No data caps?

Tom Pullar-Strecker reports:

Pacific Fibre may charge internet providers a fee per customer to use its proposed international communications cable, rather than charging for a set amount of , to encourage them to offer generous or unlimited to broadband users. …

Co-founder Rod Drury said carriers had to guess how much capacity they might need on the existing Southern Cross Cable. Pacific Fibre's approach would be to avoid a situation where consumers faced restrictive data caps while most of the bandwidth available on subsea went unsold.

“We don't want to be `Southern Cross minus 5 per cent'. Why don't we flip the model around and go to a per-person charging model and then try to give internet providers as much bandwidth as we possibly can for that?” The charges could be segmented by customer type. “You could do it for mobile connections, home connections, schools, hospitals and businesses, and set a reasonable price.”

Telecommunications Users Association chief executive Ernie Newman welcomed the approach. “The way the world is moving is towards all-you-can-eat-type plans and any move like that has got to be the way of the future.”

Hear hear.

I pay an enormous amount for Internet data. There is my home Internet connection and my work Internet connection. Then you had the Vodem for mobile Internet. Add on the data plan for the Blackberry and the data plan for the iPad, and you get the idea.

Wouldn't it be great if or Telecom offered a universal data package, regardless of medium. Say 20 GB a month which can be used on any of your devices.

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