The Effects of Metering Bandwidth
Time Warner Cable has begun a test program of metering subscriber’s bandwidth. If you go over the limit that set for the plan you pay for, you’ll be charged $1/GB. Here’s an AP story about this.
At the highest levels, users will see a 40GB cap.
“The metered Internet has been tried and tested and rejected by the consumers overwhelmingly since the days of AOL,” information-technology consultant George Ou told the Federal Communications Commission at a hearing on ISP practices in April.
How fast can you go through 40GB in one month? I can think of a few ways.
You’d use 1.5GB for a rented or downloaded movie from iTunes or Netflix, each. With players like Roku’s Netflix set-top device, you might watch 4 or 5 movies a month.
It’s easy to use up a few GB watching free, legal TV shows from places like NBC.com, Hulu.com and more. Again – this is legal usage.
I know that I few use a couple of GB playing online games, downloading game demos, or purchasing additional game content (Rock Band FTW), be it PC games or console games using a service like the Playstation Network or Xbox Live. We’re just at the beginning of video on demand services using these consoles.
All that and that’s not even take into account uses like photo sharing, VoIP, Skype, online backup services, YouTube, general web surfing and so much more.
So what’s the effect of this type of system for us higher ed web folks?
We offer a lot of media that can get somewhat large, be it podcasts or video or encouraging alums and prospectives to join our private label social networks. We put PDF course catalogs, video tours and more out there. Should this become an industry trend (and let’s hope it doesn’t), we may need to rethink the way we use new technologies to reach out to people.
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At least Time Warner is upfront about what their doing to combat some of the bandwidth issues. On the other hand you have Comcrap, who’s decided it’s just fine to throttle BitTorrent traffic behind customers backs.
I can see how torrents and HD media are definitely causing a burden on ISPs, but I think there are other solutions to the issue. Check out this: http://www.blogmaverick.com/2008/04/10/how-to-make-us-broadband-competitive-quickly-and-cheaply/
If they ARE going to impose a fee on customers, I would much rather prefer a one a month “excessive use fee” of like $10 or something. If you’re going to go over 40gb a month, chances are you going to go over pretty significantly.
Hopefully the people in Texas who are the guinea pigs for this plan raise hell and it gets dropped quickly.