Those US yanky-doodle bastards and their fibre.

So they are moving on. They’re also starting to charge for Vodafone Live under the same terms.

Unfortunately, non-DSL/UBS circuits which aren’t volume-charged have higher fixed costs, possibly because they’re sold primarily as “business” products. The only way around this seems to be to build your own last-mile network. Which I guess is what Stu has done :-)

Also, yes, mobile operators loooooove their walled gardens. See BREW, for instance. And *cough* the iPhone, which is really the same thing with less onerous requirements on the developers, and Apple firmly in control. And the Vodafone Music Store, which will happily ship me a few MB of data, and charge me much less ($3.50 instead of $20?) than what they would for the same amount of data to/from some random internet site. Despite having to pay music licensing fees out of what you give them.

So if you can do it, good on you :) But I have my doubts if it would scale. But I’d love to be wrong.

@Thomas Beagle: Strange, WXC is usually one of the ones which do really well – a friend of mine swears by them, and I have a VFX phone here in london (which is worth it’s weight in gold for calling to/from NZ). I was on TelstraClear in NZ, which was totally volume based – I even asked for an upgrade to 10meg/2meg which they couldn’t provide, but was told that what I was actually paying for was the data, not the speed. It was always full speed, too.

@Rich: yes, I was mostly looking at consumer and knowledge worker/contractor/self-emplyed/small business types – I’d consider “blue collar” to be funded by their employer (and not at all in control of or caring about the cost), where as someone like Rod _should_ care more about the cost, as it’s the one running the business.

But mobile carriers and walled gardens go together like a coffee and a muffin. I think the iphone may start to break them out of that, same with Android when it comes out.

- I think the overage and casual use charges in NZ are just price gouging. Five times plan rates could maybe be justified but 200 times? It’s akin to Air NZ charging $20k for excess baggage and not letting you out of the terminal until you pay.

- The main thing that holds back mobile data is the control freakery of the operators. Fixed internet innovation has largely come from kids in bedrooms pushing the boundaries. That sort of thing is largely locked out from the mobile world by expensive data plans, locked down phones and “walled garden” mobile data services.

We’ll know someone has got the “charging for data” model right when they’re begging their users to run BitTorrent and similar systems as hard and fast as they can – and buying themselves Ferraris out of the volume profits.

I run a wireless ISP in Dunedin. We have offered flat rate plans based on connection speed from day 1. We have never charged anyone a cent for data by volume and never will.

It is actually surprising that we don’t get hammered by users who are “on all the time”. We carefully monitor usage and scale up our provisioning based on what we observe and a consideration of our bandwidth sold.

Peer to peer isn’t a major issue; on access we shape a customer to the rate they pay for and at the core we prioritize interactive protocols over P2P. No other shaping.

It’s entirely possible to run flat rate this way; it’s a lot of hard work and the margins are very thin.