[bbb]

The bandwidth overage fee for DataPro is a reasonable $10 for each extra gigabyte. Verizon and Sprint charge around $50 per extra gigabyte in overage fees. If you use more than 2 GB per month, you deserve to pay more than the rest of us who do not. Why is this hard to understand?

It's perfectly reasonable for heavy users to pay more than light users. But the same holds true for water, sewage, electricity, etc.

So why do we have such a complicated mess of data plan options? Why is 3G bandwidth not just a simple metered service where everybody pays the same rate?

[w1ntermute]

Why is 3G bandwidth not just a simple metered service where everybody pays the same rate?

Because the vast majority of people don't use enough bandwidth to make that option more profitable for the telcos than their current setup, where people buy much more bandwidth (if you measure it as being the maximum throughput times the amount of time in a month) than they need.

[spicyj]

People like to know how much they're paying every month and not have to worry about every kilobyte transferred, one of the reasons that many people prefer postpaid plans that include a certain number of minutes per month rather than prepaid ones where you have to keep track of how much you're using. It's stressful!

[pyre]

How are pre-paid plans any different than making sure that your car has enough fuel in the tank? People don't by gasoline on post-paid plans. The real issue here is that there is no standard/easy way of knowing how many minutes you have left (i.e. fuel gauge). People have a good handle on how long a minute is, and they could easily read a countdown ticker on their phone. People go for unlimited because, "if $10 for 250 minutes is a good deal, then $30 for infinity minutes is a better deal!" You also have to add in the laziness factor (i.e. If I have unlimited minutes, then I don't have to worry about buying more minutes if I ever need to use more minutes in a given month).

Data is different because many people have no idea what a kilobyte or a megabyte is, let alone how much bandwidth each site they visit uses, and that's not counting all of the background communication from Apps or Ajax requests from web pages.

People know how to cut back on water usage. People know how to cut back on electricity usage. People know how to cut back on phone usage. A lot of people haven't the faintest clue on how to cut back on data usage other than maybe, "use the web less," but they don't know which things use bandwidth and which don't, or which things use more bandwidth than others.