oodlum - 12:59 am on Feb 2, 2011 (gmt 0)

We've had metered internet in Australia since the beginning. In the early days it was a chance for the big telcos to trick people into paying exorbitant rates for excess data usage (telling users they could watch movies etc while sneaking in a 200MB limit and $1/MB excess).

Then competition came along and sorted that out, for the most part. The government forced the main telco (Telstra) to resell their services. Now most ISPs throttle after the cap is reached, and there are a lot of reasonably priced plans with high data limits.

My plan is $89 for 400GB (200GB peak and 200GB off-peak) per month . Enough for 2 Netflix movies per night if I want, and plenty left over.

Like a lot of things in life, if you use more than other people, you pay more. Sucks in a monopoly, but that's nothing new either. We accept our electricity usage being metered, but if they historically had unlimited usage and suddenly switched to a metered model, a lot of people would be extremely upset that they had to pay for the amount of electricity they used.