Exactly, on top of the fact that internet usage has been increasing exponentially which Utilities don’t tend to experience to the same extent.

There are more costs to an Internet Provider than most people realise. For example as simple as it is to run some new cable have you thought about the related costs of that.

In the UK, most of the cost to lay cables or fibre is related to Civil Engineering and Planning. Then you have to consider that in order to keep up with capacity increases, internet providers need to upgrade every part of their access network which means that more equipment needs to be removed and replaced, so more Civils costs.

To add to that, most of this equipment has an extremely high cost related to the amount of power, space and cooling it requires in order for it to remain operational.

So overall, more costs to give the customer that extra 100 Mbps they so want. But don’t get me wrong, I completely agree that capacity billing, in its current form, is the best method to resolve.

There should be a transparent method where the top 10–15% of customers based on usage should be billed appropriately and not excessively for consuming the lionshare of the provider’s capacity. This money should then be earmarked for increasing investment into the network’s capacity. Also there should be no difference between whether the usage was due to the provider’s OTT services or a 3rd party competitors.