Ad: Manage updates with the Download App

pay-per-use

Pay-per-use bandwidth? Not without some ground rules

Update: May 17, 2012 Do I get results, or what? Less than a day after this column posted, Comcast announced it would ditch its 250GB data cap in favor of a 300GB cap with the option to buy additional 50GB chunks for $10 each. Not bad, although it's amusing timing given their current fight over Net neutrality and cap-free Xfinity on-demand streaming.

Bandwidth caps, the death of unlimited data plans, throttling, "data hog" accusations...I get it. Pay-per-use bandwidth is inevitable: the end of unlimited Internet access is at hand. Bandwidth is a limited resource, especially on … Read more

Symantec eyes pay-per-use software

Virtualization could end expensive long-term software licensing in favor of a pay-per-use model, according to Symantec.

Executives at the company said that years- or months-long licenses covering multiple machines could be slashed using virtualized applications to licensing deals structured as pay per day, per hour, or even per second.

Virtualized or streaming applications, where software is run on a central machine and streamed to computers over a network, allows monitoring of precisely how long each instance of the software is used.

"You can detect application usage so you can cut the number of licenses down to what is being … Read more