Broadband Pay As You Go

In broadband pay as you go services, you pay a small monthly fee, and you pay for the volume usage as you go (over the allocated data volume in the plan).

The services, instead of having a flat montly fee for unlimited usage, charge you based on how much you use the broadband connection.

That usage is metered by the volume of data in megabytes and billed to you at the end of each month.

Normally, however, there are monthly minimum fees even with these services.

This practice is used in wireless broadband services in the U.S. already.

In case you go over the allowed volume in your monthly wireless data package for the Cingular GPRS/EDGE data connection, for example (there are Cingular packages with unlimited volumes available).

Broadband Pay As You Go Providers

Pay as you go broadband is gaining popularity in the UK in particular. For one, a company called Metronet offers pay-as-you-go broadband with download/upload speeds ranging from 512/256 to 2048/256.

There are some additional costs, such as activation fees.

The Metronet service has a cost cap feature, where there is no charge after you have reached usage cap of 4738 MB.

To get similar type of wireless access billing in the U.S., take a look at the wireless data packages that cell phone companies such as Cingular/AT&T Wireless offer.

In the data usage package with your phone/PC card, you get billed a flat monthly fee for which you get allocated data volume.

For each megabyte you use over your allocated data volume in the plan, you pay an additional fee.

The cheapest wireless data package of this sort from Cingular costs $29.99 a month, for which you get 10MB of data, and each additional KB costs 0.005.


From Broadband Pay as You Go page to Broadband Guide index