> Say, a connection fee of $10/mo plus $0.30/GB? That seems reasonable
Do you realize this is three times the current cost of storage ? Metering could work if there was some actual competition. But if there was competition, we probably wouldn't be too worried about what methods specific ISPs were using.
The cities and towns (by virtue of owning the right-of-ways and not wanting ten copies of fiber) should mandate that companies laying wires provide only bulk access in terms of committed/burstable bit rate, which the actual ISPs would then use to provide consumer internet access.
First, electric companies have no competition in most places.
Second, $0.30/GB of transfer is a pretty reasonable amount. If you have a dedicated server you can get down to around $0.10/GB, but even Amazon charges $0.17/GB and that isn't expensive. And your home isn't a data center.
Storage and bandwidth have nothing to do with each other.
Electric rates are highly regulated. Also, note that electricity is split up exactly the way I described - transmission (local delivery) and generation (internet transit) are billed separately, with competition happening at the generation level.
Storage and bandwidth are related in that they show the tradeoff between local storage and streaming. 3x the price of storage doesn't feel right to me. If that's the actual cost, I certainly can't disagree. But with the price of bandwidth continually dropping, I don't think regulation or other arbitrary pricing will reflect anything like the true cost, and will be more akin to mobile text messaging prices.
I recall seeing usage metering based on something like $40/mo for 200GB, and then $0.50/GB thereafter. With an apparent fixed cost of -$60, it seems their goal is to punish heavy users, rather than selling them what they want for a fair price.
Do you realize this is three times the current cost of storage ? Metering could work if there was some actual competition. But if there was competition, we probably wouldn't be too worried about what methods specific ISPs were using.
The cities and towns (by virtue of owning the right-of-ways and not wanting ten copies of fiber) should mandate that companies laying wires provide only bulk access in terms of committed/burstable bit rate, which the actual ISPs would then use to provide consumer internet access.