I’ve found some news articles that scare me. According to several articles that can be found by searching for “metered internet” on Google some ISPs are going to start not only charging you for the speed of your internet connection but the amount of data in which you can download in a month. Some of the plans mentioned in the articles have a 5gb cap with a $1 per gb charge if you exceed the cap.
Folks, this is bad, real bad. 5gb or whatever the cap is (40gb is the highest cap I’ve seen mentioned) will go by real quick. The ISPs say that subscribers downloading illegal music or movies from file sharing services is clogging their network and that any legitimate browsing would be far below the caps. This simply is not true. There are several things that an average user can do legally and not excessively that could cause them to go over the caps I’ve seen mentioned. They include but are not limited to VOIP services like Vonage, watching TV shows online from networks such as ABC, downloading music and renting movies from iTunes, watching YouTube, telecommuters that dial into their corporate VPN…I can go on for hours.
This could completely kill innovation on the web. Movie downloads seem to be a viable delivery method for media in the next few years. Netflix recently announced a box you can hook to your TV and watch movies that are downloaded from the net. Apple of course has Apple TV and recently added a feature that allows you to rent movies from iTunes. If the internet is metered your $4 iTunes movie rental could turn into almost $10 once you add on the $1 per gb ISPs want to charge.
What makes this worse is they not only count downloads against your cap but uploads. TCP/IP which is the protocol used on the internet has overhead. When you download a file, your computer is constantly sending acknowledgement packets to the sender of the data to confirm you got the packets they sent. This means that a 1mb file might cause .25mb to be uploaded so you would be charged for 1.25mb instead of 1mb.
Another major issue is you’ll be charged for ads. When you visit a page and all of those ad videos start playing that will count against your monthly cap too. This is absolutely insane!
There has to be a better way to maintain network integrity without metering internet access. I would almost rather see ISPs shaping traffic for certain programs like file sharing software than putting caps on downloads.
Filed under: Technology | Tagged: metered internet
