"JD Runyan" wrote: > can use the vacated piece of highway. We pay to have that infrastructure > available to us. The cost to the company is the infrastructure. The cable > company incurs no additional cost if the infrastructure is used heavily, or > recover cost if it is not used. Sure customers may complain if there cable If you've noticed the pricing scheme that most cellular companies are using, this fits into the "pay a flat rate for base capacity, with additional charge for occasional extra use" theory. As an example, here are the Cingular rates as of yesterday (I'm shopping for a new cellphone and have the brochure handy): $/mo Base "anytime" min. extra minutes $29.99 250 .45 $39.99 400 .45 $49.99 600 .35 $69.99 900 .35 $99.99 1300 .30 149.99 2000 .25 199.99 3000 .20 And they throw in 3000 night/weekend minutes each month How to apply this to computer bandwidth? Well, let's start with that last point first. The notion of peak/off-peak rates. Airlines give you a break on travel on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday, because those are their slowest days. The buffet my family ate lunch at today charges a higher price in the evenings than midday, and higher yet on Sundays, because that's their high-traffic times. And back when AT&T had a monopoly on long distance, they had 3 different prices/min, too. That's why, back in the BBS days, we moved the mail at night. It was cheaper. I assure you that the people who run the cable companies know exactly which hours of the week constitute 'peak' times. They could program into their cable 'modems' (bridges) for each rate plan a structure that sets different bandwidth caps for time-of-day. If I am downloading .ISO images at 3 am, I ought to be able to do it at 4 Mb/s instead of 2. A sliding scale like this: DL Cap (Mb/s) UL Cap $/mo Peak Off-peak (Kb/s) $10 0.125 0.25 32 $15 0.25 0.5 64 $20 0.5 1 96 $30 1 2 128 $40 2 4 256 $50 3 6 384 $60 4 8 512 $70 5 10 640 $80 6.5 13 864 $90 8 16 1024 100 10 20 1280 would put dial-up ISPs out of business in a hurry, since even the cheapest rate is twice as good as '56K'. Sure, a lot of people would opt for a cheper plan than the $45/mo that TWC is charging for a flat 2Mb down/384Mb up cap, but they'll also notice how much faster the system works when they run off-peak hours, and be willing to kick in a few more bucks to get that speed during peak hours, at which point they'll notice how much faster the new off-peak speed is.... It would also make 'reselling' a Good Thing for the cable company - if they don't have to have customer service people talk to any of the resellers' customers, they don't care - if service works to their demarc point, that's what counts. Don't need to do the bookkeeping for the email accounts and such, either.