Your water and electricity utilities most likely also have caps on how much water or electricity you can use before they cut you off.
Most utilities cannot just shut you off. Many states have laws that determine when and how. The biggest thing about a utility though is that you pay for usage. If you want to leave your lights on all day, they really don't care as long as you continue to pay your bill.
Personally, I don't see a problem with metered broadband, and only have a problem with the current pricing structures. Look at the mobile space to see how messed up it can be. Companies set prices at a usage level that is just below what a person really needs so they force people into the next tier with the hopes the person will not actually use it. Instead, I would support a flat rate per GB. I've seen numbers like $6/GB thrown around for mobile (it would obviously be a lot lower for line connected broadband, but you get the idea).
If we do end up with broadband treated as a utility in the US, I would bet that it will be metered and charged for usage. It's the most fair way to support the system and will naturally prevent people from doing something similar to leaving their lights on all day.
I'm not personally amazingly sympathetic. He uses his service for business purposes at home (as a consultant) - as he is perfectly entitled to do so.
If he had paid for a business class account, he'd be fine. I pay Comcast right on $100 a month for 22/8mbps, with 5 static IPs, no throttling, and no caps - I work from home and according to my firewall had approximately 800GB of traffic last month (and that usage is not out of the ordinary).
Does Comcast give people the option to upgrade if they exceed their cap? The whole situation would have been very different if Comcast told him he had to upgrade to $100/mo.
$6/Gb on mobile? That would be wonderful compared to, let me check... $20/Mb that I just paid for checking google maps over AT&T roaming when lost in another country. Sigh.
I think the $6/GB came from the original unlimited plans in the US that were $30/month and had soft caps of 5GB. Pretty much all those plans have since disappeared.
The point is, I think most consumers are fine with metered data if they feel like it's mostly fair.
On an iphone at least, I cache the maps for the area I'm going to be in, then switch to airplane mode with location services turned on. Free, international GPS.
Most utilities cannot just shut you off. Many states have laws that determine when and how. The biggest thing about a utility though is that you pay for usage. If you want to leave your lights on all day, they really don't care as long as you continue to pay your bill.
Personally, I don't see a problem with metered broadband, and only have a problem with the current pricing structures. Look at the mobile space to see how messed up it can be. Companies set prices at a usage level that is just below what a person really needs so they force people into the next tier with the hopes the person will not actually use it. Instead, I would support a flat rate per GB. I've seen numbers like $6/GB thrown around for mobile (it would obviously be a lot lower for line connected broadband, but you get the idea).
If we do end up with broadband treated as a utility in the US, I would bet that it will be metered and charged for usage. It's the most fair way to support the system and will naturally prevent people from doing something similar to leaving their lights on all day.