A: Our primary service area includes most of western Washington. There may be some additional fees in areas not serviced by Qwest or Verizon, but we can almost certainly get you connected.
Q: Won't I end up paying more for your metered service than I would with flat-rate pricing if my usage is high?
A: Not likely, for a number of reasons.
If your usage varies from month to month you can save enough in the low months to pay for a lot of extra traffic in the busy months. A prime example would be a new business, which needs very little bandwidth during its startup phase, but cannot easily predict the rate of growth as it gets established. Flat-rate pricing is only attractive if you're using most of your available bandwidth most of the time, and this doesn't leave you room for growth or variable workloads.
A typical price for an "unlimited" T1 in the Seattle area is about $1200 per month. A typical price for a truly unlimited T1 from any of the national backbone providers is 3 or 4 times that, even before factoring in line charges and business overhead. Any backbone provider who gives you a truly unlimited T1 for $1200/mo. will be losing money if you use it a lot, so you'll end up sharing a "real" T1 with 10 to 30 other "T1" customers. This may be fine if you're the only heavy user in the bunch, but it can be mighty disappointing if you're not. You're likely to find that the peak bandwidth available to you isn't a lot more than your average use. By actually charging our customers enough to cover the cost of providing bandwidth, we give ourselves a powerful incentive to make sure it's readily available, and we are committed to maintaining a system with a peak capacity at least 5 times our average utilization.
Q: What happens if I exceed my prepaid bandwidth by a large amount?
A: If it's a one-time deal, you just pay the per-megabyte charge for the extra bandwidth. If you expect your usage to continue at a higher level, we'll let you shift to a more appropriate billing level retroactively, but you must be willing to commit to the new level for 2 additional months. We'll re-bill the previous month at the new rate. You can actually shift up or down this way, but we expect most customers to find that they need more traffic than they predicted, rather than less.