Nobody said that peak throughout and data use are totally unrelated, just that measuring total data use is a bad way of accounting for it.
Here's the deal ... pricing based on connection speed doesn't work for all the reasons I've listed. But, the folks who eat the most data are the ones hammering the network the most. That is, there is a direct relationship between total data use and the impact on the network.
So, if connection speed isn't the basis for pricing internet service what would you suggest?
Brian
Why not have people pay for speed and priority instead?
The limited resource we are primarily trying to conserve is bandwidth during peak times. So why not structure your pricing and billing around that instead of some amount of data usage that may or may not be done during the times that really matter?
If nobody is using the internet in the middle of the night they can put the systems into standby mode.They're doing this with the digital cable TV signals. The only time a lot of the channels are put into the cable is when a cable box or cable card requests them. They may not be saving as much as they would like to because of evening shift workers who turn their TVs and computers on at midnight. Therefore it may cost more to use the internet at 1am because they're having to keep the system powered up for a lower volume of users.