Andrew Harries, CEO of network hardware maker Zeugma, not too surprisingly has penned a missive in the Financial Times suggesting he's had a change of heart, and that he now likes the idea of metered billing. Harries, who at least admits he has a vested interest in selling hardware that tracks and meters usage, unfortunately goes on to fill his piece with a laundry list of pro-metered billing talking points that ignore countless broadband industry realities.

To start, like an author for Slate did a few weeks ago, Harries makes the mistake of confusing idealized pure per-byte billing with the metered billing models most carriers hope to implement: namely plans that offer low caps and high overages, don't really offer consumers value, and are really simply designed to have everybody paying more money, not just heavy users. He also, like most metered billing proponents do, argues there's a bandwidth crunch coming that makes metered billing absolutely necessary lest carriers run out of money:Actually, not really. Once again, if Harries bothered to look at ISP tax records, he'd see that carriers are making remarkable profits off of the flat-rate broadband billing model -- not even mentioning the money made from added services, a litany of fees, and advertisements. The argument that modern ISPs don't "earn a profit" is intentionally obnoxious. Meanwhile, if he looked at substantive network data, he'd see that Internet capacity demand (at least for wired networks) can be met with only modest capacity upgrades.

A little more than a year ago, Comcast got their wrist slapped by the FCC for throttling upstream P2P traffic (and lying about it to the press and consumers), though the "sanction" contained no substantive punishment or fine. Still, Comcast has been battling the ruling ever since, arguing that the FCC's neutrality principles (pdf) don't give the FCC the authority to investigate the issue, much less sanction the company.

The Wall Street Journal this week took a look at the push toward metered broadband, and while the story contains nothing we haven't covered here in exhausting (perhaps sometimes even annoying) detail, the Journal did interview Phillip Dampier. Dampier's a Broadband Reports user ( Dampier ) from Rochester, New York, for whom the metered billing debate was so important -- he went off and created the completely consumer funded Stop The Cap website.

Lawrence, Kansas based Sunflower Broadband (see our user reviews) has announced that it will be upgrading its infrastructure to DOCSIS 3.0 in the near future. The company, often criticized for being among the earliest US cable operators to employ rather low caps, will be launching 50 Mbps service soon for $59.95 per month (up from their high-end tier's current price of $49.95), plus $10 per month if you don't get their cable service.

There's been a growing call from investors like Craig Moffett for AT&T to ditch their $30 unlimited data plan and migrate to a pure per-byte billing model for the iPhone. Why? iPhone users like to use data, and higher overages means more money.

Just a few days after Cox bumped speeds in some of their more competitive markets, a Cox employee has stopped by our forums to indicate that the carrier has clarified their usage caps. With the FCC (and State Attorneys General) increasingly demanding network limitation transparency with consumers, the Cox website now not only lists concrete usage limits for all tiers, but the various top speeds they provision in each Cox market (which is usually dictated by the level of competition they're facing).

Back in March a company by the name of OnLive unveiled their new broadband gaming service, which aims to replace the traditional game console with what's essentially a broadband-connected dumb terminal. Under the system, which has been proposed in various forums for years now, major title games are completely streamed over your broadband connection -- for a monthly subscription fee.

Back in April, Canadian cable operator Cogeco hoisted metered billing on the back of their customers, applying caps as low as 10GB per month and overages as high as $2.50 per gigabyte on top of existing tiers. When customers complained, Cogeco insulted customer intelligence by insisting the move wasn't about making money.

If you've paid attention, you know the modern "network neutrality" debate took off in 2005, when then AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre proudly, though dumbly, proclaimed that Google got a "free ride" on his network. According to Ed, this unfairness could only be rectified by charging companies who already pay for bandwidth money to ensure their traffic reaches AT&T consumers quickly.

With the network neutrality circus back in town, the use of bogus grass roots groups (aka "astroturf") is again on the upswing as corporations lobby Uncle Sam to prevent network neutrality legislation. Such misleadingly named groups (grandmothers for network justice?) are used by corporations in every sector to give the illusion of broad consumer support for ideas that are anti-consumer.

The policy statement (pdf) that guides the FCC's hand in matters of network neutrality is not law, and is intentionally vague enough to allow providers to get away with anything short of an outright traffic blockade. So when the FCC tried to sanction Comcast last year for throttling upstream P2P traffic for all users (regardless of congestion), it wasn't too surprising to see Comcast fight the FCC's authority in court.

Last month we explored how Comcast and Sandvine's network management technology continues to evolve. Unlike Comcast's last system, which throttled upstream traffic for all users regardless of consumption, this new system identifies customers and throttles back consumption only if they're on a congested node -- and they're a particular reason why.

Late last year we were the first outlet to offer screenshots of Comcast's new bandwidth meter, a belated companion to Comcast's 250GB per month consumption cap. One source insisted the tool was to be made available last January, but Comcast told us the meter was still being tested in employee homes.

Sandvine Corporation, whose traffic shaping hardware sat at the heart of Comcast's P2P throttling controversy, was considered one of the tech-sector's hottest companies in 2007. However, things went south in 2008, when Comcast was investigated by the FCC for implementing traffic management technology that throttled all customers' upstream bandwidth by using TCP packet forgery.

Cable provider Suddenlink is one of the most poorly reviewed cable operators in our user review rankings, consistently battling with Charter Communications for the least popular cable broadband experience. Now user iansltx writes in to note the carrier has deployed a usage monitor that could be a prelude to a shift to metered billing.

CableOne, the cable provider infamous for its noon-to-midnight caps, has raised its residential speeds and reworked its capping policy. On the good news side, their business tiers (topping out at 10 Mbps down and 2 Mbps up, with an 8/1 plan for the faint of wallet and an 8/2 plan for the in-between) are ostensibly cap-free now.

Canadian cable broadband carrier Cogeco hasn't exactly been popular around these parts lately, given the company recently implemented metered billing, applying caps as low as 10GB per month and overages as high as $2.50 a gigabyte on top of existing tiers. Adding a little insult to injury, the carrier insisted that move wasn't about making money, then turned right around to raise prices on customers for good measure.

As users in our Bell Canada forums explore, Bell Canada has decided to lower the caps (and in some cases speeds and select prices) on their DSL services for new users. Bell Canada's "Performance" tier has gone from 7Mbps to 6Mbps and seen its cap reduced from 60GB per month to 25GB per month. Bell Canada's 2Mbps "Essential Plus" tier has seen its cap reduced from 20GB to just 2GB per month. In a particularly curious move, our users note that Bell has also added "Usage Insurance" that provides users additional cap space in forty GB increments (up to 120GB) for an additional $5 per month. Users who don't sign up for this "insurance" will wind up paying between $2 and $2.50 per gigabyte in overage charges.

Canadian cable operator Cogeco was supposed to start billing customers in June after they implemented a new metered billing model. However, as we noted last week, many users found Cogeco's meters didn't accurately reflect usage. Customers have complained that Cogeco's daily usage portal seems broken, and that automatic warning e-mail alerts don't match the portal. Cogeco reached out to us to note that they're working on the problems, while at the same time downplaying the breadth of the issues.

Over at the Apple blog, Dave Greenbaum laments the rise in frequently unreasonable caps and meters in an age of increasing bandwidth use, and hopes Apple gets involved in the debate in order to protect its "brand." Greenbaum's particularly annoyed with his ISP in Lawrence, Kansas, Sunflower broadband, who imposes monthly caps as low as 3GB a month with overages as high as $2.00 per gigabyte. At their website, Sunflower defends the practice by saying that 49.46% of their customers use less than 1 GBs of bandwidth a month, and 86.98% use less than 10GB. Or at least that was the case in 2007, the year Sunflower is pulling their statistics from.