As you cruise the Information Superhighway, what kind of vehicle do you see yourself using?
Are you riding the “dial-up bus” — by far the cheapest option, and the
most prudent if you don’t go to too many places too often and don’t
mind making frequent stops along the way.
Or, for movers and shakers, there are “broadband sedans” that you can
lease with unlimited-mileage plans to zip you from one Web site to the
next.
But at least two Internet service providers are toying with pulling us
out of our Web-conveyance comfort zones and forcing us into a “metered
Internet,” a kind of taxi service that will take us anywhere — but the
meter will always be running.
Such is the pilot project started this month by Time Warner Cable in
Beaumont, Texas. According to the Associated Press, the Internet
provider is now charging customers in the town based on how much data
they download per month ($29.95 for 5 gigabytes, $54.90 for 40
gigabytes). Over that, surfers are charged $1 a gigabyte. AT&T is
considering a similar plan.
For a generation, Web surfers have paid for access, buffet-style. Now,
it seems ISPs want us to pay for usage, especially those of us who keep
going back to the buffet way too many times.
Is pay-as-you-go the way to go?
For most users, a 5GB monthly allowance is more than enough (for now).
But if you’re a fan of downloadable high-def movies (6GB to 8GB each)
and live in Beaumont, you should opt for the 40GB plan.
But since everything pulled or pushed down from the World Wide Web
— e-mails, music, software, podcasts, Skype calls, YouTube
videos, even pop-up ads — will be applied to your monthly allowance, at
some point such a plan adds a shipping and handling charge to anything
whizzing past your screen. This makes ironies pile up fast.
For example, while Netflix’s actual DVDs-by-mail come and go
postage-paid, if you choose to use its new movie-download service on a
metered Internet, you could accrue an added “freight fee” from your ISP
(for the heavy lifting involved in transporting the titles through the
Web’s series of tubes).
Content providers from Hulu.com to iTunes might find this wipes out
their user base, as it’s no fun keeping one eye on your favorite online
diversion and the other on a meter.
Kevin Leddy, Time Warner Cable’s executive vice president, said in the
AP article that metered billing is the “fairest” way to deal with
uneven usage, since just 5 percent of its users take up half the
company’s capacity.
Using this logic, anyone with a teen daughter should pay at least four
times as much for basic local phone service as the average
daughter-less subscriber.
And while 40 gigabytes may seem like a liberal allotment, in a few
years, when long-distance Grandma wants to see her granddaughter’s
dance recital in Quad Holographic HDTV format, ISPs will start to
resemble price-gouging Big Oil in a big way.
Digital Slobs, now may be the time to actually e-mail our congressmen (before we’re charged extra to do it).
Next week: Ctrl-Alt-Deleting the arguments for a metered Web.
Curt Brandao is the production editor for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. Learn more about him at digitalslob.com.
