Pay as you Go Internet… Good or Bad Idea?

I am so glad i have AT&T DSL and not Comcast as those are the only 2 ISP’s that i have. Comcast is so bad in my area its not even funny. I got AT&T’s Elite plan (6/768) and it runs circles around Comcast in terms of speeds and ping times at any given time. AT&T’s U-verse service is comming here soon so i will be able to get a bump in speeds up to 10/1.5 so i can’t wait for that day to come.

I use about 300-400GB of traffic a month so the whole pay as you go would not fly well for me. Paying 35$ for my DSL line now is great for the speeds i get. Most of that traffic is for work as i FTP VM and test them at home before they go into production (each VM is about 3-5GB a peice, and with Server 2008 coming out soon, the downloads will even be larger).

-powerspec

I have to agree with you there chris. Even though we already have such services in the United Kingdom, being charged ‘by the byte’ or, or kilobyte, or megabyte etc is something I couldn’t put up with. Plus, there are other complications.

Say I bought Photoshop CSwhatever. I didn’t have enough money to buy the CD version, so I bought the download version. Should I really be charged to have access to something I’ve already bought? If they went ahead and did it anyway, who would have to foot the bill? Surely I shouldn’t, because I’m just receiving what I purchased.

For the majority of users, this would be both frustrating and mind numbing. With the economy as it is, I doubt fluctuating internet bills would make it better. But when you consider mobile users (The mobile network 3 is really pushing the whole ‘truly mobile broadband’ option with a USB modem that taps into their network), for that sort of thing it would be ideal. If it’s a secondary computer, and is going out and about, that sort of minimal usage would really be suited to this situation. I used to use my mobile phone for this, and paid £1 a day to surf the net through my mobile phone on the laptop. It didn’t save me money (I used to spend about £15-£20 each month), but it was convenient.

PAYG wouldn’t be convenient. You’d be in the middle of downloading something, run out of bandwidth, call someone up, extend the limit, and have to restart the download again (or continue it, depending on where you download it from), all of this slowly aggravating you to the point where if you worked the amount of time you spent on hold/topping up, you’d be able to pay per month anyway.

You think you got it bad? we get 10G for the entire ******* month. after that we get dial up speed until the rest of the month… waaaaaaaaa!!!!!

i can onlyafford dial-up $13 a month,but the flip side byusing wireless connection have several unlocked broadband routers i can tap into for faster speed a perk with living in a city. limiting service is insane
not sure why he has a cap unless it part of his service agreement
my phone compy does this get 40 hours of internet service a week for a low monthly fee, or unlimited for a high fee

03/05/08

Ref: [Lockergnome] Windows Fanatics ~ March 4, 2008

Chris:

I can tell the EasyShare Z1275 is not a camera I would consider buying, just from the photo of it in your email: no optical viewfinder. End of story.

–MB

Hey Chris, I feel your pain. I live in the small town of Vermillion in South Dakota. The only REAL options here are cable from Midco and DSL from Qwest. Both of which over charge and give you too little bandwidth. We pay $60 a month for a 3 megabit connection. I know there is worse, but it kills me that there are towns around me that have 10 Megabit connections for $40 a month. I am stuck with this till I get out of school. I do know this, I will be one to check the ISPs rates and connections when I move and choose where to live based partly on that.
Keep up the great job!

Jim

I’d hate it! It would cause massive troubles. Then some company would step up to fix it and all the cable companies and telephone companies would whine to the FCC about losing business. The government would probably pass laws to further screw things up. I dread that day.

There ain’y no such thing as a free lunch. Pay as you go is a great idea.

I am not a heavy user of bandwidth, so I can make do with partially restricted pathways and online advertising. I pay less. I get less. That’s fair. The guy who needs more, pays more. That’s fair too.

I think that pay as you go internet service is an interesting idea for the folks out there that only check email once or twice a week. But the average use does so much more than that, and if the scheme were to be used overall (as Time Warner Cable is piloting in Texas, I believe) , the structure impedes innovation by only allowing people to upload/download the amount of information they can afford.

It would be bad for me as I am currently disabled and on a fixed income and I am online numerous times a day. I really enjoy reading a lot of newsletters, downloading music & videos. I’m currently paying $36.00 Per Month with High Speed Cable. If it were to switch to pay as you go then I think I would be paying about $100 or more for the time I’m normally online. Some may wish to have a pay as you go service but I do not.

I wouldn’t like it. I’d be overly conscious of the time I’m spending. Isn’t this the way AOL originally did things? Didn’t their subscribers greatly increase after they went to a flat fee?

Hey Chris!

I checked out your blog and I am kind of torn between the pay as you go broadband or standard monthly fee. I think I might stick with the monthly plan since I use the internet every day anyway, but I would at least check out the prices for pay as you go. If the rate is ridiculously high, I think I’d be setting myself up for a scam. If that was the case then I’d practically have to be Amish if I were to go with that plan just so I didn’t get such a high bill.
Still, one thing that bugs me about my plan (Charter) is that since my roommate wanted the fastest internet possible so he could play WOW we are now paying (along with basic cable) around $100/month. Fortunately there are 4 of us living here. Well, that’s my spiel so see ya later!

That would be horrible… If something like that ever happened we would need to boycott it or soemthing. I hope I never see pay-as-you-go internet…

At this point, I think I would try anything that could ease my parents into the Internet. They are older and live in the middle of nowhere, hence my reasons for moving years ago. I’ve done my best to get them to just TRY dialup for a period of time. Mom loves yard sales, thrift shopping etc, so I tried numerous sites (via phone web) to entice her. (craigslist, freecycle, etc). That backfired. She just calls me now to ask me to look stuff up for her. I guess it’s a step.

Dad is a dyed in the wool carpenter with some mad skill. I’ve tried to lure him online in order to be able to find cheaper products for projects (large and small scale). That didn’t work. He doesn’t call me like Mom does to ask me to look stuff up, but somehow expects me to be able to run figures off the top of my head of things I’ve found online which shall remain unnamed because… he didn’t call. *insert eye rolling here*.

They have custody of my ten year old niece. She’s jumped two grades ahead of herself and is once again feeling the frustration of “If it was good enough for your great grandfather….etc”. The very same attitude I had to grow up with. She has to go to the local library (which closes at 5 daily! She gets home from school about 4 from about an hour bus ride) in order to do research. Then they complain because she has assignments from school that require research, far greater than what the outdated encyclopedias have. It’s still the same set that I had growing up.

It won’t be a blazing trail of glory, but my hope is that it could offer greater options for those who want to “try before buying” without contracts or the unnecessary dealing with folks to try to cancel something they don’t want to be bothered with anymore ( who they may feel is pushing something on them…as opposed to me pushing internet use on them). I would like to be able to have options like this from my cell phone company (as opposed to the local cable company where the folks live - if there is one), so that I could renew it personally instead of letting it run out. . . as they would do. “We can’t afford it.” That just leaves me thinking, “stop wasting gas to run up the road and pay bills, visit a store an hour away “to see if they have such and such a product”, etc…

I love my folks, I do! Any help here would be great on how to convince them… or at least ease them in the direction of the internet. I think this would be a good step for them, no matter how “behind the times” folks think this may be.

OH… as far as power users go… I suppose it would depend on whether or not it could be purchased as a backup plan. I’m an educator and when my service goes down, it might be nice to have some sort of backup service in order to maintain grades, emails, etc… even if I had to go through another company to do it. On the flip side of this “gift card/pay-as-you-go” type use, it would have to depend on the company also. With companies claiming bankruptcy and no longer honoring their “gift cards”, I may have similar concerns that the pay as you go plan may end up having similar issues - that they would not be honored. I would also have to keep in mind that there may be “Use by” dates.

Chris,

I agree with you to a certain extent. I myself have a pre-paid cell phone because I do not use it that much, and by not using it so much I end up saving a lot of money. I think that for people like the elderly or users who do not use the internet that much a pay-as-you-go service would be great. There is no way though that all ISPs will do this to us. As soon as non-pay-as-you-go internet service comes along all of us “power-users” will switch to them, and the pay-as-you-go ISPs will loose a ton of money.

Lol… I used to have this actually, and in a nutshell… IT SUCKS!!! Imagine watching an online movie not being able to finish it because you reached your cap (this happened to me with MDotStrange’s - We Are the Strange). Anyways, if you want good a good ISP then try and find a place with Time Warner/Road Runner (which is what I now have and love!) and try and steer clear of HugesNet because they cap everything :((.

Of course it is a bad idea. If it will make them more money then it is a bad idea for us. As a website designer I would just have to raise my prices to cover it.
Just like higher fuel prices. I just goes down hill and costs the customer more. Band idea? You think?
Stan

This is a very, very bad idea…..!
I’m a power user that has three lines of internet coming into my home office. I use two dsl lines from at&t, and a comcast line. I really do use over 5gb a day, on most days. My computer are always downloading file programs and testing them and then send out the new text out to the company with the file.
I have an iPhone, and i am paying for 2,000min and i always have to pay extra because i go over.
I would think that if they would limit what i can use they will also limit what you can upload, or does that go under the 500mb the guy was talking about?
The best isp is a company called Skynet Belgium which puts out the most upload and download speeds on earth, period. But i cant get ahold of those speeds because well i dont stay in the other side of the world.
I’m just like you Chris i really dont care how much the prices are. I just want faster internet. The fastest im pulling is 8mb from comcast and then for at&t im pull 6mb from both lines. I would like to have something like a T1 line, but i cant put my hands on it. =(

BAD IDEA! Pop-ups, spyware, etc. would kill you bandwidth without you even knowing or controlling,

wow 500mb, that sucks. I just recently got stuck with comcast and it isn’t that bad. Its an infinite amount better than my Verizon, but on the other hand. my friend had cable and it was slower than dial-up. Location plays a part in your speeds.

My speedtest results:
http://www.speedtest.net/result/236485492.png

I can’t imagine only getting 500mb a DAY! Right when you said ‘Think about the things you did today’ I completely realized how much I really use everyday.

I have used comcast and it was horrible, at least for my needs. My wife used it and it was fine for her. I on the other hand run a website, stream a webcast, and run a blog. Comcast did not cut it for me so I switched to AT&T DSL that is dedicated and I have a static IP for use. I could not be happier with it. The DSL keeps up with not only my streams, but I have gamed on it with my PC and my XBOX 360 without issue.

I don’t know what I would do if I had to pay for the amount of bandwidth I use, it is horrible to think of.

that would be a bad ideal. i had AOL it was timed internet use and it really sucked. now i have dsl 3 mb for 30 dollars. I like it

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This is disturbing. The thought that a company would stop giving us what we want and force us to get what they decide to offer is bad. Of course, anyone who has ever gotten television service, be it cable, satellite or another transmission method, should be well used to having to pay for whatever they can get. For you, Chris, if they offered you the service you have now, or a pay as you go with no traffic shaping, no caps, and a 30 Meg bandwidth, would you keep your old service? That is probably the choices it will come down to. If you want the modern, fastest connection, you would have to have the most modern, screwed up way of paying for the service.

As far as a half gig cap, I wouldn’t probably reach the cap 9 days out of 10, but it would be that one day that would be the deal breaker. On my mobile phone service I pay for several times the minutes I normally require to make sure I do not run over an have to scrape together ungodly amounts of extra to pay the bill. I would want enough connection to cover the maximum, not the median, and I believe that the majority of the consumer public is with me on that idea.

I think if we stand together as a group, the industry will provide us with the consumer options we want. It is when we think that whatever crumbs they deem to give us are good enough and we should be thankful for them, that we give them the authority to treat us however they wish. Companies will nearly always make decisions that are best for the bottom line. Don’t let this be a profitable option.

Mike (Apathy)

The reason why there tring to do cap peoples internet connections is the total amount of data that each phone exchange(especially country exchanges(the pipes that connect to other countries)) is excessive.

For example, if you have 1 million people downloading something @ 1 mb/s, the about of data that the phone exchange has to _handle_ is 1 terabyte/per second plus the normal phone usage(don’t forget that ADSL uses the same hardware as phone lines do). Now that is a lot of data. Now take things like Google which nearly everyone uses, how much would that exchange need to handle. Also we do have other services that use the internet for transfer(i.e mail, P2P networks, Messenger networks).

Also we do have a similar thing already here in Australia, some companyies only give you 200 MB ‘free’ per month(yes per month) and are change $1.50 for every Meg over, also your speed gets capped to 64kb/s.

koreas broadband is superb. although I’m not korean. but they are really good.

How do you know then?

wow… i watch like 100 youtube videos while downloading tons of stuff…. i use about 5gb a day….

?

This is strange, because i’m on TalkTalk, which is considered one of the worst providers in the UK. But I’m on 40gb per month downloads, with about 320kbps upload.

i can only have 99 terabites

eh, no… because if they all got on the “pay as you go” bandwagon, we would be getting dialup speeds on our computers, at $0.10 a kilobyte…. just like some phone companies….

absolute NO!!!!

in batavia i get 10mp/s down and aobut 300kb up(we neeed to pay for for more upload)

but i dont really use uploading exept for youtube :)

Sheer eliteism designed to shove out the fixed income user and steal another freedom from the American people. Very few of us on Social Security are here because we choose it - only rich politician relatives can aford that sort of luxory. This reeks of the same mentality that charges entrance fees to parks built entirely with tax money. Access to knowledge may be the last freedom left and will remain a freedom only as long is it cosats the same for all. Sorry if that irritates the elite.

Hope to NEVER see pay-as-you-go.

The prices would start out small, but (as is typical with everything else) the rates would just escalate.

There is no excuse in a major country for not having dirt-cheap nearly-unlimited access (there will always be some idiot who will abuse everyone else…)

Nickel-and-dime-ing us to death should not be tolerated by consumers in this day and age….

Lol, u lost ur right leg? dang….

we have good broadband
be jealous :)

I think we will immediately switch to Verizon. Right now, we have a decent connection.

Right now, our connection is pretty good. If there’s a cap, we haven’t reached it yet, even though we are on the internet almost all day.

I suspect it will be in different packages. And the limited version is to attract the occasional users off of dial-up.

hell F-u_c123king no

500mb a day!?
I have…. 500mb a month $2 NZ for another 500 though :p auto update

no screw that i get 20Gb of transfer a month and 1meg performance for about 30$

no wayyy. I hope isp’s dont do this. I use alott of bandwith, I mean alot. And if ISP’s do this, im glad there are companies like google who are there to offer an alternative and help ya out.

damn straight it sucks baaaaaad, a can’t download anything

I think this might be great for people who use the internet very little, and are paying for internet that they don’t take fully advantage of. With this, their monthly bills would go down. However, people who do a lot of downloading, online video watching, ect, might run into some financial problems within a few months.

People do not pay for long distance calls for the minute, so I cannot see pay as you go internet. I could see pay as you go internet years ago when people only had dial up, not now. There is too much room for getting ripped off.

OHH!

If this “pay as you go” internet ends up working, us geeks will be in serious trouble. I have a 20GB download limit and a 10GB upload limit per month. Often, i have to pay 20$- 50$ in extra becuase i exeeded my download limit. So this is bad news, especially for me.

my friend studies there.

Boy, I remember being charged by the minute for internet back in the ol’ dial-up days. Back before 56k, I think.

I can’t even begin to express how freeing it is to have that lifted. I would never in a million years go to a pay-as-you-go plan. I can, however, see how some people would benefit from such a plan.

If you only use it to check your email once a week, then there’s no reason to not pay as you go. But if you’re a power user, there’s no way this would suffice. If it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg to keep up, it would be a pain knowing that you’re racking up a bill whenever you’re online, even if you’re just sitting idly.

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I would hate to have pay as you go internet, haveing to worry about how much bandwidth you use and not knowing what the bill will be by the end of the month, gahhh. Fixed rate and unlimted bandwidth is the way to go..!!

i got verizon Fios “D Fiber optics :D

Pay as you go internet?

That’s a horrible idea in my opinion. I completely agree with you on that. People that use the internet a lot like you and me will be spending huge amounts just to use it. I’d much prefer keeping the pay by month internet service that I currently use…in the long run it is much cheaper considering that I have my internet running 24/7.

I shudder at the thought of my DSL switching to pay as you go…I’d be severely screwed.

-Xenu

Worst idea ever, it would cause way too many problems. People use the internet for so many things nowadays and it’s been doing fine the way it is now, putting a cap on it all or making people pay by the bandwidth would be moving backwards.

jI live in a rural area also, but my service from my small company, seems to be better than most larger companies. My phone company offers up to 10MBPS and you can get anything down to 1.5MBPS for a low fee of 19.00 am month. Another thing I like about my ISP is that they are offering a FIBER Based Service! Although it isn’t fully out they are testing it at a few golf courses. I feel that my company will never set any limits like that, just think you could not even download a Linux distro or watch live.pirillo.com. If my ISP did put this cap on me I just think I would go crazy, considering my life is on the internet as well.

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hey i’ve heard that time warner cable is tryin this out in texas. man i hope they dont go through with it. this will take us back to the dail-up days.

what a homo you talk about computers on a friday night u should go to the movies with ur wife :)

I think time warner cable is pretty good but verizon is better!

What wife? ROFL

HDTVA, Chris Pirillo has a wife…

For generation Y it is a really bad idea. REALLY REALLY REALLY BAD!!!!!!!! World of Warcraft for those who play it, is dead on that one.

I already get a 40 gig download limit per month I am in the United Kingdom, Virgin offers fibre optic broadband and all our infrastructure is being replaced so in five years we will be getting a 20mb download speed will be the norm and cheap without caps the US needs to get its act together fast! after all it invented the the internet for godsake!

BAD :(

Can’t say I have had many problems. Been on BT Broadband ADSL for a while now, which started at 1MB/s with about 30GB a month it then went up to 2MB/s and now it goes up to it’s maximum possible of 8MB/s unlimited although most the time we only get around 3MB/s, highest it has been is 4, plus my dad works for BT so the discount is pretty sweet.

Used to be on Virgin back with my ex. I probably preferred that to BT, cable seems a bit faster than ADSL.

3 pay as you go broadband.
total ******* rip off.

Sorry, but we’ve already done this. Back in the day, Internet access was paid for by the minute. This is just altering that billing method and trying to claim it’s something new. We moved to unlimited access for a flat rate for a reason. The Internet is something that simply needs to be kept as open as possible. This means open in communication, open in information, and open in quantity of usage, both in terms of time used and bandwidth used. Cutting into any of these will only serve to suffocate the ‘net and seriously hurt its usefulness.

I actually have good broadband service. I have a 200 GB/month cap, I haven’t reached it yet.