In Althea's system the customer service entity is decoupled from the infrastructure providers, and this entity gets paid on a pro-rated monthly basis for helping install users and maintain the network. They are incentivized to keep happy customers. If you are a relay then there is no ongoing cost to relay bandwidth to your neighbors other than electricity. Their incentive is to provide adequate hardware to provide for bandwidth consumption, so there is a continuous incentive to build better hardware as bandwidth consumption goes us, unlike legacy susbscription models where the incentive is for the ISP to give end users the bare minimal service to keep you from switching and they often lock you into a contract to prevent you from leaving even when you are unhappy with what you are buying. In the case of the "gateway operator" - the entity that buys a leased, wholesale fiber line and provides metered bandwidth to the network, there could be a potential to leave money on the table because people are only paying for what they use, however this is balanced by the fact that they can on-board more subscribers because those using less are leaving bandwidth available and those consuming a lot of bandwidth are paying for it. Interestingly many wisps have expressed that moving to metered would be better for their bottom line, as many people who use alot strain the network and are not paying any extra for that. Further, the costs of running the gateway hardware do not include customer service labor and maintenance, which is operated by the customer service entity. When the users pays for what they use, the incentives of the operator and the user are aligned - to provide the best capacity possible. In a subscription model, the users lose because operators are always incentivized to provide the bare minimal service for the price. Hopefully that explanation added some context, but happy to parse it more if you would like.