Penny for your virtual thoughts?
In a shocking statement which will have Internet addicts gasping in dismay, Verizon Communications' CTO, Dick Lynch, has advocated a ‘pay per megabyte' model for home Internet usage, according to widespread reports.
Speaking at a fibre-to-the-home industry conference in Houston, Texas, Lynch said the Internet could not continue to grow "without passing the cost on to someone." And that ‘someone' means you.
Want to update your Facebook or Twitter status? Pay up. Want to send an email? Virtual stamp duty, please. Want to download some music? Fine, it's going for a song. That's what metered billing means, where broadband will be packaged and sold to users in bundles of pre-paid megabytes, just like US cell phone minutes.
In the States, users buy packages of a set number of minutes per month which, if exceeded, cost the user a premium for every extra minute used. Lynch wants the same to apply to broadband which, to date, has always been sold at a flat rate per month.
"We're going to have to consider pricing structures that allow us to sell packages of bytes, and at the end of the day the concept of a flat-rate infinitely expandable service is unachievable," said Lynch who explained that even a fibre rich company like Verizon had to watch how it managed its bandwidth.
