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March 14th, 2011

Bandwidth Caps are BS

i was, uh, thrilled to learn yesterday that my heretofore uncapped DSL from AT&T will be capped very soon at 150GB per month.

Now, odds are that I don’t use that much bandwidth – today. But it’s simple to see that the future, for everyone, is more usage. Netflix, Pandora, CrashPlan – all of these services chew up bandwidth, and can’t be as successful when users have to ration a resource which doesn’t truly require rationing.

This is an artificial limit being put in place by a large company who, in lieu of spending money on overhauling their infrastructure for the future, has chosen to perform modest upgrades and throw cash at blowing any future competitors out the door. Worse, of course, is that there’s no real competition: nearly all consumer high-speed services have a cap of 250GB per month, at least those in my area.

It’s a money grab, pure and simple. Bandwidth caps will do nothing but make big companies bigger and stifle innovation.

Posted in Technology

Paul March 14, 2011, 12:33 pm

Worse, too, is that this cap apparently applies to both downloading AND uploading – so putting HD videos and photos on the web is more costly and online backup services become less appealing to me, at least. I mean, I’d blow that 150GB cap just from an initial backup, no sweat.

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