Originally posted by: SandInMyShoes
I'm a WISP, so I'll weigh in on how I see things.
Being a WISP is a tough business. Unless you're in a major metropolitan area, you have to pay an arm and a leg for a wholesale connection. In many rural areas, a T1 can cost 1000 bucks per month or more--with a 3 year contract! To cover your bandwidth cost alone you would have to have a minimum of 20 customers at $50 per customer per month. Since a T1 is 1.5mbps, you could only guarantee each customer a whopping 75kbps of bandwidth, or approximately twice the speed of dialup. With some fancy traffic shaping to have the P2P users scraping the bottom of the barrel for the leftover bandwidth, you might be able to get by with offering service "up to 256kbps" and as a bonus, burst the customer to 512kbps if the bandwidth is available. All for $50/mo. Not going to get rich quick, are you?
Now that I've filled your head with a very-bad-case scenario, keep in mind that many WISPs don't have to pay quite THAT much for bandwidth. Obviously, yours doesn't, or they wouldn't be able to offer "up to 12mbps+" speeds. That'd be 8 T1s, or up to $10,000/mo! Still, since they are selling a "3mbps" plan for only $50/mo, I feel that it is being very unreasonable to the customer to have a phantom quota that can be reached in under one hour! Most rural ISPs are run by sane common people like you and me, and actually want the customer to be happy. That's why you see most WISPs selling very slow plans, rarely over 1mbps; if you're selling it, the customer has a reasonable expectation of being able to use it substantially. If your WISP doesn't want people downloading more than 800mb per day, they should consider selling "up to 256kbps" plans, and publish the quota!
As a side note, I think that in the interest of rural broadband development, all incumbent phone and cable providers should be required to offer WISPs a reasonably-priced connection. It's very crippling to these small WISPs that have to pay out the nose for a puny little T1, while the ILEC sells 6mbps ADSL for $40/mo. I believe that the cheapest and most-efficient way for rural America to see widespread broadband is to ensure that rural WISPs can purchase wholesale bandwidth at carrier cost; hell, in really remote regions, even use the USF to subsidize it so it's available below cost. The internet's infrastructure is now in dire need of the same boost that phone and electric got in days of yore.