As referenced by Stacy Higginbotham, of GigaOm, TimeWarner recently went live with its tiered bandwidth capping policy. Comcast just announced it was also capping downloads to 250GB a month and countless others are threatening it. And in her article, 10 Things to Know and Hate About Metered Broadband, she ends it with a very valid point that we should all remember:
…regardless of what a few carriers in the U.S. are doing with caps, the web will continue to grow, both in terms of the number of users and the amount of data they consume. Caps won’t stop it, and neither will network management measures such as traffic throttling. If our broadband networks can’t meet that demand, the U.S. eventually could find itself lagging in the technology field.
If the US’s broadband isn’t competitive globally, the US will no longer be a center for innovation and growth.
Period.
It is really striking to see this sort of thing happen at the same time that they’re rolling out 1Gb/s connections to the home in Japan for $50/mo.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/151562/.html?tk=rss_news
I guess it’s a good thing we don’t have that kind of speed here in the US, we’d blow though our 250 gb cap in under an hour, then we’d be done for the month. Thank you Comcast, your inadequate network is saving us from your draconian policies!
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