Speaking at the FTTH Conference and Expo in Houston Tuesday, Verizon Communications CTO Richard Lynch said the broadband industry is headed toward a pricing paradigm shift that will see it embrace the usage-based pricing common to the wireless broadband industry.

Internet service providers “cannot continue to grow the Internet without passing the cost on to someone,” Lynch said in remarks reported by Telephony Online. “At the end of the day the concept of a flat-rate infinitely expandable service is unachievable. We are going to reach a point where we will sell packages of bytes. Now I’m not announcing a new pricing plan. But we have already gone this way in wireless because that is where the resource is most constrained.”

So while Lynch may not have announced a new pricing plan, he’s clearly got one in mind. And these, the first public comments from Verizon (VZ) on a transition to metered bandwidth, likely mean the all-you-can-eat days are soon to end and the “will this streaming video put me over my monthly usage cap” days about to begin.

Which, as consumer advocates will tell you, is bad news because charging Internet customers based on how much Web data they consume is likely to stifle innovation by undermining demand for high-bandwidth services such as online video and whatnot.