Many years ago, wireless and wireline minutes of use were sold on a metered basis. These days voice and texting are sold by the bucket. There's now more experimentation with that sort of model for broadband access as well.
It might seem odd, but changing the way broadband access is priced at retail, using a model similar to wireless minutes of use and texting, might be beneficial for end users, not simply for Internet Service Providers.
The reason is that if a user wants to buy a bigger bucket to move more packets for peer-to-peer video, the user is happier and so is the provider, who is able to match revenue with use of network resources.
That's arguably a better solution that having ISPs deploy sniffing and packet inspection capabilities so they can inspect all packets (as happy as some solution providers would be to sell all that capability).
Since deep packet inspection has to impose some overhead and latency, the user's applications arguably should work better as well (also avoiding privacy concerns). If any user is found to be shipping around video bits in violation of copyright, there are other remedies.
That's the way enterprises and businesses buy bandwidth, by the way. They pay more money but have unrestricted right to use the bandwidth they've purchased. Pricing consumer access in the same way wireless text and voice now can be bought would allow users to make their own choices about what applications they want to use, and how much.
It isn't metered usage in any way more objectionable than buckets of minutes or texting are. And it might allow ISPs to avoid the DPI effort.
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