YES! Toll Lanes! To finish, no less!
From that excellent article: "Traffic just isn't moving up that fast," Burstein said. "It will go up and it will go up faster, but not fast enough to be dollars and cents that really matter."
Internet video is still just a small fraction of the total amount of video people watch, and that's unlikely to change overnight, in Burstein's opinion. In fact, he said, internet traffic has increased much more slowly than the prices of internet-carrying equipment like switches and routers have fallen, and that trend is likely to continue. Burstein believes the danger of letting the carriers charge extra for guaranteed delivery is that they'll put the spending for upgrades into creating that extra "toll lane," and won't reduce oversubscription in the rest of the network even though it would be cheap to do so. Both Verizon and AT&T have said they won't degrade or block anyone's internet traffic. But it's impossible to tell what goes on inside their networks.
Compare that with the mumbo jumbo here:
"The plain truth is that today's access and backbone networks simply do not have the capacity to deliver all that customers expect," according to Tom Tauke, Verizon Communications' top lobbyist. The solution, of course, is to make the pipes connecting to the internet fatter. To illustrate what that would mean, BellSouth's chief architect, Henry Kafka, uses the assumption that the cost of providing a month's worth of data to the average user, about 2 gigabytes, costs the company $1. That's a fairly small amount compared to the $25 to $47 a month BellSouth charges for DSL, but then the company has to pay for sales, support, maintenance and a host of other costs. If that same user were to start downloading five TV-quality movies per month, BellSouth's data cost, not including the cost of maintaining the DSL line, would go up to $4.50 a month. Higher, but perhaps not high enough to break BellSouth's business model. But if the customer starts watching internet TV like the average household watches regular TV, 8 hours a day, BellSouth's cost would go up to $112 a month, according to Kafka.
"We don't expect to get to the point where we're charging anyone those kinds of prices for internet service, but it does reflect the kind of impact that high-quality video could have on the network and business models for providing the Internet," Kafka said.
Which one sounds like BS?
Which one is a winner?
That last paragraph is a doozie, eh? $112/month COST! We don't expect to get to that point... Really?
Oh, of course not, they plan on taking us off the Information Superhighway and forcing us onto their Information Toll Road; complete with roadblocks and detours that only the deepest of pockets can avoid.
This will put you, me, our small businesses, and the public library into a bidding war with Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Yahoo, and Google.
That sounds like a fair fight, eh?
Personalize this issue! Make it about them, the Communications Cartel, Muzzling us... Controlling our information with roadblocks, toll booths and detours.
A clever design of virtual toll booths, roadblocks and detours so that the money from our wallets will find its way into their pockets.
ron
n May 14, 2006, at 11:47 PM, LeanBackVids.com wrote: "Small clips are fine, but TV-quality and especially high-definition
programming could make the internet choke."
http://www.wired.com/news/wireservice/0,70895-0.html?tw=rss.index
-Matt
SPONSORED LINKS
YAHOO! GROUPS LINKS
SPONSORED LINKS
YAHOO! GROUPS LINKS
|
