From memory: * Dial-up in the 28.8k era was per-minute. Occasional $700 AOL bill. Mom was pissed. * Dial-up in the 33.6k through 56k eras was flat-rate. St

From memory: * Dial-up in the 28.8k era was per-minute. Occasional $700 AOL bill. Mom was pissed. * Dial-up in the 33.6k through 56k eras was flat-rate. Start a download before bed, enjoy it in the morning. * Broadband, pre 3mbps era. Flat rate. * Netzero: Back to dialup, but now free. (Especially if you replaced their dialer software with a pencil-and-paper key to the Caesar cipher they used for auth.) * Cellular. Sorta based on SMS rates. * Broadband, 10mbps. Some companies have caps. Only a subset of users notice them, nobody had their back. * Mobile. Smart phones! But the device is the limiting factor, not the network. * Broadband, every major provider has caps written into the contract, but few enable technical enforcement of the caps. I smell deception: "We've always had these caps, you must have increased your usage!" * Mobile, post 3g: pay per byte, period.