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Comment by baskire | Hacker News Reader

Really should be billed on a combination of peak utilization and total consumption.

Having the ability to download at 1Gibps for a few minutes a day is a lot less strain than downloading 24x7 at 1Gibps.

Such complex billing models are pretty common with electrical utilities. With many industrial consumers even installing Flywheels to reduce their utilization spikes.

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IP transit in data centers etc is often a combination of a base rate + extra fees based on the 95% percentile (if that value is over the base rate). E.g. you might buy a 500Mb/s base rate over a 1 Gb/s link, and then end up with a 95% percentile value of 600Mb/s at the end of the month, so you pay an extra fee for the 100Mbit difference. Whereas if you use the link fully for 2 % of the time, but then stay under the base rate the rest of month, you only pay the base price.

>> Really should be billed on a combination of peak utilization and total consumption.

Why?

>> Having the ability to download at 1Gibps for a few minutes a day is a lot less strain than downloading 24x7 at 1Gibps

It's not a strain on the hardware, its that the ISPs have to give you a dedicated pipe, which is what they're already selling.

>> Such complex billing models are pretty common with electrical utilities

That's false. For example, you do not get billed by how large your water pipe is, only how much water you use.

I imagine that model would work really well for a lot of data usage too: Downloading updates for applications and games could be scheduled for off-peak times, and users might even be incentivized to pre-cache streaming content they want to watch during primetime hours if they can save by doing so.

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