UBC pricing proposals - who are they good for?

UBC pricing, or Usage Based Pricing is meant to complement the Capacity Based Pricing (CBC) that has allowed some ISPs to start to offer 1Mbps services at 0.5Mbps service pricing. It is expected that the standard based pricing BT use for the BT Central products that link every IPStream based ISP to the BT Wholesale network will be withdrawn a few months after the introduction of UBC pricing.

UBC pricing apparently will work by BT Wholesale billing an ISP based on the 95% percentile of the peak bandwidth usage. So if a 34Mbps BT Central has a calculated peak of 26Mbps during a monthly billing period, BT will charge for 26Mbps of bandwidth. This means that an ISPs bill will vary from month to month, and things like the release of a service pack or security patch by Microsoft could push the cost to the ISP up vastly.


Full story: ADSL Guide