ISPs Should Stay With Flat-Rate Pricing

Cable companies are wooing Wall Street by saying they’ll offset expensive implementation of a new, high-speed software protocol by metering broadband Internet access. Bad move, Om Malik writes on GigaOm. Flat-rate high-speed access has enabled recent revolutionary innovation in the telecom business, which led to almost 70 million broadband subscriptions in 2007, and a cash cow for the cable companies.

Metering connections, where an individual customer would have a set number of gigabytes to download each month, and be charged for every gig they went over, would amount to slaughtering the “golden goose,” Malik writes. Though cable companies must deal with a more changeable demand than DSL or FIOS providers, it matters not: the inventiveness spurred by unlimited data will inspire the next bunch of paying customers. (More Time Warner Cable stories.)