[tpm] [u-u] Usage Based Billing - What you should know..

[Liam R E Quin]

On Mon, 2011-01-31 at 15:57 -0500, D'Arcy J.M. Cain wrote:

> Where is the petition to oppose this petition?  I'm not sure about Perl
> Mongers (and also not sure why the cross post) but I have trouble
> believing that most members of Unix Unanimous have a problem with pay
> for use.  Why should sensible users be subsidizing the heavy users?

I'm not sure either. It sounds to me like people in the city wanting
life easy -- out here in the country the bandwidth caps are rarely
higher than 10G and it's still $50/month for 1.5Mbps service. (we
actually pay $90/month to have two antennas, for more reliability)

I do take the point that the charges are too high, but that's separate
from charging based on usage. Bandwidth *is* a limited resource: any
given router has a maximum capacity, any given connection has a maximum
throughput at any given time.  When I lived in Toronto we had cable for
a while, and when the teenagers got home from school our network went
like molasses in the snow.  So we switched to ADSL (magma.ca at the
time) and paid a little more for better service.

If everyone in town turns their air conditioning on at the same time,
the power goes out.  To discourage this, there's a charge for
electricity.  (Here at least, more than half of it is a "delivery
charge".)

If everyone in the town strips naked and bathes in the front garden with
five hose-pipes going, there is then a shortage of water (and also of
cameras).

We have to share resources, and the way to do that is to meter our
usage.

Rogers Wireless already charges over $30 per megabyte if you roam with
your 'phone (and who uses 3G data at home instead of wifi???). So it's
not new to Canada.

If there's a petition to be heard it shouldn't be spoilt children
wanting free candy, but needs to offer a practical way to stop the
bullies taking all the sugar without actual extortion.

There's my rant for the month :-)

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
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