The Free Press issued a report this afternoon casting doubt on the theory of network congestion that has been cited by ISPs as the reason behind P2P blocking or broadband caps, and offering more rational solutions for dealing with sporadic congestion. It also claims that tiered broadband and limitation pricing–in which a carrier charges per gigabyte fee after users exceed a certain cap–is unlikely to become reality. Prior to the report coming out, I had spent the afternoon asking people about this issue, trying to figure out if our series of tubes is really clogged or if the carriers are merely seeking financial and/or competitive gain.

Read the rest of this post

It should come as no surprise: Incumbents are beginning to act like incumbents. But while the cable companies are the first ones to jump on the tiered-broadband bandwagon, they won’t be the last. Their argument for limiting bandwidth and data transfers based on price sounds like a good idea, especially as a way to get bargain hunters to buy. In the long run, however, tiered broadband is a terrible idea that will bring the innovation inspired by flat-rate broadband to a screeching halt.

Flat-rate broadband–however cheap or expensive (depending on your point of view) it might be–inspired the formation of Skype, YouTube, Facebook, Apple’s iTunes and MySpace, amongst others. It allowed us to freely experiment, to embrace both the applications and the ideas they represented, such as VoIP, online video, digital downloads and social networking.

Read the rest of this post

When it comes to broadband Internet access, you can have speed or large volumes of data transfer. You can’t have both. One certainty in the broadband world is that for those of us with cable or DSL modems connecting us to the Internet, there is still a finite amount of bandwidth available. When a user consumes a disproportionate and significant amount of bandwidth, it can and will slow down everyone. I hate that.

If the choice is between your being able to download more movies or other video and my getting the best possible speed from my Internet connection, I’m thrilled when you get kicked off. It can’t happen soon enough. Speed is what I need. Take all your P2P downloads and get the hell off my Internet.

Read the rest of this post