Bandwith-limiting non-paying accounts?

If bandwidth charges are eating up LL's cash-flow, then how about effectively charging for bandwidth by limiting non-paying accounts. If an account has no payment-info-on-file, then limit it to some number of bytes or hours online per day... by IP address. After (say) 2 hours online from free-riders from one IP address, start charging them $20L/hour to connect to a free-rider account from that address. The account doesn't have $20L in its pockets? You're out until the next day.

That'll shut down the camping chairs, unless they start paying a whole lot more per hour.

To make it fair to Basics who've paid, or people who've tiered down from Premium, keep an account in "non-free-rider" status for some number of months. Do the same for accounts that buy Lindens on LindeX...

I haven't heard of bandwidth charges eating up our cash-flow, AFAIK we have plenty of bandwidth... where's this idea coming from? Have a source?

Actually, bandwidth does cost, and we use a lot of it so it's a factor in our operations bill. There are a number of ideas about how to reduce bandwidth. Restricting the bandwidth for base accounts is one of them but there are others that may forestall the necessity of that, perhaps long enough to let the broadband revolution catch up. Eventually bandwidth will be much cheaper so it may become a vanishing component of our operations bill.

My favorite idea for reducing bandwidth is to allow larger (and more efficient) caches on local machines hard drives. Textures are a large chunk of the data that needs to be streamed, and I suspect there are many SL Residents who would be happy to devote 10GB or more to an SL data cache. We'll probably enable this feature in the future, however there is no active development on it that I know of.