This is a self fulfilling prophecy. The idiots at TWC and Comcast started this, and then all the sideliners started with the talk about how it’s coming to an ISP near you.

It will only be that way if tolerated by the public – as each ISP puts up their changes, the customers move on to the next provider smart enough not to play that game. In the end, the last ISP standing wins, and has money to more than build out its network, while the cappers and moaners wither and die. However, this only works if the customer base is not lazy, and takes the time and effort to switch.

Almost forgot – if metered and punished service starts, along with everything else destroyed …there goes ‘cloud computing’.

Everything will go back to the little world of the local desktop and intralan – the exchange of information will slow to a trickle

the real problem is that bandwith is a big issue. my dad used to work for an isp, and of course bandwith is the number 1 reason things have to be choked like p2p. if the internet ever becomes like tv on a subscription service, ill be mad. but worse, I would never want to “pay as i go” i would be dead. a flat monthly fee is just perfect for me, and i hope it stays that way

This story is being played universally with a copyright / media-thief orientation. I’ve even seen the term bandwidth pig also being used. These bad people who download stuff all day that they shouldn’t be downloading anyway.

Well take a look at a typical monthly download volume for someone who properly maintains windows XP pro or Vista home premium. Look at how big Microsoft patches and service packs for office and XP can be. The current Windows XP service pack 3 is 316.4 MB. Try installing Linux across the net this also takes a lot of MB. Look at the trends where Microsoft and most other vendors deliver their media by download rather than by CD. Look also at the amount of multi-media content, increases in streaming video on sites, even for commercials. The web 2.0, hype and application serving is being treated like everyone in the world is on a T3 line. I personally want my applications on my own computer. The problem isn’t that not too many people will be hit by higher prices now, it’s that with the way technology is moving the bandwidth hog today may be next years average user.

Are these ISP’s in their attempt to reduce broadband traffic actually contributing to un-maintained systems, easy prey for mal-ware hacker’s looking for their use as zombie computers? I think so. I think they are just being greedy and are significantly miss-leading the public about how many mega-bytes of ads, banners and other nonsense that is so ubiquitous on web sites today will contribute to their monthly bill. Including those media pages originating from the ISP’s themselves, like Comcast’s FAN. Let’s see, I can either watch the winning play of the super bowl, or protect my computer with an update. Wonder which one most guys will pick when they are low on remaining metered internet time?

You know they can’t have it both ways. In recent Television Advertising one of these ISP’s portrays a middle aged man bragging to his son about the “hot new” system. He gets all the jargon wrong and then goes to download something using dialup speed. Broadband is so much better, so come get our service today, by the way….. You’ll soon be getting 5 times the speed for 25 times the cost. You know, that doesn’t sound like such a good deal after all.

Free market is great, but since when is a cable company a free market. Cable companies get to be something like a monopoly while they have a local municipal contract. Not much competition there. I can’t choose to use a different cable company than the one that servers my town, can I. Most people are not close enough to DLS phone stations (DSLAM) to be able to use this slightly more competitive technology. Such lack of free market and competition drives the prices up and leads to the potential for greedy moves like metered service all with the approval of government through the way cable is regulated as a closed line. Look at other countries approach that has much higher availability of broadband.

As a starting point though slightly behind the times,(2005), I suggest taking a look at: http://biz.yahoo.com/special/broadband05_article1.html

The big down side of this issue is how such practices are placing the US further and further behind in the area of information access availability. I frequently have said that the internet is today’s version of the Library at Alexandria perhaps the ancients’ greatest (free) intellectual resource. Most agree that the building and its contents were destroyed by fire though it is not clear which of several different groups are actually to blame. It seems that our access to today’s technological equivalent has similarly been under attack from hackers, virus writers, and credit card and identity thieves. To that you can now add the greed of the internet providers themselves.

This is not atypicaly, but you have to look at the upstream. The whole pricing model is based on oversubscription, and that top 5% has always been the issue – even back in the dial-up days. From the inside, if you could find a way to keep the folks that would lock in a modem port 24×7 offline some, you could up the number of customers you served and generally drop the price for everyone.

I have to agree with some of the comments – the folks that casually use are the ones “overpaying” – I have that problem with my cell phone, and my TV service. I don’t use as much as many, but the few features I need make me pay the “premium prices”. Look at the AVG LinkScanner article here – Web sites pay per gig of transfer, not by link speed. The idea of “per meg” service has been around for a while, it’s just pushing it to the consumer. Even “cloud computing” and “gaming” uses nothing compared to the file share sucking dry ideal.

Point is – if they made the data transfer 150, or 200, gigabytes of data, I don’t think anyone would scream. I’m sure they’ll screw it up and and make it 5gig or something, though.