This article is nothing more than PR and propaganda for a company that hopes to sell lot's of sw to ISP's. Shame on you BBC.
The only basis on which pay for usage could be justified at all would be by the MB/GB. The problem with this approach is the incremental cost of moving the data is so marginal, once the network is in place, and falling at such a rate that any 'system' put in place to monitor such usage and produce variable billing will be more expensive than the 'bandwidth' that is being charged for.
The vast bulk of the monthly payment a user makes goes to 'pay down' fixed costs and not incremental ones (ones based on usage). These are the same for "Mrs Gadekar" as they are for "Mr p2p nutter". If you were to offer a price difference to these two users, that truely related to 'cost of provision', both fixed and incremental, then it would be a minscule difference and not worth the trouble and cost to implement. Similarly if you were to bill users on usage in such a way you might have a user who does not use his conection at all being charged £25 pm and one saturating it paying £26pm, where 70p of the extra £1 is actualy the cost of of 'tracking and implementing' the variable billing and 30p for the extra incremental cost actualy created by the 'heavy user'. This is just madness.
The agenda here is not one of 'fairness' at all. It is a telco agenda of 'regaining control' and a sw producer agenda of selling product. The true agenda can be seen in the statments like
"The last four or five years has been about building this infrastructure of a high-speed network, providing a dumb access," Now, he says, service providers need to make their networks "intelligent" so they can identify users and the applications used.
So the real agenda starts to appear. The whole reason the internet is so powerful, so useful and has spread accross the world like wildfire, is that it is a 'dumb' network. This does not mean their is no intelligence in it, what it means is the intelligence is at the 'ends' of the network, ie in the hands of the 'users' and not the owners of the network. This is the very basis of its power. It is also an anethma to the network companies, reducing their role from one of controling and defining and billing for every application to one of 'commondity transport movers'. This is an attempt by telco's to 'regain' the 'control' they lost when TCP/IP moved that 'control' from their domain to the users domain. Any such efforts will ultimately prove futile but they are sure gonna try in the mean time.
further reading on this subject can be found via these links. The 'rise of the stupid network' is nothing short of a 'seminal' piece on this issue and should be read and understood by every internet user and more inportantly every CEO of a network company.
http://www.rageboy.com/stupidnet.html
and generaly at
http://www.isen.com
To finish off I will just highlight a couple more examples of 'insidious propaganda' being brought to play here.
"Between 60 and 80% of bandwidth is being eaten up by a fraction of customers - who are mainly engaged in peer-to-peer activity - and, according to the industry, the rest are penalised because of the heavy users sharing the network."
ahh an old chestnut here
Where do these figures come from ? If they are saying during peak hours (when congestion occurs) that a tiny 'fraction' of users are using 60-80% of the bandwidth, they are quite simply lying. You can only use as much bandwidth as your connection allows and when congestion occurs all users slow down equally. This simply means it is impossible for one user, during peak hours, to use 60-80% of the 'bandwidth'. If they are saying '60-80%' during all hours, peak and off peak, then the statment is meaningless in terms of congestion and one users impact on other users. However this 'story' is highly 'emotive' and a great 'propaganda' tool for the telcos, trying to convince a public that all the gains of a 'dumb' network should be reversed and control should be restored to telco hands, who will then decide what 'services' are offered and bill for each one, regardless of the cost of provision.
next
"Ever been out to dinner with a big group of people, only to feel cheated when everyone splits the bill equally?"
Let's imagine a senario where the actual cost of food to the restuarant is neglegable and the vast bulk of the cost on your bill is for the 'fixed' costs of building the restuarant or renting it etc, so that if you have just a starter your bill is say £20 and if you have a 3 course full on meal it is £20.33, then no one would ever suggest at such a meal that the bill is not split equally. This is exactly the case with internet access. It is even the case with restaurants to some degree when they impose a 'minimum charge' regardless of what you eat or do not eat. When the ratio of these fixed costs to incremental costs is such that the incremental are marginal to the fixed, then flat rate pricing is the only sensible approach.
and finaly
"What could be difficult is to persuade new customers to plan what they want to do on the web. At least in the short-term, perhaps many would prefer to split the bill evenly while they sample what is on offer."
You are damm right is going to be difficult to 'persuade' customers that what they really want is for all control to be taken away from them and put back into the hands of the telcos. The biggest weapon 'users' have in this fight is knowledge and self education and ironicaly the greatest means to this is the internet itself. Of course under a 'telco' model this would be packaged and billed as a specfic service by them and under their control, and priced out of the hands of the mere 'average user'.