The demand for bandwidth is doubling every year. According to a report in PCWorld, it won’t be long before providers begin to charge extra and begin to restrict users from running high bandwidth applications.
That’s the opinion of a number of experts polled by the magazine, although executives at major broadband providers deny it. Despite the denials, the magazine reports “some service providers are already clamping down on bandwidth hogs. Others are experimenting with payment plans (such as tiered pricing) that raise the cost to consumers of excessive bandwidth use.”
The question is: As more and more users use more and more bandwidth, how will the major providers avoid bottlenecks without spending the billions of dollars it will take to upgrade their aging networks?
The question impacts muni providers, as well–both in terms of how they will maintain speed and performance as more and more users take advantage of the connectivity being provided, as well as how they will cope with the rising cost of purchasing wholesale bandwidth from the national providers.
The article focuses on commercial use of bandwidth by end users (Users who download big movie files, back up files across the Web, play interactive games, or stream audio and video). But munis, too, are consumers of bandwidth and often they’re the provider’s biggest single customer. No doubt, providers will be cutting large commercial and municipal customers breaks that they won’t give end users. But this trend would seem to have implications–and serious ones–in the debate over how to best deliver high-speed broadband nationwide.
No comments yet.