The iPass announcement yesterday that it will offer its enterprise customers flat-rate pricing for its Wi-Fi network is just another sign that the pay-as-you-go Internet access business model is going away.

And why is that? This quote from their press release pretty much says it all:

"iPass spends a lot of time in dialogue with our customers, and this pricing plan addresses the desires of some of our customers who wanted a way to make the cost of Wi-Fi use predictable," said Jon Russo, vice president of marketing at iPass. "This 'all-you-can-eat' approach allows the IT department to reliably budget the cost of Wi-Fi hotspot access across an entire organization or for a subset within it. iPass expects this new optional pricing plan to further accelerate Wi-Fi usage."

Charging by the minute or charging by the megabyte (MB) inevitably cause user frustration. Phone calls always seem to last longer than we expect and who honestly wants to spend their days monitoring the kilobytes of every email they send? Flat-rate pricing is a big reason why I favor Connexion by Boeing over Tenzing.

Flat-rate pricing is great news for content providers and, I believe, the future of the telecoms industry. VoIP would not be the phonomenon that it is today if consumers were paying for their broadband connections by the MB.

But what I find most interesting is that we're seeing a collision of sorts between per-minute voice plans and flat-rate data plans. If consumers want predictable billing and VoIP is proving that voice works just fine over broadband connections, how can per-minute voice plans survive in the long run?

As any carrier will tell you (privately), they can't.

Perhaps the 3G networks that we're now seeing go nationwide will give carriers the breathing room they need to start testing unlimited voice plans. Or, perhaps unlimited voice usage will be relegated to those Wi-Fi networks that carriers can't figure out how to profit from.

And cellular carriers can insert fine print into their contracts to prevent network overuse. Even Cox caps broadband consumption per month; it's just that the cap is set so high that few people are affected (so far).

Although the iPass announcement only affects IT departments. In a way, we're all IT managers when it comes to our personal cellular and data plans. And it's hard for me to believe that we all won't one day get those flat-rate plans we desire.