet port. You cannot expect all current and future customers to be able to use 1 Gbit/s at the same time. You would need a big non blocking switch with as many ports as subscribers, the technology for this does not exist once you reach a large customer base.

Now do you want me to shape your link to 0.1Mbit/s, because that's the only thing I can guarantee if all customers uses their link at the same time ? Or you'd rather have the 1Gbit/s possible bandwidth ?

Which one is better:

1) guaranteed 0.1Mbit/s for 10$, 5Mbit/s for 100$, 1Gbit/s for 4000$ 2) possible 1Gbit/s for 20$ ?

If you take the globalized approach, you cannot have business like Netflix, they destabilize the equation.

I don't even have the option for "gigabyte speeds" - consider yourself lucky.

no it's not subsidizing. Basically I pay X amount to the ISP to ACTUALLY VIEW NETFLIX. Basically the ISP gets more out of the deal by having access to netflix, not the other way.

They do though.

FAANG pay their respective ISPs for X gigabit connections to their data centers. I pay my ISP for a Y megabit connection.

I shouldn't have to pay my ISP extra to have access to Netflix just because Netflix will use up a constant 8-12 mbps data stream. Why should I pay more to access Netflix versus any other high-bandwidth application?

generally when businesses have a cost they charge extra to cover that. Or theoretically they may be making enough money that they could have less profit for a year to improve service.

>the ISP is specifically choosing to drop Netflix packets at a higher rate than other packets.

yeah, and then they are saying we would like to be able to offer a service where we don't drop packets of particular customers if they pay us money. So the 'nice packets you got there, shame if anything were to happen to them' business model.

That assumes people have a choice for their ISP.

If I want high speed internet I have two choices. Both of them are huge national companies.

If they decide to go the throttle route, where do I go?

>Secondly, why are they throttling this service? Because they can't charge effectively for it.

That's an interesting take considering how they offered a product at a certain bandwidth and I agreed to pay for that bandwidth. If I use it to capacity, the services I receive from third parties are somehow 'exploiting' the model? I don't think so.

If the post office offers to ship anything under 10lbs for a flat rate, is a company taking advantage if they offer, say, a 10 lbs cheese of the month package using that USPS service?