You may have noticed mentions of bandwidth throttling and prioritization in the news lately. That is because these two things could profoundly effect your internet experience in the future. Bandwidth throttling has already been put in place by some ISPs to try to curb the download of large files using Bittorrent clients. Granted, most of this traffic consists of pirated material, but it is also used for legitimate distribution. I have personally downloaded OpenOffice.org ISOs via Bittorrent and Revision 3 uses Bittorrent to distribute their shows. If this is allowed to happen, little companies that do not have the funding to pay for hosting to distribute there files will perish. As discussed in the video I posted earlier, this is what happened with printing and radio. Throttling could also be used to influence your internet service choices in the future. For example, Comcast offers an internet phone service for $40 a month compared to Vonage’s $25 a month or Skype’s unlimited plan that works out to $5.50 a month. Comcast’s plan is already way more expensive than the competitors. I wonder if their rate would stay at $40 a month if they were allowed to prohibit all other VOIP companies from using their network. These issues can be applied to any company that conducts it’s business over the internet.
The ISPs are also are also considering going back to an a’la carte plan where those that use more pay more. This is basically how the internet started. All of the early ISP’s built their business plan up around this and all was good for a while. Then AOL introduced and all-you-can-eat plan and everyone had to follow their lead. If they do decide to charge per byte again, I am sure the market will demand that someone offer an unlimited plan. Personally, I would rather have a lower bandwidth (~700kbs) unlimited plan than have to pay for every byte over the fastest lines. We should not complain too much though. There are many countries that have it worse than us. I think that in New Zealand you are only allowed 500MB of traffic a month before you get hit with overages. I burn through that in a regular day.
~~Related Links~~
