Broadband service billing: based on traffic or time

11/6/2006, there is a long time dispute in China about the billing method on broadband service. Should it be based on how long you use it or should it be based on how much traffic you uesd? Recently, this dispute leads to a serious online brawl. The fuse of it is Nanjing telecom, China Telecom's branch in Nanjing city, suddenly announced that they would adopt traffic billing method on their broadband service instead of old time billing method.
Nanjing telecom stated that there was a big difference between different kind of broadband users. Averge monthly traffic is 8Gb, but some user can use upto 2600Gb per month mainly due to abuse of P2P software like BT. Nanjing Telecom considers such abuse of BT leads to unbalance of network resources, and it is unfair to those customers who don't use BT.
Sounds reasonable, right? But this annoucement reaps severe online remonstration. People threaten that they will change to other service provider who don't use traffic billing. People reprobate that this is a new monopoly policy. People rebuke Nanjing Telecom does not consider consumer benefits. Those who advocate the new policy often get flaks from raged customers.
Today, Nanjing Telecom told local media that their new billing policy has been temperately stopped, and no further information when they will resume this policy. Is this the victory of those critics? Mr. Xiang,ligang, Editor in Chief of a local communication magazine wrote in his blog:"This is a PR failure of China Telecom.". Xiang thought China Telecom should do more PR work before they launched this policy.
Nanjing Telecom doesn't think they are the first around the country to launch this policy. Some other cities in Jiangsu province also have this policy before them. Anyway, what we can find now is their reason to launch this new billing method doesn't disappear, they still fact hugh network resources unbalance. The traffic is increasing, but the revenue isn't. What is waiting them ahead is another suitable time to launch this billing method.
Maybe there is a good news for Nanjing Telecom, Chinese goverment is working on crumbling down those websites who provide piratic films downloading. If this work works, the pressure on China Telecom will be less.