Cable Greed
The PCWorld posting Get Ready for a Crackdown on Broadband Use
subtitle says
As traffic increases, experts say ISPs may start charging by the gigabyte, limiting use of some services and snooping at the data passing through their networks.
Major broadband ISPs shrug off criticism that their networks can’t handle the increased demand for bandwidth. “We’ve been successfully delivering broadband services to our customers for 10 years, and that’s not going to change anytime soon,” says Mitch Bowling, senior vice president and general manager for Comcast’s high-speed Internet group.
I usually don’t comment on “maybe” postings. This one is a sort of “maybe” since some ISPs are in the planning stages for charging by bandwidth usage.
Time Warner Cable is experimenting with managing bandwidth by billing its customers, not at a flat monthly rate, but on the basis of how much bandwidth each customer uses. The cable company is rolling out a trial version of a consumption-based billing system in Texas later this year. “We have more than enough bandwidth, but we are looking to the future,” says Alex Dudley, spokesperson for Time Warner Cable.
Under the new billing scheme, customers who exceed their monthly bandwidth allotment risk incurring an overage charge. A spokesperson says that the billing scheme isn’t in place yet, so the company doesn’t yet have any hard numbers available regarding these charges.
Also, some ISPs are already throttling bandwidth.
Comcast spokesperson Charlie Douglas explains that a single customer who uses disproportionately more bandwidth than his or her neighbors can slow down the Internet for everyone on the block. Comcast has faced a user uproar for manipulating the way file-sharing programs work and for introducing bandwidth caps on individual accounts without identifying what those caps are.
I smell greed in the air here. The cable ISPs are claiming they are loaded with bandwidth, and
According to network monitoring firm Keynote Systems, broadband users rarely feel the impact of bandwidth bottlenecks today unless a big media event causes a brief spike in Web use or unless a major component of the Internet infrastructure suffers unexpected damage. Keynote describes these types of Internet slowdowns as virtually imperceptible brown-outs.
So why throttle and charge extra for bandwidth? I speculate it is all about movie downloads. The greed mongers smell money and are preparing to stifle any competition, such as iTunes download movie rentals.
We’ll see.
…John
