Why metered broadband won't last

When Verizon's chief technology officer, Dick Lynch, recently predicted an end to flat-rate broadband, many in the industry saw it as a late entry into the general consensus. After all, the combination of runaway consumer bandwidth demand and meager service provider revenue growth is unsustainable, right? "The concept of a flat-rated infinitely expanding service for everyone just won't work," Lynch told the audience at the Fiber-to-the-Home Conference. Not everyone agrees. "I think ultimately we'll end up with a simple flat rate," said Craig Labovitz, chief scientist for Arbor Networks, which sells network management systems. "The question is over what time scale." "Generally stuff starts out flat-rate, and it's very expensive for a select few," Labovitz said, citing the telegraph and the telephone as examples. "Then as it becomes more ubiquitous, it becomes metered as you try to relax capacity...and you try to dis-incentivize people from using your capacity. And then it ends up being flat-rate again as ultimately there's a strong economic [force toward] consumers preferring simplicity as a key metric."