In the world’s smallest surprise move ever, Telus announced this week that they too would be moving toward Usage Based Billing (UBB). Their argument? “It’s only fair that people pay for how much Internet capacity they use.”
I’d buy that if they didn’t also say that most people only use 15GB out of the 75GB cap (only their High Speed Lite has a smaller cap at 13GB) — but there’s no rebate offered for unused GB.
In my last post, I compared the usage to fuel but maybe that’s not the best example — I buy fuel in bulk, estimating how much I will use, and then it is “debited” from my tank as needed. If I think I will be doing a lot of driving in the coming week, I might fill the tank instead of adding $30 or $40 worth. However, I do pay only for what I use — unless the tank is syphoned or springs a leak, I will eventually use all of that fuel.
So, in the interest of considering how we “pay for what we use” how do we pay for other services?
For our phone service, we pay a flat fee for local calling regardless of how many or how few calls we make or the duration of those calls. Having been raised with this model for phone service I was surprised by the UK pay-per-call model and later the pay-by-the-minute charges of cell phones. Now, even my cell phone is a flat fee model. Oddly, Telus thinks this model is fine for phone service which also requires infrastructure, maintenance and upgrading.
For our cable television, we pay a flat fee whether the television is on or not. We choose to pay for some premium channels too, but again we can choose to watch them a lot or a little. The premium channels also add a large selection of Video On Demand (VOD) options which are included in our flat monthly fee*. Oddly, Shaw finds this model acceptable for cable television but not for … uh…. cable internet. I know there is a different protocol governing the movement of each type of information but they use the same damned wire and this confounds me.
For our natural gas service, we pay a flat access fee and then are billed by the gigajoule (GJ) depending on our use. This means that for the months of May-Oct when the gas is off (we only use it for heat, not cooking or hot water) we still pay the modest access fee. While we aren’t fully paying for what we use, it is much closer to the fuel model.
Finally, our electricity includes both a per day rate and our per kW/h rate. The usage is strictly metred and we pay one rate for the first portion (step 1) and a higher rate for additional use (step 2) — when this was introduced there was a lot of bally-hoo but most seem to have adjusted. This is about as close to “paying for what we use” as I can imagine.
*The VOD issue drives me crazy because I cannot for the life of me see this as different from Netflix — both are streaming television shows or movies on my schedule.