In Russia a decade ago all the consumer internet was billed on usage. Like 40 kopecks per megabyte. Sometimes uplink was free and downlink was metered, sometimes more crazy schemes.
Guess what killed it?
Competition. If you allow cables to be slung on top of rooftops / utility poles then soon you'll have a lot of cheap operators.
I was in Australia a few years ago and was flabbergasted that many ISPs were still operating on a complicated set of caps and on-peak / off-peak rules. I blamed the de-facto monopoly created when the copper got privatized and all sold to a single company, Telstra.
Telstra is the privatisation of the old government postmaster general (well after the split from mail post). The government department owned the copper, and telstra retained it as part of the privatisation.
As part of this agreement Telstra had to provide equal access to its network, and had to charge the same price for all users, so that the cost of calls was the same for people in regional areas (even though maintenance cost more).
Most of the issues relating to Austrlia's internet relate to the cost of overseas transit of information. There are only a few cables between Australia and the rest of the world, and that is the large driver of cost or at least it was in the early 00s
Yeah, Telstra was forced to lease copper to any ISP who wanted to use it -- but I strongly suspect anti-competitive business practices on that aspect (delaying hookups to non-Telstra customers, etc.)
Oh, the irony! Malcolm Turnbull paid Telstra for the copper networks so that the government could own them again. He did this so that nobody else could get fibre to the home.
I feel a bit sorry for him. He was forced into this by Tony "Shirt-front" Abbott, who knew nothing about technology (or how to run a country, for that matter). Now he's stuck with it - a millstone around our new Prime Minister's neck.
I guess the intense destabilization and white-anting now going on in the LNP will distract from this.
Is there any evidence at all that he was forced into this? Are there anecdotes of Malcolm arguing for an all-fibre NBN in the party room, only to be smacked down and forced into MTM?
I'm assuming this was rescinded shortly after because I'm in St. Petersburg right now and not only are competing ISPs plentiful, but the net is unmetered and fast as hell. I think we're paying about 650 rub a month for 40-100 mbps (they do the tiering weird where the more you pay the higher your minimum speed guarantee is). That works out to about $10 USD a month, or for perhaps a more reasonable comparison, about .9% of a monthly salary of 70,000 ruble (not unreasonable if you have some skills)
Guess what killed it? Competition. If you allow cables to be slung on top of rooftops / utility poles then soon you'll have a lot of cheap operators.