An important aspect of the time we live in is the reality of data growth. Many speculators expect the exponential explosive growth of technology within the coming years, while more adventurous futurists look forward to the Technological Singularity. One thing, however, is undeniable: our hard drives, files, and data transfers are getting larger every year and our Internet structure needs to keep up. In order to understand the problem of ISP data caps a glance to the future is necessary.
The development of new video codecs bring us cleaner, smoother video, developments in audio technology lend to clearer sound, and digital cameras fall into obsolescence within days while images from newer models are ever sharper. (The current record being 192 gigabytes for a single image!). All of these factors dramatically lend to the growth of data. Naturally, the growth of data effects files transferred along the Internet as well, leading to larger bandwidths and the need for faster data rates. As you can imagine, this makes the bandwidth caps set by ISPs problematic.
ISPs in the US have been careful to set their bandwidth caps high enough that the majority of customers go unaware and unaffected, but low enough that, assuming the caps are not adjusted or abolished, those customers will be swamped with overcharges in just a few short years. "Overage charges", like overdraft fees on checking accounts, are intentionally under-represented limitations and penalties on services which result in massive fees and huge sources of revenue for the service providers. These sort of practices are decidedly underhanded, so much so that federal regulators were recently forced to refuse banks the right to force customers into debit overdraft fees.
Japan is leading the pack in data management while Canada is beginning to make the necessary efforts. Consumers in the US need to be made aware of their Internet futures before ISPs get too greedy and ingrained in polotics.
No comments:
Post a Comment