Broadband pricing and useage caps

Susan Crawford’s posting on ‘Bit caps, consolidation, and Clearwire’ makes some interesting observations:

• Koreans rate their (nearly 100 Mbps) broadband connections as being ‘ordinary’
• Australians say having fixed caps and overage charges is misery
• The Japanese have discarded metered access in their post unbundled/separated regime
• In the US, carriers are looking at moving away from ‘all you can eat’ access pricing to metered access; but the Sprint/Clearwire natioanl wireless network proposal may provide an alternative

So there are quite distinct broadband pricing strategies and market structures in the above – some shaped by regulation and others not.

Meanwhile, the world watches US wireless policy closely (including operationalising the ‘open access’ specs for ‘C’ band spectrum).