R
RadioPatrol
Guest
From Win XP Newsletter ........
Spam is annoying enough already. We spend precious time going through it and deleting it (or alternatively, going through our junk mail folders to make sure our spam filters didn't catch something that wasn't spam). It takes up precious space on our hard drives and may slow down our networks. We spend extra money for anti-spam software because without it, we would be drowning in mortgage loan offers, phishing emails and more disgusting messages.
Now some ISPs want to make you pay extra if you get a lot of spam. Oh, that's not how they're putting it, but that will be the effect. Because with tiered access pricing, the more bandwidth you use - both incoming and outgoing - the more you pay. That means you end up paying even for that incoming email that you don't want.
Last week Time Warner Cable announced that they are going to "revolutionize broadband pricing" by pricing Internet service according to how much bandwidth customers use. It's called metered or tiered pricing and it sounds okay in theory: those who use the Internet a lot pay more than those who only use it a little. Read more about their plans here:
PC World - Time Warner to Try Tiered Cable Pricing
Back in the early days of the commercial 'net, metered service was the norm. Back then, you generally paid a per-hour fee for access. I remember when my Compuserve access cost $25 an hour (yes, that's twenty-five). A few years later, AOL seemed like a real bargain at around $3 an hour. Needless to say, most folks didn't stay online for long periods of time back then.
Some of the first DSL services were metered, too. In that case, you usually paid by the kilobyte or megabyte instead of by the hour. Big downloads got you a bigger bill. Our first T-1 line was metered and charged on a tiered basis. You got up to 5 GB per month for a set fee. Between 5 and 10 GB got you a higher fee. 10 to 20 was higher still, and so forth. You had to be careful to monitor your usage; you certainly didn't want to get kicked into the higher price bracket because you went just a couple of megabytes over the threshold.
There is a reason the vast majority of ISPs switched to flat rate unlimited service plans. It's what customers want. Most of us don't want to have to worry about how much bandwidth we're using. Sure, paying according to usage seems "fair." Hey, it would also be more "fair" if we paid taxes according to how much we used governmental services. I work at home and only put a few thousand miles on my car every year. Shouldn't I have to pay less taxes for road improvements than someone who commutes 50 miles every day and takes weekend road trips? (Of course, there are some state governments now that do want to monitor how much you drive and charge you accordingly - a real nightmare of an idea).
The idea behind this "new" tiered pricing structure may be partly a response to the great debate over "network neutrality." ISPs complain that peer to peer programs use inordinate amounts of bandwidth and clog up networks, but there has been huge political opposition to the idea of giving priority to certain types of traffic. So this "new" way of gouging - er, I mean charging - customers is offered as an alternative.
According to Dave Burstein of DSL Prime, the marginal costs of extra bandwidth to the ISP is very small, yet ISPs in other countries that use the tiered or metered plans charge their customers over $7 for each gigabyte over the plan limit. At that rate, a 5 to 6 GB high definition movie would cost $30. Read this article for more on this:
Time Warner: Download Too Much and You Might Pay a Movie - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog
As Burstein suggests, the net neutrality debate aside, the main impetus for Time Warner's move may be plain old fashioned fear of competition. If people can download TV shows and movies from the Internet and those programs look better than the ones they get from their CATV service, they might drop the CATV service altogether. Is Time Warner Cable planning to go the way of the music companies - rather than adapt to new technology, try to kill it off and in the process commit market suicide? (After all, Time Warner is also a record company).
I could be wrong, but my prediction is that if the cable companies try to force tiered pricing structures on their customers, Internet users will leave them in droves for ISPs that still offer unlimited access at a reasonable monthly rate. Many people these days do have more than one option. And who knows? A move like this on the part of major cable companies might just make DSL the next "comeback kid" in places where it's available.
The most immediately obvious unintended consequence of tiered pricing is that you will have to pay for whatever bandwidth you use, and bandwidth is two-way. And you don't always have control over the incoming part. If a deluge of spam uses your bandwidth, you'll have to pay for it. If a hacker floods your network with packets in a Denial of Service attack, you'll have to pay for it. If a virus sends out hundreds or thousands of email messages from your account without your knowledge, you'll have to pay for it. Talk about adding insult to injury - these are all situations in which you are a victim, but under a tiered pricing structure your ISP will charge you extra money for being victimized.
Tell us what you think? Am I all wet? Is tiered or metered pricing a great thing that will result in lower Internet bills for the majority of people, as the cable company wants us to believe? Or is all this ostensible concern over "bandwidth hogs" just a guise for a new way to make us all end up paying more for our Internet access and leave us financially at the mercy of spammers and attackers? Let us know your opinions at [B][COLOR="Blue"]feedback@wxpnews.com[/COLOR][/B].
