A horrible comparison has been drawn in the following AP article about TimeWarner: http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jwm8wu3jZWZLcKfIlycqFqFegknwD9126HN8A. “You’re used to paying extra if you use up your cell phone minutes, but will you be willing to pay extra if your home computer goes over its Internet allowance?”
There’s a problem with that statement: lots of cell phone users are going to unlimited time and text plans. I just switched because my personal phone is also my home phone is also my work number. So, switching made a great deal of sense.
My roadrunner bill was for “unlimited” usage. Of course, it’s de facto limited by the speed cap. If they want to meter usage, they could just drop the top speed. It’s how my hosting provider operates: I pay for an “unlimited” 2Mbps pipe to the outside world. I can’t push content faster than that. No per-gig funkiness required.
(Thanks to Ben P on the the TriLUG mailing list for pointing this story out.)