I have a negative gut reaction to meter. I realize it's fair, but it looms over me. Will I go over if I watch this movie? How much will my bill be this month?

That's how all utilities are measured, and it's totally reasonable, I just wish it didn't have to be that way.

How does everyone feel about metering in general?

I would not buy a metered connection. It might end up costing me less than an unmetered one, but cognitively it weighs more as you said. I want a flat-charge XMBit/s hard limit, which translates to a total theoretical maximum of ZGB/month.

The power costs per GB sent/received are negligible, the money goes towards maintenance of the network and ethernet cable doesn't degrade based on how many bits pass through it. If too many people utilise the network, then just throttle them and start dropping connections from the more aggressive ones.

Perversely, I would be perfectly fine with you dropping my connections if I try starting 100 parallel downloads or charging me the same whether I download 1GB or 100GB this month, as long as it's a nice flat reliable fee.

Edit: about "that's how all utilities are measured". They aren't. Road tax is flat, but I can drive on the road for as long as I like as fast as the rules permit. Except it's slower when too many people do it at once. I want my internet to be like a road. (disclaimer: maybe road tax isn't flat where you live, but it is in many parts of the world, so please imagine we're talking about them for the purpose of the analogy. you may also need to pay a higher tax to use the highway, but it's still flat. it may also vary per type of vehicle but it's still flat.)

>Perversely, I would be perfectly fine with you dropping my connections if I try starting 100 parallel downloads or charging me the same whether I download 1GB or 100GB this month, as long as it's a nice flat reliable fee.

I wouldn't. Never interfere with my packets (except dropping when buffers are too full, of course). Throttle me to 1mbps if you need to, but you shouldn't even know how many TCP connections I have open.

I meant in the case when the network is saturated. If I've bought a link that only guarantees N concurrent connections and I'm over that and the link is being saturated, then I would expect to have some of my packets dropped.

I guess we're saying mostly the same thing, just worded differently.

Kind of. But I'm trying to make a point that limits should always be in terms of packets. The ISP should not even know how many connections I have, let alone limit it. It's not like you can't saturate a line with a single connection.

I was thinking utilities in terms of electricity, gas, water or sewer.

My point was that internet is not the same as those. Generating the packets costs nothing and moving them down the wire costs nothing. Whether your router is passing packets at top capacity or it's staying almost idle, it's consuming the same amount of electricity and the same amount of upkeep. Your wires don't get damaged by the packets.

In the case of electricity (etc.) there's an actual amount of work that goes into each KWh and that's what you pay for. With internet, there's just the upfront cost of connecting a router and paying a sysadmin team to support it; after that, operating it is a flat cost no matter how many packets pass through it.

Unless I'm a Tier 1 service provider, I have to pay for those bits moving out of my network.

Can you give me some citation on that? I can believe it would be the case, but such an arrangement sounds moronically greedy.

Unless you count expansion and upgrades. Bandwidth increases up to 1G are relatively cheap then things become crazy expensive fast. And of course this is assuming you can get unmetered bandwidth as an ISP (only available for dark fibre bundle owners - incumbent telcos exclusively).

You have to dig fibers at some point - at a cost of ~$15-100 per meter.

Feel free to join my "unmetered" internet. I've connected my routers via 56k lines to eachother, but we never even throttle a single customer. Of course given the chances of even a single packet ever reaching it's destination are so low you probably shouldn't even bother connecting to the network at all ...

I was thinking similarly. Like electricity, shut the light off when you leave a room, find the right AC setting that isn't too low, etc. I'd hate to move to a state of "close every browser tab I'm not actively using". Perhaps it could be a hidden pricing system that isn't advertised to the public but is available for those who want it.

>Will I go over if I watch this movie? How much will my bill be this month? //

Wouldn't that be solved with a simple ticker giving you the current spend. This way you wouldn't have "overage" charges that suddenly leap up, your spend would match usage, watch one more movie and it will cost you a small fraction extra to what it cost last month when you watched 23 movies, say.

Not all utilities are measured, domestic water is often unmetered FWIW.