Yea, they have been promising that historical data would be available "real soon now" since Jan
I never got the impression that it was a money issue, I though the issue was preventing lag during busy periods by limiting the amount of traffic generated through aggregation (e.g. its not a bug its a feature)
I think it would be a good idea if IB offerred a true tick feed in parallel using separate servers & connections with the appropriate network traffic prioritization such that the full tick feed never impacts (lags) the aggregated data feed (e.g. limit the amount of bandwidth that the tick feed can consume)
During really busy periods MBT's data feed becomes worthless because it can't handle the volume and lags terribly (or just disconnects) During those times it sure is nice to have IB's aggregated data feed so I know what is going on.