If service providers made any major mistake in this regard (which I think they have…), it is that they made naive folks like yourself feel you are entitled to something you aren’t.

You spin this issue as well as a Catholic and Southern Baptist arguing over scripture. No, seriously.

It’s hard to value one’s opinion when it is so blatantly biased with socialistic themes and doesn’t even for a minute try to view the issue fairly from the other side of the fence.

When we started Msen.com in 1991, we paid $10,000 PER MONTH for a 56KB dedicated line. Think about that. Since then, I can go almost anywhere and get broadband (1MB/384k) for $40/mo or less. Inevitably, the game will move toward efficient markets.

However, in the end, the network must be paid for, just like highways, government buildings, and airports.

Several years ago, where I live, every single day at 4pm the network would “got to pot” and I was absolutely unable to work. Kids came home from school and hit that net with IM, porn downloads, and MP3 ripping, saturating the common bandwidth on the cable network. I planned my workday around this, and it was a major problem for me. Then, the cable provider changed their pricing, and started charging a premium price for higher bandwidth. PROBLEM SOLVED. The kiddies (college kids mostly, and many lower-middle-class families), stuck with the cheap plans, which inherently capped their activities via their bandwidth cap. Since that time, I have seen my network saturated only on rare occasions.

Price is necessary to eliminate “marginal usage”, which must be done with any resource that is finite, or has costs associated with its production. Given unlimited bandwidth at zero cost, and a college kid will spend all day and night downloading music. Tell them it costs a penny per song for delivery, and they will immediately limit downloads according to their budget. Meanwhile, my business can easily justify every byte it uses, and can pay more for the privilege of using those finite bits at key times (business hours). Starting to sound frighteningly like a cell-phone plan isn’t it?!

The most important issue is competition, as others have pointed out. It is my hope that technologies such as WiMax will compete with cable and DSL and keep them all reasonably honest. Without proper competition, we will be in trouble.

Honestly though..this would really affect me if it was established now. I do a lot of computations and rendering with vpn and ssh stuff as well as the videos I work on. My usage is probably pretty high.

I think a meter would be a must for any ISP that goes this route. Meters exist for water and other things so they should be mandatory for this too.

Honestly, if P2P all stopped for a day would the internet really get that much faster?

I agree that your analysis is lame.

• It’ll cost me MORE to work from home remotely (no more working from home unless employer will cover extra bandwidth costs)

• My AppleTV where I download Youtube, Podcasts (even some with commercials) and iTunes movies/shows. I guess I will stop doing this as well. Paying per bandwidth becomes expensive when I have to pay per byte for transit plus the content (iTunes business model will fall apart)

• VOIP hmm… whats the benefit now?

Bottom line – I pay a lot right now for my tv, viewing movies, tvshows, internet and the ability to work remotely as needed. If this comes into play I will likely stop using television a lot and will limit my downloading to things I know I will like. This will kill consumerism and the business model most of the internet is based upon. Additionally, the companies that benefit from having employees that will work to fix something in the middle of the night or work from home if they are sick, or need to watch the kids or whatever will lose either productivity or income as they would need to cover the bandwidth fees of remote employees.

This is a bad idea for the entire economy and the companies that look to push this out as well, however if they do this – we should probably hold them to a higher bandwidth requirement no 1.5mbps – how about 10 – 20mbps or more?