The New York Times has reported (and we've been hearing rumblings for a while now) that some internet providers will be charging "heavy users" higher monthly prices to access the interet and even 'gasp' slowing them down purposely.
I'll give that a moment to sink in.
That means that a lot of people in the tech industry (and certainly most people who would read this blog) will have to ante up extra money each month to continue to use sites like hulu.com, Youtube, and Netflix. Anyone sending large-ish photo files (pics of your vacation), or downloading iTunes will be considered a "bandwidth hog".
I see a few problems with this new idea. Similar to the "$15 to check your first piece of luggage" rule that the airlines are implementing, it's basically price gauging the consumers. Not only that, with the internet, they are charging or "slowing down" the users that populate and use the most successful sites. The argument that a lot of tech industry experts are making is that it will deter the innovators of the web from producing and sharing new work (such as apps for Facebook, Google,etc.).
Unfortunately, they are already trying this new plan in Texas and it will likely spread throughout the country.
Don't worry though, if you go over your bandwidth amount, they'll just charge you overage fees reminiscent of the cell phone overages that used to be so common.
Here's the link to the Time Warner Cable comment page.
Monday, June 16, 2008
Paying For Bandwidth Usage?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comments:
I agree with you, Caitlin, that this pricing plan is likely not to take off.
The situation is a little bit different from "back in the day" when ISPs used to charge by the minute or by the megabyte. Back then, the ISPs' network resources really *were* limited. There just wasn't enough bandwidth available for everyone to dial up and download things at the same time.
What's different now is that, in terms of bandwidth, the ISP isn't even slightly strained when it comes to every-day Internet usage such as Websites, YouTube, occasional file downloads, and games. Yet, most of us still pay anywhere ranging from $30+ a month for this service.
So we're going to charge Bobby BitTorrent extra for clogging up the "tubes"? Sounds awesome. But if he's paying $100 a month to download 100gB, can I pay $5 a month for the 5gB of data transfer I do a month, IF that?
Somehow I doubt the ISP would be too cool with the idea of me and the other 90% of of their users (non-P2P users) only paying for exactly what they use. :)
Post a Comment