Time Warner, Comcast, and AT&T are now planning on placing caps from 40G to 250G a month on Internet usage. They all claim that it’s impossible to keep up with the torrenters who are monopolizing the available bandwidth on the local networks and the interconnections on the internet itself. While I do not agree with their assessment that caps are the answer (QOS policies would of ensured joe netuser’s experience for free) and at the same time alleviate the need to constantly upgrade their networks to beat demand.
The United States has been the breeding ground of almost all of the most popular reasons people are online. Youtube, Google, MSN, MySpace, and a plethora of other websites sprung up because of this all you can eat strategy. My fear is that we will begin to see the end of an era of home grown internet dominance and more foreign companies will begin to pop up. Companies like Mozy are going to have a hard time serving the consumer markets if they would cause a user to use up their allotment of bandwidth.
I will agree that the all you can eat model was a recipie for failure because ISP’s refused to use the free QOS that most routers and firewalls currently employ. They started out saying Google should pay us to access our customers and frankly gave up once they realized that Google has a lobby in the government. These same companies now have figured out they can do it to the people who will be ignored if they cry out, and frankly we probably do have other things that are more important. However this stands to stifle innovation in the market and in the cases of IPTV will kill any notion that you can get around your Cable provider’s inflated rental rates and vendor dependent boxes. I love my Tivo, I love my Apple TV, and I love using Unbox and iTunes for rentals. I find it unfair to these companies because those same high bandwidth users also are proably their biggest renters.
However, torrenters will largely be to blame in my eyes because they’ve continued to download at horrendous rates 24/7 and they’ve pushed the telco’s into looking for options. Once they realized that they can make money if they put up caps and keep the competition at bay, it was a done deal.
Good Going Guys
Oh, same goes for you Newsgroup users too.