Sounds like lowering your water or power bill buy using less or turning the lights down lower (first setting of 3-way bulb for example).

Bad analogy I know, but it’s actually much closer of an analogy in terms of user control than CBB is. The theory about consumption based billing is that if you use less, you pay less but the reality is you can’t keep from using some bandwidth (advertisements, viruses, spam, bots, modem chatter to/from the ISP). If your costs are predictable (i.e. not based on usage, but based on a flat rate for speed), then people can budget Internet access.

I’d argue that if you’re in a family on a budget and Internet changes from predictable to relatively unpredictable (due to CBB) then the Internet will become an unnecessary luxury for those households. On the other hand, if the costs can be controlled and limited by simply subscribing to an unlimited (but slower) access plan, then the Internet remains in the budget, the ISP continues to get money it would have otherwise lost, and everybody’s happy.

If in the future that family has more money in the budget, maybe the ISP will get a little more.

To me CBB vs. speed-based billing (SBB) is about the ISP imposing itself on your wallet vs. the ISP working with you to find an acceptable plan.

But I’m just too “customer focused” as some CEOs have been accused of being by their board of directors.

Somehow I highly doubt anyone at Verizon or TWC or Comcast will lose sleep worrying about whether Joe the Plumber is subscribed to the right speed tier so as not to go broke.

Besides, I have no illusions that residential customers would not have nearly as fine-grained control over their bandwidth as enterprise customers, but the ability to change it from month to month might be acceptable. You can make a change at any time, but whatever the speed settings are set to on midnight of your billing cycle is when it actually changes. Or maybe it always gets set on the 1st of the month for self-service and you have to call customer support to change it mid-cycle for extenuating circumstances (like your kid boosted it to 15Mbps and you can’t afford the bill if it stays that high all month).

Obviously there are kinks to work out and some protections need to come into play (perhaps it can warn you what your bill will be for the following month if the requested speed change is made — easy to calculate because it’s not usage-based), but generally speaking this is a MUCH better idea than consumption based billing.

With a little tuning I’m sure I can find a speed that’s right for me and as my finances allow and my demands increase I’ll eventually bump up my connection speed. I have friends I know right now who would start at 15 or 20Mbps and pay whatever rate (within reason) because they: run their business from home, play a lot of online games, watch Netflix or other streaming video online, simply want the fastest Internet they can afford, any number of other reasons.

On the other hand there will be plenty of people who will likely turn down their speed because it’s not as important to them as a manageable bill.

As always realistic and acceptable pricing will be the key here, but speed-based tiers as opposed to consumption-based tiers are one thing many of us on this site (and elsewhere) have stated zero opposition to.

The current scheme is speed-based but with only two or three very course “tiers” if you will — slow and cheap, fast and moderate, slightly faster and slightly pricey. Creating a customized (or at least far more granular) tiering system based on speed is the only way I can see consumers accepting by and large. Some accept the CBB plans for now because either they’ve been convinced they’re funding the high-use users down the street or they simply don’t think they’ll ever be affected (most likely because they have no real idea of how much they use and we still don’t have a gas gauge for the Common Man to help put that into perspective).

Frankly I think the best option is provide the opportunity to customize your speed but still offer basic service levels as they do today. People who aren’t interested in tweaking their connection can pick a basic service level. Others (the more technologically savvy or the “heavy” users) will more likely than not opt to tweak their connection to suit their lifestyle and their wallet.

In the end the ISPs win. Their pricing scheme should be set up in such a way that they’re not losing money (and if they are then their sales & marketing team isn’t worth anything) and customers feel they have control over their Internet spending without the stress and hassle of watching a meter and paying overage fees at a outrageous markup.

The best part of it, in my opinion, is that it eliminates the need for customers to constantly monitor their monthly running total of bandwidth used. Even with some serious restriction, like a subscriber being limited to changing the speed setting twice per month, I would still consider this vastly better than what TW is planning for us all.

For those wanting the direct link to the burstable speeds and such, this should be it.

http://www.verizonbusiness.com/products/internet/dedicated/#details-ethernet

Wife: “Honey, are you a sleep?”
Husband: “I was…”
Wife: “Did you turn off the lights downstairs?”
Husband: “Yes”
Wife: “Did you turn down the bandwith for the night too?”
Husband: “I don’t remember”
Wife: “Well, someone should go check.”
Husband: “Yes, someone should.”