Open Media?

[James Knott]

Jason Carson wrote:
> But that aside I still don`t want to have to pay by the byte. I run my own
> email server and personal web page on my DSL connection and although I
> don`t have a large amount of traffic to the site or a large volume of
> email. The little traffic I do get would now cost me money.
>    
Actually, usage based billing has a lot in favour of it.  With flat rate 
billing, the light user is subsidizing the heavy user.  Why should 
someone who only reads a bit of email and does a bit of surfing pay as 
much as someone who's constantly downloading large files, videos etc.  
Perhaps a better way would be to have a separate connection fee, well 
below what we currently pay and then pick from a selection of data block 
sizes.  It would also allow over use at fees that, if encountered 
frequently, would encourage one to go for the next size up.  Throughout 
the history of telecom, usage based billing has been far more common 
than flat rate.  Flat rate local phones have been pretty much unique to 
North America and other packet based networks, such as X.25, frame 
relay, ATM were typically usage based billing.  However, if the ISPs 
decide to charge UBB on top of what we currently pay, then we'd 
certainly have cause to complain.
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists