Universal coverage is certainly a goal of any ISP< but in rural areas without an extensive infrastructure in place, it is usually difficult, expensive and very high maintenance. Look at the difficulties plaguing some Native American reservations in the Southwestern US, where the only way to get dependable internet service is to pay through the nose for satellite dishes.

The ISPs would argue that tiered services is a way to ensure that rural areas get the service they need, since every user would be paying for what they use. If User A in the big city wants to pay for 100GB of downloading a week, that will make it easier to spend capital to create the infrastructure to bring at least minimum service to hard to access areas.

As a business model it has it's merits, but we are used to "unlimited" bandwidth plans and having the ISPs think that leveraged services and advertising were the keys to making a profit for them. They assumed that the connection was the free razor and the services and content they provided were the income generating razor blade. They are slowly realizing there is no way for them to make their money that way. Content is the razor, free to anyone who wants it and can get to it...the bandwidth you use to access it is the razor blade, and that is where they will begin charging you.

Z

I do not have much of a problem with bandwidth caps and tiers of service. But, I'll only agree completely when the ISPs do more to bring higher than megabit throughput to all US users in rural areas. I have a vacation home 40 mils from here - which is 75 miles from a major US city - that has no broadband access available at all. The exclusive contract cable TV company does not offer internet connectivity, the monopolistic phone company offers no DSL (not even the low speed junk).

Give everybody decent access and then you can talk about metering it.

You are absolutely right. The age of fixed rates are gone.

Nods..I agree...which is why issues such as Bandwidth management and Service Plans are being looked at now and rightly so. In the future, people who download massive amounts of data from such VoD services as Netflix will be able to pay for service plans tailored to give them the right amount of bandwidth, optimized for VoD. Everyone will pay for the resources they use rather then a general fee.

We need to remember we are still at the very beginning of this revolution. When cities were first wired for electricity, you paid a single fee to be connected, then used as much as you wished. As more and more people started using the same current, billing schemes were introduced so you paid for what you used. Bandwidth is the same way. the days of plugging into the stream and using all you could manage are ending as more and more people need to use the bandwidth...the age of service plans and enforced QoS is at hand, be that good or bad.

Using Netflix to watch movies online still something that not everybody does even within those with a Netflix account but that´s the future. There are new devices coming out in the market to be connected to your tv and stream from your netflix account. Same devices already exist from apple and Sony I believe. In about a year or two the popularity of these method of getting video material for your TV will be very high and then this is going to become an issue.

Today is going to be an issue for a few people, tomorrow many people are going to be affected by this.

True, video will make a difference..but plain old garden variety browsing and the occasion funny video of cats acting stupid, as the majority of people behave on the web, will come under the quota limits pretty easily.

I do see your point however. Heavy video use or power user downloading even without file sharing may start running into problems...or at least cost more for the same level of performance we are used to.

Zealot you are very optimistic. Do you have a netflix account? Do you use Youtube uploading movies for blogs or just watching them? The normal bandwidth per user have gone up a lot lately with the increasingly use of video materials in the internet.

Well, the good news is that such bandwidth management (or throttling, choose your terms) is highly unlikely to affect normal browsing. The limits will be set high enough and the proper QoS will be applied that standard http traffic will be pretty much unencumbered, I believe.

The bad news is that downloading large files, especially via P2P applications, will become much slower if it is not blocked completely, depending on the application used. Some ISPs will possibly then create service plans allowing P2P downloading, or allowing bandwidth to be bought in bursts, but we will see how the market for that sort of service matures.

I know from discussions with ISP project managers that most ISPs in the US, Europe and Asia are looking at creating specialized quota based Service Plans tailored to gamers (speed and priority), downloaders (volume) and Skyype/VpIP users (priority and guaranteed bandwidth) and then charging for them on a different scale from normal home and business plans.

Z