If you are not following the current trends in Internet Service Providers (ISPs) closely, you might wake up surprised one day. On the tail end of an un-successful, but not over, fight against net-neutrality, ISPs have decided to take another stab and killing the blistering growth of internet video to save the flailing cable industry.
This time it’s called Metered Bandwidth. With big hitters like Comcast, AT&T and Time Warner on-board and actively testing in markets, I find myself concerned and considering a pre-emptive change to how I get internet access currently.
The problem is simple. Cable companies exist to sell you TV. If you have internet and television through cable, simply examine your bill. If you have something similar to mine you will probably find something like this:
| Internet Service | $30 | 13% |
| Cable | $160 | 71% |
| Hardware | $25 | 11% |
| Fees | $10 | 5% |
So basically if you count the cable boxes and cable service itself, it accounts for 82% of my already monstrous bill. It’s obvious that they have good reason to be shaking in their boots. With services like Hulu and Netflix providing compelling alternatives at free or close to it ($8.99 for Netflix to stream all you want) it’s a changing world. My father recently sent his cable box back to watch all his basic cable on a Windows Vista Media Center PC and all of his on-demand content on Netflix.
So how do they try to make it up? Let’s look at this AT&T alternative. Your internet fee provides 5GB of bandwidth per month. A single HD quality movie is 7GB. They charge you $1 per Gigabyte when you go over. Let’s look into my mom and dad in this future. They watch a lot of TV. Usually two are on in the house for I would guess 4 hours a day. If both were getting video content online at HD quality, this quickly becomes a problem. If you take the 7GB HD movie, assume it’s two hours long, you can come up to about 3.5GB per hour per TV. So in one evening they could consume 28GB of bandwidth. Extrapolate that for a month, and you come up with something shocking. Do the math, $835 in overage charges.
I may be a cynic, but it sounds like direct approach to try and kill internet delivered video in it’s tracks. The scary part is that the government does not declare internet a utility, so the regulations that were put in place against telephone and cable providers regarding television pricing, do not have any power to protect the consumer.
The end to this horrifying alternate reality is that cable companies protect their dying model, innovation gets crushed, and customers suffer a trifecta of Quality, Value and Choice.
I want to end saying I definitely understand that if they don’t make the money with Cable anymore, they have to come up with an alternate business model. I, for one, do not mind paying more than I pay now for pure internet access. (not more total, more than the internet service portion of my bill) If I was able to get all of my video entertainment online, I would gladly pay $100 a month for fast, reliable and un-metered bandwidth.