Yesterday we issued a report exploring how Verizon was again hinting at how they believed metered billing is inevitable. We also discussed how yet again, you had an ISP suggesting that a shift to metered billing was financially necessary (not true) and that the ISP desire to shift to metered billing was dictated by some kind of altruism (also not true). Apparently, this position upset Todd Spangler over at Multichannel News, who somewhere in between taking pot shots at "edgy bloggers" and "clueless" flat-rate pricing proponents arrives at his central thesis: that consumption-based billing is inevitable:Again, the inference that the flat-rate pricing model mysteriously doesn't offer the money needed to fund investment is simply not true, should you care to look at any major ISP balance sheet or 10-K. Internet usage data (at least the data not coming from DC lobbyists pushing the "Exaflood") indicates that future capacity demand can be met with only modest capacity upgrades. New data from the University of Minnesota this week indicates that growth continues to slow. So if by "shooting through the roof," Spangler means "completely manageable with only modest investment and smart engineering," he's right. Otherwise, not so much.

Spangler's second major point is that consumption-based billing is inevitable because bandwidth caps won't work. To prove his point, Spangler turns to a guy that sells network throttling hardware for a living. "Bandwidth caps don't do anything for you," agrees Sandvine CEO David Caputo, who obviously would rather ISPs pay his company to install network management hardware that can detect and manage network congestion in real time. Comcast's Sandvine deployment does just that, detecting heavy users on congested nodes and throttling them back temporarily -- without the majority of network users even noticing.

But Spangler derails his own point here. Comcast's using a combination of investment in DOCSIS 3.0, smart engineering, intelligent network management hardware and a 250GB cap to handle demand on peak and off. All of that is funded, with plenty of money to spare, by flat-rate pricing. The 1% of users who are still a problem can be bumped to more expensive business-class tiers. The capacity demands are being taken care of now and in the future, customers understand the pricing and limits, Comcast's network is healthy, most of their costs are fixed or decreasing, and their business is hugely profitable. Yet Spangler says:Now as Spangler himself says he's "the man" and we're just "edgy blogger types" (edgy is apparently a polite euphemism for asking questions when presented with industry talking points) but again: where's the evidence that a shift to consumption-based billing is necessary? Repeating that metered billing is necessary and inevitable doesn't magically make it so.

Back in September we noted how it seems like only a matter of time before Verizon engaged in metered broadband billing. After Time Warner Cable's PR implosion, most ISPs are in a holding pattern on the idea until they can sell consumers on it, something they haven't done a good job of so far. Verizon also continues to face competition from Cablevision, who has publicly stated they think metered billing confuses customers and they "think broadband is a pretty powerful drug and we want people to consume more of it." But Verizon continues to dream, telling Stacey Higginbotham at GigaOM they still dream of a metered future:Again though, the kind of metered billing models carriers propose have nothing to do with fairness.

It has been interesting watching Blockbuster video adapt to the broadband age, with the company seemingly not trying very hard out of fear of cannibalizing their brick and mortar revenue and losing control. Early efforts to mirror Netflix's success at broadband video delivery have seemed relatively lackluster, and the company's CEO, when announcing such broadband initiatives, seems to almost expect them to fail.

Blockbuster's latest video effort is a strange one in the face of 50 Mbps fiber and cable connections at home, and increasingly speedy connectivity options while on the go. They're offering movies at kiosks on SD card.

Consumer Group Free Press takes a few shots at Verizon's inconsistent positions on rural broadband, noting that while the baby bell continually claims to support getting broadband into the nation's rural nooks and crannies, their actions of late say the complete opposite. Forget FiOS -- the new Verizon is uninterested in delivering even DSL or phone service to most rural markets, which is why they're continually selling off these markets in tricky tax loophole leaping deals that usually wind up badly for the consumer and the sold markets:Verizon's justification of course is that rural America is costly to wire. That doesn't mean rural America can't be profitable -- it's just not profitable enough, quickly enough for impatient Verizon executives and shareholders. The telco is now trying to get regulatory approval for their latest sale of customers to Frontier Communications, and in a filing with the FCC essentially argues that Frontier will do a better job than Verizon ever did at treating rural customers well: story continues..

We've certainly levied more than our fair share of criticism at Comcast over the years, but late yesterday the cable giant took one hell of a beating for doing, well, absolutely nothing. It began when Slashdot posted a story saying that Comcast had imposed a new throttling system. Comcast actually hadn't -- the story Slashdot linked to was nearly a year old and explored a throttling system Comcast implemented almost a year ago.

No matter, apparently.