I am not alone
On Mon, Jan ,  at 12:45:53PM -0600, Jonathan Hutchins wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Patrick Miller" <pert@ygbd.tas-kc.com>
> 
> >  I still would personaly love to get a service that
> > uses metering. It pays for the necessary infastructure, and allows me to
> > burst.
> 
> But the infrastructure is what you pay for - amortization of the wiring,
> switches, and routers, plus whatever the provider pays for his uplink.
Yes, Yes
> There is virtually no difference in the cost of operating a dead line vs.
> one that is running at maximum capacity.  Perhaps a little more electricity,
> and perhaps that's a detectable expense if you have a few million
Isn't that just the argument people have made though?  Again Yes, Yes
> On an oversold network - whether it's Cable, DSL, or T1, it's true that
> someone consistently running at capacity is pushing the expenses up by
> reducing the available capacity.  It seems to me though that if I buy a
> 1500/384 connection, I ought to be able to simultaneously push 384k and pull
> 1500k if I want to.  There's nothing about traffic use in the user
> agreements, other than to loosely ban "servers" on the grounds that their
> uplink load would strain the network.
and Yes
> Supposedly "the industry" is trying to push broadband, but policies that
> attempt to limit it's use are counterproductive.  If they're overbooking
> their capacity to the point that it might as well be a dial-up connection
> anyway, where's the advantage?
No busy signals, haven't you seen the commercials? ;)
> So I really don't think that there's any logic to doing metered billing.
> And while long distance billing used to be metered, a majority of people
> today are on some sort of flat-rate plan, even if there is a charge for
> exceeding the packaged time.  Local service has mostly always been
> flat-rate.
Did anyone look for the logic in this? ;)
> In the '80's, phone companies worrying about capacity problems because
> people were using their phone lines for dial-up connections to BBSs, and
> were staying on-line for hours at a time - longer, according to Bell, than
> telephone conversations typically lasted.  They tried to impose either
> metered use or higher rates for private data connections.  Southwestern Bell
> tried to declare hobby BBSs "commercial", and require that they pay
> commercial rates.  I was part of a group of BBS Operators that successfully
> fought that move.  Other attempts to address the capacity problem by
> penalizing users failed as well, as people could see that it was the same
> thing as overbooking an airplane, then charging extra to the people who
> actually showed up for the flight.
In other words, you shouldn't pay to have access to the line, and then also 
be charged to actually use it.
-- 
JD Runyan
		"You can't milk a point."
			David M. Kuehn, Ph.D.