I think the analogy to water or electricity billing is actually a very good one.
My electricity bill shows only X kWh per month. There is no "itemization" of usage. However I can purchase watt meters that can monitor power anywhere (including the main grid connection) if I decide the bill is too high.
I can definitely imagine a similar service sitting on the router or provided by the provider that does bandwidth accounting to deliver a picture of what is going on. I'm sure there would be many third party device manufacturers willing to do this traffic accounting as well.
My electricity bill shows only X kWh per month. There is no "itemization" of usage. However I can purchase watt meters that can monitor power anywhere (including the main grid connection) if I decide the bill is too high.
I can definitely imagine a similar service sitting on the router or provided by the provider that does bandwidth accounting to deliver a picture of what is going on. I'm sure there would be many third party device manufacturers willing to do this traffic accounting as well.