Microsoft’s Horrifying Story About Usage-Based Billing Abuse
If you haven’t read a good dystopian tale like George Orwell’s 1984 lately, have a look at a new study on usage-based Internet billing from Microsoft and a couple of professors from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
The report tells of a number of families in South Africa that took part in the study, which sought to understand how the caps on monthly home broadband plans affected Internet usage. It’s bone-chilling stuff.
In South Africa, broadband speeds are still relatively slow, hitting a maximum of four megabits per second as of the study’s purview (2010). Usage caps, meanwhile, typically came in at between one and nine gigabytes per month, with unlimited plans only recently surfacing.
The report found that these restrictions-obviously heavy by Western standards-introduced three uncertainties to the families living with them: “invisible balances, mysterious processes and multiple users.” In a nutshell, the families didn’t know how to measure their usage and determine how close to their caps they were; which websites and applications used more data; and which household members were using more of the monthly allotment.
All of the 12 households reported regularly hitting their caps, which resulted in one of three things: counting down the days until the next month’s reset, topping up by buying more data, or finding Internet access elsewhere, sometimes by going over to a relative’s and using up their cap. In some cases, participants would run out of data in the middle of doing something, leaving them unable to finish a task. As one respondent said, this was enough to make one “psychotic.”