the tindog coffeehouse

I hate Walmart. I detest it. I hate everything about it. I hate the parking lot. I hate that the medicine and toiletries section is on the complete opposite side of the store as everything else you need. I hate that even if you’re just running in for five things, you still have to get a full-size cart because you can never find a handbasket. I hate that they have 78 checkout lanes, but only two are open at any given time. And I hate that if you use the self-checkout lane, there’s a 99.9% chance something won’t work, and you’ll have to wait around for ten minutes for a worker to come by and enter a random code that you probably could’ve entered yourself.

And yet I still shop there.

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AT&T announced a few days ago that beginning May 2, it’ll be instituting Internet usage caps to all its broadband customers: 150 GB/month for DSL users and 250 GB/month for U-verse folks. Go over that, and you’ll be charged an extra 10 bucks per 50 GB of excess usage.

The evil empire claims that this change will only affect 2 percent of its users. Maybe so. Doing a quick estimate, I don’t think our household will be in danger of hitting the cap, at least not in the foreseeable future. I use about 80-90 GB from my computer, but that’s the bulk of our usage. We also stream Netflix movies a lot, but at about 1.5-2 GB per movie (SD, through the Wii), we would have to watch a ton of movies to put us in danger.

But that’s not the point, is it?

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It’s not just the Chinese government imposing nationwide Internet filtering. Australia is getting it, too.

Under the current plan, Internet content filters will be mandatory for all Australians. They get to choose, however, between two different levels. The default plan blocks all content that may be objectionable to children, but consumers can opt-out, choosing a more watered-down blacklist which allows pornography but still blocks other “illegal content” (potentially including “euthanasia, drugs and protest”).

(Never mind that the filtering system probably won’t be very effective or that the deep-packet inspection required at the ISP level will cripple Internet speeds. And of course, all costs associated with the filtering will be passed on to consumers.)

As ridiculous as this is, however, I can’t help but to wonder if this same sort of nonsense is inevitable here in the U.S.  Surely not, right?

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On July 31st I made a decision to monitor by bandwidth consumption for the month of August to see how many bits I downloaded and uploaded. The experiment was in direct response to the decision of several ISPs who are now imposing usage limits, including New York ISP Frontier Communications’ paltry 5 GB cap.

I installed DU Meter on my home computer and then just used it as I normally would. The results were pretty surprising.

The total usage for the month came to 21.4 GB, using a whopping 4.3 GB the first day alone.

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The mainstream press is finally starting to catch on to the broadband caps issue.

It’s about time.

The phone company, Frontier Communications Corp., is one of several Internet service providers that are moving to curb the growth of traffic on their networks, or at least make the subscribers who download the most pay more. This could have consequences not just for consumers — who would have to learn to watch how much data their Internet use entails — but also for companies that hope to make the Internet a conduit for movies and other content that comes in huge files.

Meanwhile, ISPs such as AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast are starting to get behind the push for P4P as a way to reduce the load on their networks while speeding up traffic. (Overview of P4P here.) That’s good news.

Previously:
Metered broadband: An experiment
Bandwidth experiment, day 2: Throttled?
Metered broadband vs. cloud computing

Om Malik has taken issue with ISPs (and the FCC) over the emerging trend of metered broadband Internet access. Currently, most cable Internet and DSL accounts allow for unlimited usage, but ISPs such as AT&T and Comcast are hoping to place a monthly usage limit in the plans, gouging charging customers for any overages (similar to most cell phone plans).

He states:

While 5 GB [the limit imposed by New York ISP Frontier] looks pretty sizable – Comcast claims that their average broadband subscriber only uses 2 GB per month – in reality, it’s nothing. It’s essentially two movies in HD. Once you go over the limit, the meter ticks over faster than a San Francisco taxicab. That would limit the amount of Internet a consumer can use on a daily basis, thereby limiting the amount of time people spend on Facebook, MySpace, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo or any one of numerous services.

The situation would be no different than the early days of dial-up, when the pain of dialing up prevented us from being always on the network. When broadband came along, things changed, for usage of services like Google skyrocketed, Skype came along and YouTube became part of our lives.

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