Verizon: Metered broadband is on the horizon - FierceTelecom

During this week's Fiber to the Home Council trade show, Verizon's CTO Dick Lynch intimated that metered billing for broadband services could become a reality. As one of the first Verizon executives to express such an idea, Lynch said in a Telephony article that the broadband industry "will see a pricing paradigm shift" because Internet Service Providers "cannot continue to grow the Internet without passing the cost onto someone."

Verizon expressed concern that the FCC's proposed Net neutrality rules could hamper an ISP's effort to offer premium bandwidth packages, while enabling unfettered access to the public Internet. Stopping short of announcing a specific plan for Verizon, Lynch said that he thinks the broadband industry could follow the wireless industry's model of selling buckets of bandwidth. "We are going to reach a point where we will sell packages of bites," Lynch said. "Now, I'm not announcing a new pricing plan. But we have already gone this way in wireless because that is where the resource is most constrained..."