Pricing
Dial-up users pay the costs for making local or long distance phone calls, usually pay a monthly subscription fee, and may be subject to additional per minute or traffic based charges, and connect time limits by their ISP. Though less common today than in the past, some dial-up access is offered for "free" in return for watching banner ads as part of the dial-up service. NetZero, BlueLight, Juno, Freenet (NZ), and Free-nets are examples of services providing free access. Some Wireless community networks continue the tradition of providing free Internet access.
Fixed broadband Internet access is often sold under an "unlimited" or flat rate pricing model, with price determined by the maximum data rate chosen by the customer, rather than a per minute or traffic based charge. Per minute and traffic based charges and traffic caps are common for mobile broadband Internet access.
With increased consumer demand for streaming content such as video on demand and peer-to-peer file sharing, demand for bandwidth has increased rapidly and for some ISPs the flat rate pricing model may become unsustainable. However, with fixed costs estimated to represent 80-90% of the cost of providing broadband service, the marginal cost to carry additional traffic is low. Most ISPs do not disclose their costs, but the cost to transmit a gigabyte of data in 2011 was estimated to be about $0.03.
Some ISPs estimate that about 5% of their users consume about 50% of the total bandwidth. To ensure these high-bandwidth users do not slow down the network for everyone, some ISPs are considering, are experimenting with, or have implemented combinations of traffic based pricing, time of day or "peak" and "off peak" pricing, and bandwidth or traffic caps.
In Canada, Rogers Hi-Speed Internet and Bell Canada have imposed bandwidth caps. Time Warner experimented with usage-based pricing in Beaumont, Texas. An effort by Time Warner to expand usage-based pricing into the Rochester, New York area met with public resistance, however, and was abandoned.
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