| I work for an ISP and ... ... well, perhaps you do too, but we're not here to bump chests.
So moving on to the matter at hand, the simple fact is folks are just plain using far more bandwidth than they were, even just 1 year ago.
The department I work in handles long term planning and capacity issues, and I can assure you that the areas in which these increases in bandwidth affect our hardware(upgrade requirements such as new switches, faster cards for the switches, etc) and circuits (upgraded circuits are not as big a deal as hardware costs) will eventually force most providers to pay additional costs to keep up with the demand.
If that does NOT happen, customers will begin to see degraded service, such as dropped packets, less speed than "promised", and all sorts of misc. issues.
In general, an ISP will do its best to shy away from applying limits based on content or shall I say protocol, port numbers, etc., or even outright bandwidth limits as much as it can. There are already pricing tiers for different speeds and services (business vs consumer), so there may not be much room to maneuver in that area.
So, as you sit down and download the latest video (i dont care where you get it from), keep in mind that the exponential growth of media-heavy content these days will eventually begin to push and pull apart the very nuts and bolts of the economic basis upon which some ISPs survive.
Yes, it will all work itself out in some fashion or another, but I will guarantee you some growing pains, specially if those who benefit from these downloads (google, youtube (oh wait, did i get redundant?), itunes, or any media heavy content provider) are unwilling to participate in taking a share of the responsibility.
Hey, maybe they dont have to. Thats fine too. But at some point either something gives or something goes. It will be an interesting next couple years, as we see audio and video content mold the Internet from what we know it to be today into the something entirely different that it will necessarily have to become in order to survive.
Eventually the strong survive and the weak die, and I fear that will leave us with entities too strong and too few for us to have any concept of competition in this industry. |
| I agree with you. But my issue with an ISP like Comcast is that if you are making good profits well over what is expected, upgrade your network to handle the demands but also design the network to place a channel on each and every user that is on it. The pipes can be designed to let up to a certain amount travel through without degrading another's.
Get rid of the SHARED design and be honest with people. I don't see why Comcast can't do it. |
