the tindog coffeehouse

I’m only at the end of the 2nd day of my month-long metered bandwidth experiment, and I’ve already exceeded the 5 GB usage cap being imposed by New York ISP Frontier Communications (not my ISP, thankfully).

What pushed me over the limit? Well, on Friday I remotely connected to my computer for maybe about 30 minutes. I also downloaded audio podcasts using Juice, video podcasts using Miro, and did some general browsing. Today I downloaded some YouTube videos, downloaded a few trial programs, and uploaded the YouTube FLV videos to Media-Convert.com to convert them to a different format.

Combined, those activities over two days amounted to a total of 8 GB of total usage. And keep in mind that’s only activity from my computer, not including Christy’s or the girls’ computers or any other Internet-connected device we may have (such as the Wii).

Continue reading…

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.

Continue reading…