On his blog, Bill St. Arnaud asks “Will bandwidth caps be the next battle for Network Neutrality”? His piece opens with some commentary:
Increasingly we are seeing carriers look to impose bandwidth caps and a variety of tiered services for Internet usage. Although I think some sort of bandwidth cap may be necessary for egregious users, there [sic] proliferation and adoption by cablecos and telco flies in the face of the fact that growth of Internet traffic is slowing down substantially as evidenced by the data provided by Andrew Olydzko. The cablecos and telcos seem to be the only industry that intentionally punishes their biggest customers when given declining growth rates they should be rewarding them. One suspects other motives may be at play
If you actually look at the data from Andrew Olydzko [ppt, 299 KB], you’ll see that the “slowing down substantially” refers to only 50-60%! That is 50-60% growth on a huge base and enormous penetration rate, meaning that in absolute terms, we still are seeing significant growth.
Of course, this is nothing (on a percentage basis) compared to wireless growth of 500% but you need to look beyond the percentages at the real numbers.
As to Bill’s comment that “cablecos and telcos seem to be the only industry that intentionally punishes their biggest customers when given declining growth rates”, I can’t figure out what he is talking about. Every service I pay for charges me more when I use more. Electricity, water, gasoline. Even car leases charge extra if you exceed the predicted mileage.
If you want to look at these kinds of issues in depth, you need to attend The 2009 Canadian Telecom Summit.
We have a session called Building Broadband on June 15, featuring real network operators, like the presidents of Sasktel, Cogeco Data Services and Barrett Xplore, suppliers like Motorola as well as the author of Homes with Tails. On June 16, we have a panel looking at Net Neutrality featuring Skype, Rogers and Sandvine. Have you registered yet?
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net neutrality, Canadian Telecom Summit