As you know, Rogers has announced caps, called “usage allowances,” on downloading for its range of internet access products: 95GB for Extreme and Extreme Plus; 60 GB for Express; 25 GB for Lite; and, 2 GB for Ultra-Lite. Considerable discussion has taken place on a number of blogs and newspaper articles.
It seems to me that these caps are a necessary step in aligning revenues with costs, which will ultimately alleviate much of the need to arbitrarily apply network management to applications. But it is just the first of a number of steps.
I compared my recent downloading to some friends and neighbours and an trend emerged: many of the heavy downloaders report a marked reduction in January and February from previous months. Why? When asking their kids what is going on, the answer is uniformly: writers’ strike. There haven’t been new TV shows to download.
A caution to parents that when TV production gets back to normal, almost coinciding with real charges for exceeding download caps, you may want to watch the ‘bit-meter’ or risk some hefty charges.
It will be interesting to see the impact of the price increases for people exceeding their usage allowance. Paying for higher consumption may result in some people changing their patterns of usage; it will also lead to an appropriate alignment of revenue to capital drivers.
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