axus
join:2001-06-18
Washington, DC
 ·Verizon Online DSL
1 edit | did they expect traffic to stop growing?
The amount of data that people send back and forth will always be increasing. Internet providers are always growing their capacity so they can sell more.
If traffic is growing faster than they can build out quick enough to keep up, then guess what? They can raise the price! When a resource is scarce, raising the price allows a "fair" distribution, and encourages new producers to appear.
Obviously an increased price is good for AT&T and other backbone providers, so why are they against it? Of course it's possible that the internet isn't growing too fast, and they are using it for other purposes. But it's believable that production can't keep up. I think the issue is they don't want new producers to appear. If they can't provide all the bandwidth fast enough, other companies would build more to meet the demand. That would mean future competition for them, and the capacity crunch would be met eventually, bringing prices down.
What they'd probably like, instead, is to control the demand side by throttling traffic or capping it. It's like the old phone monopolies where people didn't use much long distance because of the cost... except instead of cost they'll use poor performance. I don't think this will work, though. The business market is always going to demand good performance, and since it's more profitable, competitors would show up there first. From there, they can move into the consumer market. |
