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When you turn on a light switch, you are paying for every single second of use. Somewhere behind your house or apartment there is a box that is charged with the unenviable task of adding up your Kilowatt hours so that your local Utilities company can wring a few extra cents out of you for keeping your laptop plugged in for too long. If you were a fan of the Sopranos, years ago you looked at your Cable bill and said, “you know, I don’t mind if this is ten dollars higher, as long as I get to figure out what happens to Tony next week.”

Long ago, service providers learned an extremely important lesson about surviving in a saturated market — if you give people “more,” even if that more is imaginary, they will pay for it.


Metered Internet

Enter your ISP.

Many of the major ISPs want to start metering Internet use. Across the country, they are experimenting with the concept and it wouldn’t surprise me if most ISPs have tried some sort of metering tactic before next summer. The driving principle behind this is that a tiny percentage of their users are responsible for eating up most of the available bandwidth. These power users are also responsible for a large portion of the costs associated with keeping their servers running. If you spend a substantial amount of time streaming videos, downloading torrents, playing online games or using other high bandwidth web services then you are on their hit list.

Before you get too upset, there are a few things that you need to understand. The first is that most of these bandwidth limits will only affect you if you are using an abnormally high amount of bandwidth. If your surfing habits don’t include large amounts of streaming media or significant online gameplay, chances are you won’t come near your limit. The second point is explained by the video. If you go back into the annals of the web, ISPs have always wanted to charge customers for use. The idea of metering bandwidth isn’t anything new. In fact, the original model that ISPs toyed with was structured much like long distance phone service.

The reason this all rubs people the wrong way is that years ago, when the ISPs saw that the growth of Internet use was stagnating and the cost of providing bandwidth was shrinking they decided to capitalize on these trends by writing everyone a blank check.

Now they’re trying to take that check away and unfortunately for them, despite the fact that they will push this as far as it will go, there is little chance that this will pass the test of public sentiment.


Some Problems

Why? Here are a few problems with any strategy that involves metering bandwidth.

Advertising. We live in a world of online ads. If you are paying for every byte, how many people will want to bleed away their bandwidth on ads? Companies that serve rich media advertising will fight tooth and nail to keep people watching as much advertising as they can serve. The best way to do that is to make sure that everyone has all the bandwidth that they can handle. If you want to know where the money that will fuel the fight against Internet metering will come from, look no further than the advertisers and publishers who stand to lose their shirts in the deal.

Leeching. How long would it be before someone complained to their ISP that their huge Internet bill was from someone leeching? Sure, the first thing you should do when you buy a router is to secure it, but how many less net savvy individuals leave theirs open? When bandwidth costs money, the best way around the limit is to simply use someone else’s. As it stands, there is nothing preventing leechers from having a field when they realize that it’s easy to get unmetered service as long as it’s coming from someone else.

Ubiquitous Use. Everything connects to the Internet these days, from video game consoles to — in some cases — your household appliances. Each of these devices eats bandwidth and as more and more gadgets become wired, it’s only going to get worse. Hardware manufacturers that rely on the web for their appliances to function will be less than thrilled when people stop making purchases because they think their product “wastes too much bandwidth.”

Competition. Assuming that your area has multiple ISPs (this might be a big assumption) if one of them starts to meter extensively then the smart money will just shift to the one that still offers an unlimited service plan. Especially in more web savvy markets, ISPs will have to be extremely careful that their new policies don’t end up costing them more users than they are worth.

Metering as a concept isn’t completely crazy, it just doesn’t mesh with the way that people use the Internet. In a world where the web could be seen as a luxury, in the world of Compuserve, pay per use was something people could understand. Now that the web is less an utility and more way of life, the only way for ISPs to survive will be to find a way increase their bottom-line while giving users all the Internet that they believe they are paying for.

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