Todd posted earlier about Time Warner experimenting with bandwidth caps and charges for overuse. This type of plan was standard in Australia when broadband was introduced and there is no such thing as an unlimited plan here. After a number of years of experimenting the options settled down to a single method of bandwidth limiting that seems to work without excess charges to consumers. It is too much to hope for that T-W will do some research and go with a system that is known to work, so I will give you a rundown of the sequence here that you will probably face in the US.
Some differences in the market here though. There are 2 big network players here which have broadband lines to most houses and multiple smaller players that lease and on sell them. There is also legislation that mandates that the lines be available for lease to resellers at competitive rates. Australia also has broad consumer protection laws and a legislative body set up to enforce them. The lack of this in the US will probably make your journey through broadband usage caps longer.
‘Unlimited downloads’ in Australia has always had a cap. Initially these were not a hard cap, but variable depending on system usage. The plan was that if you downloaded more than 10 times the average usage you would get charged extra. The flaws in this method are obvious. This was quickly replaced with a hard limit and the telco’s were effectively banned from calling it unlimited.
At the start if you went “over plan” you would be charged extra on a per-MB basis. This led to some huge bills and the inevitable cases of people unwittingly going over plan or going over due to virus/trojan activity. The telco’s were forced to offer the choice for users to get cut off rather than get charged when they hit the limit and for that to be the default. Neither of these was still a good choice.
Now the plans offer variable download limits for different prices (the more you pay the higher the limit) and also cost variation (on DSL) for download speed. If you go over the plan amount your account gets limited down to 64K. Too slow to do anything major, but enough to still do your basic web stuff. You then have the option to temporarily upgrade your account for the rest of the month to get another chuck of download allowance.
This plan seems to strike the right balance between the variability of need for bandwidth users have, and the need for the telco’s to smooth their useage without running the risk of getting a huge unexpected bill at the end of the month. If I was a betting man I would predict this is what the US will eventually get to. I hope you don’t have to repeat the pain we had here.