Verizon Heard Rumbling About Data Access & Cost, It Starts Again

We seem to be on the verge of the same debate that seemed to be over just a short time ago. You know, the one where one side states that unlimited data plans are going the way of the dodo, and the other side  says that innovation will be stifled if the plans change, to be sold by the byte.

Though it won’t be the very byte, and instead be the megabyte, the gigabyte, or possibly, the terabyte, the loss of unlimited packaging will come as a hard hit to many.

I am one of them.

The change in pricing, should it come, will be a major problem for many like me, who remember that during the early years of the internet, we were paying entirely too much for access, and instead of using the insane profits to build out the system (the much spoken of infrastructure), the money instead fueled the greed of many companies, and went into the coffers, while the physical systems that were making the money, were largely ignored. If this is not made a constant reminder, those involved might actually buy the idea that pricing should change, in order to pay for growth.

from AllThingsD

Get ready for metered broadband.

Speaking at the FTTH Conference and Expo in Houston Tuesday, Verizon Communications CTO Richard Lynch said the broadband industry is headed toward a pricing paradigm shift that will see it embrace the usage-based pricing common to the wireless broadband industry.

Internet service providers “cannot continue to grow the Internet without passing the cost on to someone,” Lynch said. “At the end of the day the concept of a flat-rate infinitely expandable service is unachievable. We are going to reach a point where we will sell packages of bites. Now I’m not announcing a new pricing plan. But we have already gone this way in wireless because that is where the resource is most constrained.”

So while Lynch may not have announced a new pricing plan, he’s clearly got one in mind. And these, the first public comments from Verizon (VZ) on a transition to metered bandwidth, likely mean the all-you-can-eat days are soon to end and the “will this streaming video put me over my monthly usage cap” days about to begin.

Which, as consumer advocates will tell you, is bad news because charging Internet customers based on how much Web data they consume is likely to stifle innovation by undermining demand for high-bandwidth services such as online video and whatnot.

It’s time to start the letter writing, and the inclusion of the reminders of those high costs in earlier times, which brought amazing growth, along with the stagnation of all that is being pushed, if the outrageous idea of metered bandwidth is not removed from the collective consciousness immediately. If this does not happen, perhaps an FCC investigation, into the almost generational rip off of many, under the auspices of regulated utilities, should be undertaken.

The odd thing about this - Verizon would seem to be cutting its own throat with this idea, as delivering content, though fiber (its FiOS service) is now ostensibly the mainstay of its revenue stream, now that the company has announced that it really is not interested in terrestrial copper wire phone service any longer.

Perhaps a rethink is in order…of the holder of the CTO position.

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I’m not mad as hell yet, but it won’t take much…

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