I think it's a sure sign of dysfunction any time a company is trying to discourage use of their product.
A healthy company in a healthy market loves additional demand. Imagine if there's some new kind of fruit that everyone wants to buy. The local supermarkets are flooded. Are they going to say, "this fruit is too popular and causing too much strain on our infrastructure, so we demand additional compensation from the fruit growers"? Hell no. They're going to say, "This is awesome! We're making so much cash! Hire more workers! Build out the stores! Buy more magic fruit!"
Many ISPs have managed to set up their product offerings such that they don't want additional use of their product. That's a major screwup on their part, and one they should fix.
It's interesting to look at cellular carriers, which started out this way but have mostly overcome it. For example, AT&T started out offering "unlimited" plans to iPhone users, and inevitably iPhone users used "too much" and this caused trouble. Now they only offer metered plans, and the attitude is different. Oh, you want to stream video constantly and use dozens of GB per month? Come right this way, we have a plan just for you, and you'll get a nice bulk discount. Contrast with Clear, who I used for a little bit as a home connection. They advertise "unlimited" and say it's suitable for replacing a home broadband connection, but if you actually try to use it that way, they throttle you into the ground and tell you to stop being abusive.
Techies as a whole seem to be really resistant to metered pricing for internet connections, but I think standardizing on that approach would solve a whole bunch of problems.
A healthy company in a healthy market loves additional demand. Imagine if there's some new kind of fruit that everyone wants to buy. The local supermarkets are flooded. Are they going to say, "this fruit is too popular and causing too much strain on our infrastructure, so we demand additional compensation from the fruit growers"? Hell no. They're going to say, "This is awesome! We're making so much cash! Hire more workers! Build out the stores! Buy more magic fruit!"
Many ISPs have managed to set up their product offerings such that they don't want additional use of their product. That's a major screwup on their part, and one they should fix.
It's interesting to look at cellular carriers, which started out this way but have mostly overcome it. For example, AT&T started out offering "unlimited" plans to iPhone users, and inevitably iPhone users used "too much" and this caused trouble. Now they only offer metered plans, and the attitude is different. Oh, you want to stream video constantly and use dozens of GB per month? Come right this way, we have a plan just for you, and you'll get a nice bulk discount. Contrast with Clear, who I used for a little bit as a home connection. They advertise "unlimited" and say it's suitable for replacing a home broadband connection, but if you actually try to use it that way, they throttle you into the ground and tell you to stop being abusive.
Techies as a whole seem to be really resistant to metered pricing for internet connections, but I think standardizing on that approach would solve a whole bunch of problems.