Data Caps - your ISP is no longer a true access provider
Rogers Cable in Canada and dozens of other Internet Service Providers in Canada and the U.S. and Europe are capping your monthly data traffic. While caps vary, they're not really the point. What's important is that in many jurisdictions (in Canada and Europe in particular), data caps are a way around the regulatory strictures which force ISPs to get permission from regulatory bodies in order to raise monthly access fees.
See the trick? To hell with regulatory requirements when you can simply avoid the process altogether. All you have to do is cry bandwidth problems, throttle whatever data you want, point to fine print in the customer access contract, and then charge whatever you want for every gigabyte used over the arbitrary cap set on each regional or nodal block of subscribers.
I hate these people. They reaped big profits for years while allowing us to freely get used to downloading and browsing whatever we wanted. Now that we're almost addicted to high volumes of data, suddenly the ISPs impose data caps? Suddenly we're paying through the nose to view/browse/stream/download all the things which were covered by the fixed monthly fee for previously unrestricted internet access accounts?
Yes. We've been suckered.
All those profits went and continue to go to ISP shareholders and fat executive salaries and bonuses, not into the infrastructure needed to provide really great service, support and bandwidth to all the customers. Net neutrality is a dreamy myth. It never existed. The corporate communications mavens will no doubt soon attempt to charge us for just thinking about Internet access.
Governments sit back and do nothing. Governments hire consultants to help rip off billions in tax dollars in return for bad tech advice. Every last nickel will be milked out of the systems until people begin screaming and threatening, and only then will ISPs and governments react by (grudingly) enforcing the design and implementation of better quality and more consumer friendly Internet access.
In the meantime we pay ridiculous fees for Internet access, something which should be comoditized and turned into a public utility.
See the trick? To hell with regulatory requirements when you can simply avoid the process altogether. All you have to do is cry bandwidth problems, throttle whatever data you want, point to fine print in the customer access contract, and then charge whatever you want for every gigabyte used over the arbitrary cap set on each regional or nodal block of subscribers.
I hate these people. They reaped big profits for years while allowing us to freely get used to downloading and browsing whatever we wanted. Now that we're almost addicted to high volumes of data, suddenly the ISPs impose data caps? Suddenly we're paying through the nose to view/browse/stream/download all the things which were covered by the fixed monthly fee for previously unrestricted internet access accounts?
Yes. We've been suckered.
All those profits went and continue to go to ISP shareholders and fat executive salaries and bonuses, not into the infrastructure needed to provide really great service, support and bandwidth to all the customers. Net neutrality is a dreamy myth. It never existed. The corporate communications mavens will no doubt soon attempt to charge us for just thinking about Internet access.
Governments sit back and do nothing. Governments hire consultants to help rip off billions in tax dollars in return for bad tech advice. Every last nickel will be milked out of the systems until people begin screaming and threatening, and only then will ISPs and governments react by (grudingly) enforcing the design and implementation of better quality and more consumer friendly Internet access.
In the meantime we pay ridiculous fees for Internet access, something which should be comoditized and turned into a public utility.
Labels: data caps, Inernet access, Net Neutrality, regulation
posted by Howard Carson, Managing Editor @ 6:10 PM
