Since the first dot-com boom, unmetered Internet access has been the industry standard. But recently, usage-based billing has been staging a comeback. Comcast instituted a bandwidth cap in 2008, and some other wired ISPs, including AT&T , have followed suit. In 2010, three of the four national wireless carriers—Sprint is the only holdout—switched from unlimited data plans to plans featuring bandwidth caps. To many people, the argument for metered bandwidth seems intuitive and obvious. Bandwidth is a scarce resource, and advocates argue that usage-based pricing encourages efficient network use and ensures that heavy users pay their “fair share.” Read the comments on this post

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Why bandwidth caps could be a threat to competition